You're given 55 seconds and three takes to create a film using a vintage Lumière camera, no artificial light, and no sync'ed sound. What do you do with an opportunity like that? If you're David Lynch you do the following:
"In 1995 Lumière and Company called and said that forty directors from all over the world were being asked to make short films using the original Lumière Brothers camera made out of wood, glass, and brass. It's a hand-cranked camera with a little wooden magazine that holds fifty-five seconds of film, and I thought it sounded cool, but I had no ideas. Then I was in the woodshop and I got this idea of a person who's been killed - I still have the original drawing I made when I got the idea-and we got working on it pretty fast. We built a hundred-foot dolly track in Gary D'Amico's yard and special effects engineer Big Phil Sloan was running it, and another Phil who worked with Gary made this big box that went over the camera, and when you pulled this wire these doors in the box would fly open and you could shoot. Then you'd pull it again and the doors would bang shut for a tiny instant while the camera moved on the dolly from one set to the next. There was a shot of a body in a field, a woman on a couch, two women dressed in white with a deer, a huge tank Gary built with a nude woman in it, and some men walking around carrying these stick-like things. Then you move through smoke to a sheet of paper that explodes into fire and reveals the final set. You couldn't miss a single mark, and you only had fifty-five seconds to make all these changes, and it was thrilling. They had a Frenchman cranking the camera - he went everywhere with it - and we had six or seven people on the dolly, and there were like a hundred people there and everybody had a thing to do. The woman in the tank was named Dawn Salcedo, and she did a great job. She could only hold her breath for so long, but everything had to happen at a precise time and she had to be in the tank holding her breath when we arrived at the tank. At the beginning of the film there's a woman sitting on a couch who's having a premonition, and as soon as we got that shot, these guys had to get in there and move the couch to the last set. It was so much fun." - Copyright 2018 by David Lynch, "Room to Dream", pp. 349-350, Random House.
I thoroughly enjoyed this short which I only learned about while reading "Room to Dream". Now I want all the other chapters in the story. You'll find many nods to his other work that came before and after the making of this short piece. It's worth multiple watches, especially if you're a fan of what came before and after. The 1-minute video is readily available if you search for it.
"In 1995 Lumière and Company called and said that forty directors from all over the world were being asked to make short films using the original Lumière Brothers camera made out of wood, glass, and brass. It's a hand-cranked camera with a little wooden magazine that holds fifty-five seconds of film, and I thought it sounded cool, but I had no ideas. Then I was in the woodshop and I got this idea of a person who's been killed - I still have the original drawing I made when I got the idea-and we got working on it pretty fast. We built a hundred-foot dolly track in Gary D'Amico's yard and special effects engineer Big Phil Sloan was running it, and another Phil who worked with Gary made this big box that went over the camera, and when you pulled this wire these doors in the box would fly open and you could shoot. Then you'd pull it again and the doors would bang shut for a tiny instant while the camera moved on the dolly from one set to the next. There was a shot of a body in a field, a woman on a couch, two women dressed in white with a deer, a huge tank Gary built with a nude woman in it, and some men walking around carrying these stick-like things. Then you move through smoke to a sheet of paper that explodes into fire and reveals the final set. You couldn't miss a single mark, and you only had fifty-five seconds to make all these changes, and it was thrilling. They had a Frenchman cranking the camera - he went everywhere with it - and we had six or seven people on the dolly, and there were like a hundred people there and everybody had a thing to do. The woman in the tank was named Dawn Salcedo, and she did a great job. She could only hold her breath for so long, but everything had to happen at a precise time and she had to be in the tank holding her breath when we arrived at the tank. At the beginning of the film there's a woman sitting on a couch who's having a premonition, and as soon as we got that shot, these guys had to get in there and move the couch to the last set. It was so much fun." - Copyright 2018 by David Lynch, "Room to Dream", pp. 349-350, Random House.
I thoroughly enjoyed this short which I only learned about while reading "Room to Dream". Now I want all the other chapters in the story. You'll find many nods to his other work that came before and after the making of this short piece. It's worth multiple watches, especially if you're a fan of what came before and after. The 1-minute video is readily available if you search for it.