OUR FLAG STILL WAVES

         The morning of September 11, 2001 changed the people of the United States, as can be witnessed by the face of any American. Terrorism from abroad was still fairly new to many of us; it came in such a manner as to be an all out assault on our land, and almost twice as many lives were lost as on December 7, 1941 at Pearl Harbor.

        We as Americans feel we are at war -- a war not of our choosing but one that was thrust upon us, not unlike the Second World War. But a strange and powerful phenomena has overtaken the land. Americans are more united than ever -- we are ready for war -- we are ready to fight -- we are ready to make any sacrifice if called upon to do so. This is not the braggadocios of some friends who've had a few drinks around the neighborhood bar, but the reality of what I see. There is a determinedness among the people -- a spirit partly created from sadness, partly created from anger, but also driven from a feeling we are part of a mission to destroy an evil that threatens all civilized peoples and we want a chance to do our part.
        This new era of patriotism is so powerful, so ubiquitous across the nation that I felt compelled to capture it with my Super-8 camera. One of the most obvious signs of this patriotism is that American flags are flying everywhere, so this became the basis of the film Our Flag Still Waves.
        I traveled several miles near my home and filmed flags blowing in the breeze on beautiful autumn days, often through the light of the magical hour just before evening when the sunlight is soft and subdued. The flags might be in the city atop a crane at a construction site, blanketing the streets of small towns, draped across the front porches of homes, or just planted in the middle of fields on farms along the countryside. The film rarely has people in any of the shots, as it is an edited collection of American flags -- but the flags make an amazing statement about the people that hoisted them in the air, or hung them upon their walls, or planted these makeshift flagpoles in the ground.
        Once I felt I had enough material, I needed an opening and closing and most importantly an explanation of what was to be shown. Back in the October 1998 issue of International Movie Making I wrote Using Video in a Super-8 World. In this article I experimented with filming off a computer LCD or flat screen. I used this technique again and with the aid of a $60 computer program called "VideoFactory 2.0" was able to provide opening and closing titles. This software is designed to edit videotape taken from a digital camera and then transferred to a hard drive, which had no appeal to me, but the fact that the software also allowed titles to be overlaid onto either moving or still images proved quite useful.
        The first forty-five seconds of Our Flag Still Waves was filmed entirely off the computer screen. The film fades in with a computer image of a red, white, and blue flag over which the film title begins from a dot in the center and quickly enlarges to fill the screen. That shot fades out and is followed by two shots, each an entire paragraph of white letters on a black background.

(One of the title cards -- Picture taken from computer screen)

        These two "title cards" contain a dissolve to transition from one to another, reminiscent of the historical titles used on the beginnings of old Blackhawk Films silent releases. Initially I filmed the titles using Kodachrome but the camera's light meter showed no reading at all on the lettering, and hardly a reading on the flag. I then switched to Ektachrome 7240 (the only Ektachrome shot for the film) hoping for a better exposure. When the film came back from the lab, however, the Kodachrome look was far superior and was properly exposed as well, so the Ektachrome titles were discarded. While still not as colorful as viewing the computer monitor directly, the Kodachrome had much better colors than the Ektachrome 7240, and the small white lettering was much sharper and easier to read due to the film's finer grain. The filming was simple to do -- requiring a #1 close-up lens on the camera and the camera set slightly less than three feet from the screen. Then I let the camera run for forty-five seconds, as the "real time" titles had already been programmed into the computer.
        Because of the timeliness of this project, Dwayne's Photo in Kansas did all the processing of the Super-8 film, and their turnaround time is incredible. Same day service is the standard at $9 per roll of Kodachrome. Had the film been sent through Kodak via Switzerland, it would have been a three and possibly four week wait, so if anything had needed to be re-shot the colorful leaves in the background of so many of the pictures would have been long gone. Fortunately, with fourteen cartridges of Kodachrome 40 used, and all exposed well, enough material was on hand to put this film together without the need to re-shoot anything.
        From the original concept I had envisioned a musical track with no narration or sound effects. The track consists of three patriotic songs. First, God Bless America sung by Kate Smith in 1963, second God Bless the USA sung by Lee Greenwood in 1984 (which seems to be the song heard on all the radio stations these days), and finally an edited version of This Is My Country performed by the Air Force Band and sung by a choir known as the Singing Sergeants.
        I decided to edit the film first without listening to the musical track, so as not to be seduced by the power of the music. My goal was to make sure the visual aspect of the film could keep one's interest. In the end, the rough cut was only thirty seconds longer than the music track, so it wasn't difficult to tighten the film and delete a couple of shots to bring the film into the required seven and a half minutes of running time. After that a quick play of the songs a few times against the pictures required the moving around of a few shots just so some images matched the words of the music best. Amazingly, this required rearranging only several shots, and not a complete re-edit.
        There are some quite moving shots in the film. One especially is of a chain link fence in front of a school yard. The students had made a rather large sign out of a couple hundred Styrofoam cups, painting some of the cups red and blue to intermix with the white ones, each cup poking through the holes in the chain link fence. The sign said "GOD BLESS NY AND DC" and to the right of that more red, white, and blue cups were used to make an American flag. After taking an initial long-shot of the entire sign with the school as a backdrop, three times I shot close-ups of the sign panning slowly from left to right so that the letters almost filled the screen, stopping at the flag. On the third attempt, out of sheer luck, when I came to the flag, there was a procession of children leaving the school that could be easily seen through the fence and sign in the background. I zoomed on this just a little and of course this is the shot that made it into the film.
        I have always been a bit cautious about overusing the zoom lens, but the effect of zooming in on flags or even zooming in so close as to concentrate on only parts of flags helped create some emotion at the end of the film when accompanied by This Is My Country. The final two shots are of a large backlit flag on a pole which fades out and fades into the same computer generated flag as used in the beginning but with the words "THE END" filling the screen.
        This was one film that turned out very well, despite the fact that during the filming there was only a vague idea that shots of "Old Glory" could be edited in a moving and entertaining manner when accompanied by the music I had already chosen. Whenever I saw a flag that symbolized an emotion I filmed it, and this emotion apparently came across in the final film.
        Americans cannot, we must not forget September 11, 2001. As years pass waves of patriotism may come and go, but Our Flag Still Waves can serve as a reminder of the collective spirit that now permeates the very air we breathe, and of the date precipitating this spirit which embodies us now.

---  Chris Cottrill
        E-mail:  chris_cottrill@yahoo.com
 

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