MY LOS ANGELES

A film by Gary Davis

Email: gdavisloop@earthlink.net

The Story of "My Los Angeles"

I came to Los Angeles in February, 1980, and made this film during my first semester at USC film school a few months later. In the "Cinema 290" class, students were assigned to make five films: shot, edited, and presented in Super-8. Video was still a very awkward technology, and non-linear video editing wouldn't be practical for a decade. Film was literally cut-and-paste!

I envisioned an "epic" (in Super-8 terms, 18 minutes is an epic) as my "4th and 5th" of the five films - giving me four weeks to shoot and two weeks to edit the film. I would present my experiences and impressions of Los Angeles - good and bad - in documentary and "docudrama" format.

I must have done some planning... note cards? But I don't recall writing shot-lists or even an outline of the structure. Still, the film cuts together so well; I got "all the shots I needed" for the dramatic scenes, everything is well exposed and in focus! Looking back after 40 years, it seems a monumental task that I can't quite imagine.

I graduated from regular 8mm to 16mm by age 14, so shooting in Super-8, as USC required, was kind-of slumming. So I made sure to take advantage of Super-8's advantages: Zoom lens, inexpensive color film, somewhat smaller and lighter equipment, auto-exposure (which you should NEVER rely on!) and interesting sound options. I say "interesting" because Super-8 had a magnetic sound option, but natively it was silent, and the assignment was to create a coordinated, but not lip-sync, soundtrack on a separate tape. While 16mm filmmaking supports fully processional sound editing, mixing, and an optical track, and I had done that, 16mm sound doesn't allow stereo, and the fidelity is limited to slightly better than AM radio.

For this Super-8 project, by recording the sound on a top-quality reel-to-reel tape recorder, I hoped to get the fidelity and dynamic range of a Hollywood blockbuster... especially if I used Dolby noise reduction on the tape, which I did!

When you watch the film, you'll see it's episodic, and basically tells its story in two days. I had originally planned separate "Westwood" and "Hollywood" scenes, but there wasn't enough difference between them so they became one scene.

I used a few home-brewed techniques to keep the visuals fluid. For night filming, I believe we had ISO 200 Ektrachrome, so city lights would expose quite nicely, but people's faces would be in shadow. If you had seen the TV news of the time, they would typically shine a bright light in people's faces, which would "burn out" their faces and "blow out" the background. To get around this, I had the idea of using a very dim light, instead of a bright one! I bought a hand-held automotive spotlight which could be disassembled, and replaced the high-powered bulb with the lowest-wattage bulb that would fit, which I believe was 18 watts, and I powered this with two lantern batteries. As you can see, this combination really worked, because you can see people's faces and the street backgrounds look great too.

I also shot many of the street scenes, and the opening scene at LAX, using a simple 3-wheel dolly triangle that fit at the bottom of my tripod. It didn't ride in a particularly straight line, but it did allow for a plethora of moving camera shots that would have been difficult to achieve otherwise. One place they wouldn't let me use the dolly was the handprint court at the Chinese Theater, so that scene was hand-held.

There are several scenes with me in them, and I don't remember exactly how I got these, but there are a few "additional cameramen" listed in the credits. For the Santa Monica airport scene, where I'm "hitchhiking", I'm sure I went by myself, so I must have used a tripod. That's another advantage of Super-8 - the camera can run continually (for about 3 minutes), so you could start the camera and then walk in front of it!

Another advantage was an electronic intervalometer for time-lapse photography. I had done time-lapse with my beloved Bolex H16 many times, but you had to actually pull the shutter yourself for every frame! With a "bells-and-whistles" Super-8 cameras, you could just set the time lapse mode, point the camera and it would do the rest!

At least that's what I thought before shooting the Sunset transition scene! What I didn't realize, is the Sun goes down at an angle, and hits different places different times of year. I tried shooting the Sunset twice while making this film, once from Santa Monica and again from the jutting coast of Rancho Palos Verdes, but I couldn't get the Sun hitting the water - it set too far north. I went back and shot it again in Winter, long after the film's impetus had come and gone, and that Sunset got spliced into the film you see today.

The beach scene was filmed at Santa Monica beach, but the surfing was filmed at Huntington Beach, where the pier reaches out into the surfing area. This gave me a high, dry, and close angle to shoot surfers. I "overcranked" the camera at 64fps, which gives you approx one-fourth speed, true slow motion with the 18fps playback rate. I used the Canon XLS-1014 for these scenes, with its 10X zoom lens, and used a tripod with all the locks loosened "just enough" to let me follow the surfers fluidly. (I used a smaller camera, can't remember the model, for the street scenes).

For the small-plane ride, I didn't hitchhike quite the way it looks in the picture... actually, I hung out in the pilot's lounge until I found a "solo" flier who was willing to take me up. No fancy camera support so the zoom on the Century City Twin Towers is a bit shaky. Notice that none of the other buildings in the CC skyline, were there at the time! After my plane ride, I set up off the end of the runway, but still inside the airport fence, to get that "plane flying over head" shot. I figured, the planes were hitting the ground some distance in front of me, so they wouldn't hit me! I believe it took five takes before I got the "perfect shot" you see in the film... and it was just about that time that people in little electric carts showed up to escort me off the property ;-)

I mentioned the sound! I was determined to make the loudest, coolest rock n' roll soundtrack in the history of film. (I may not have seen "Easy Rider"... or maybe I had!) At the time, I owned a very fine Revox A77 mk4 tape deck with built-in Dolby-B, and I modified both the tape recorder and my projector slightly to achieve better sync. Still, it seems the only way I could have built the soundtrack, was to run the film and audio from the beginning each time, while adding the next music or sound-effects cue. CDs wouldn't come out till 1982, so all the music in this soundtrack came from Vinyl. Although I had a very good turntable and pre-amp, and recorded the tape at the faster "7.5 ips" speed, I'm still very impressed when I listen today at how good it sounds. There's not the slightest vinyl artifact anywhere in the music - in fact, this recording more-or-less disproves my belief that vinyl isn't worth listening to.

To premiere the movie to my film class, I brought a pair of Snell C-II speakers, which are about 5 feet tall and made of solid wood; a 400 watt NAD power amplifier, and the Revox. I didn't need a control amp - the Revox connected directly to the NAD. I presented my masterpiece and...

The class was not impressed. Of course, that was a role of film students, to criticize each-other's films, but even worse, my professor said I hadn't completed the assignment, so I was at risk of flunking out in my very first semester.

I didn't expect them to accept an 18-minute film as satisfying the requirement of two films, so I had presented an extended cut of the beach scene a few weeks earlier under the title "Coming Attractions" - and I only revealed after the comment period, that the beach scene was a preview of my epic-to-come. That didn't go over very well, and also I was accused of sexism (at the very least) because it seemed that all the guys in my beach scene were hot, but the women ranged from frumpy to embarrassing. This scene in the finished film is about half the length of the preview, and I tried to balance it better, but I have no memory of who got cut out.

I didn't come to LA for the weather, but it's the reason I'll never leave!

About the Digital Restoration

I had resisted transferring any of my films to video in the "VHS" days, and I'm glad I did, because I would have had to do them again in the "DVD" days and again once high-def came out. By waiting till 2014 when high-def was mature, I skipped some missteps.

The transfer was done by Pro8mm in Burbank, and frankly I was not too thrilled with their work. The first time they did the transfer, the results were distinctly out-of-focus - all the more frustrating because the film literally begins with a leader that says "Focus Please" - and Pro8mm claims to do professional work.

So I had to drive to Burbank two more times (to drop off, and pick up, the film), and at least the second time, it was in focus, but still some issues - it "weaves" a bit at every splice, and the ProRes file they produced is standard for a Mac, but the 4:2:2 video was hard to work with on a PC, and the necessary conversion had some artifacts in dark scenes.

Since doing this transfer, Pro8mm has gotten a few new scanners, so they might handle splices better today, but I thing they're really better equipped to transfer new, unspliced color negative original, than old, tape-spliced movies.

But one good thing about their process - they didn't actually transfer the film at 18FPS, but a higher frame rate, and then used a Mac algorithm to convert the film to any speed you want... any EXACT speed. So between the first and second transfers, I calculated exactly how much the speed of the film needed to be corrected to match the length of the audio track, making the second transfer match quite precisely.

Speaking of the audio, I was fortunate that around that time, I had gotten back into the Reel-to-Reel audio hobby, spending some money on a used Revox B77 deck which could play all my old tapes splendidly. Although Revox's newer decks didn't have Dolby built-in, fortunately I still had a working Nakamichi NR-200 external Dolby B/C unit, so I could play the original audio reel perfectly.

I don't use traditional "movie editing" software on my PC, instead using a cuts-only Mpeg editor (VideoReDo) and an great audio program (Adobe Audition, formerly Cool Edit Pro). This combination is a bit awkward for editing audio and video separately, and there's only so much you can do with a locked picture and a wall-to-wall music track, but still I made a few tiny adjustments, and I also added just a few new sound effects, so the audio you hear today is tighter than the original presentation.

That was in 2014. Last year, as the pandemic began, I thought more about making my videos public (I put most of my concert videos on YouTube under "Rock-Steadi-Cam"), but Sebastian had recently announced the CineFile members' film collection, and I thought that would make a better home for "My Los Angeles" - a real film! I had been thinking of going back to the original ProRes file to see if I could do a better conversion to 4:2:0 in 2021 than I did in 2014. I had to find the original file again, and not the out-of-focus one! Sure enough, the latest codecs worked much better - artifacts are gone! (I suppose I could have done this in 2014 with a Mac or the right pro software, but...)

Then I had to figure out, all-over-again, what small changes I had made - and make them even better, until ever sync point was "right". I think the final results show, the second "remastering" was worth it!

CineFile Video also requires a vertically-shaped poster for each film, and all my frame-caps were horizontal, so I enlisted "Captured Live" videographer Whit Padgett to design a vertical poster. I think he did a better job than I could have imagined!

I hope you enjoy this film! I can't believe how much work was involved, then and now, and how much of "who" and "what" was just luck. This may not be the perfect film of YOUR Los Angeles, but it's certainly the perfect vision of MINE!

--Gary Davis, one year into Pandemic, March, 2021