During the Rhode Island International Film Festival, I had the opportunity to see an inspiring film by one of Avid’s customers, Alex Houston. Alex submitted his film, “Swim Lessons: The Nick Irons Story” to the festival. Not only was the film selected to be shown at the festival as one of the 300 out of over 3,000 submitted; it won first place in the Short Documentary category. The 40-minute film, based on the book by Nick Irons, chronicles his 1997 fundraising swim down the length of the Mississippi River to benefit multiple sclerosis research. He swam the river for the sake of his father, who suffers from the disease.
I had the opportunity to talk to Alex about his experience making the film. Nick and Alex went to Boston College together. When Alex heard about what Nick did, the first thing he said was, ‘Tell me you have footage of this.’ He knew right away that he wanted to make this film. “This is such a compelling story, so much more than just a fundraising event. This is the story of a family, and about sacrifice. It’s a character study in perseverance and love.” says producer/director Houston.
Q: How did it transpire that you directed the Nick Irons story?
A: Nick and I knew each other in college but had fallen out of touch after graduating in 1994. I never watched the news that much, so I was never aware of the swim. Right around our 10-year reunion I found out he was living in the DC area near me and tracked him down, because he was always one of those people I just had a good gut feeling about. When he told me he “swam the Mississippi River,” knowing he was a competitive swimmer in school I asked, “Oh really? Where?” thinking he swam across. “No,” he said, “the length of the Mississippi River.” The next words out of my mouth (after an unprintable expletive), were “Tell me you have footage of this. Dude, we’re making a documentary.” It was a no-brainer that I had to make this film.
Q: How long did it take?
A: After I read his book for background, I started interviewing and logging the footage in earnest in early 2005, and continued cutting whenever I had a free moment from bread-and-butter projects right up until March 2008.
Q: What equipment (hardware/software) did you use to create the film?
A: I shot the interviews on a Panasonic DVX-100B at 24pA with the “Cinelike-D” gamma setting using an anamorphic lens. The home movies were shot on one of the better consumer-grade Sony Hi-8 camcorders available back in 1997 when Nick did the swim, and we had some news source material from BetaSP and DVCPro. We did the editing on an XPressProHD system after converting all the BetaSP to DV with timecode, and onlined and color-corrected on a Media Composer Mojo. Migrating the project from XPressPro to Media Composer was seamless. Copy the project, plug in the drives, and bingo, it’s there. Some of the Indiana Jones-style red-line map animations were created in After Effects, but we also did a lot of the straight photo treatments with the built-in Avid Pan and Zoom filter. The acoustic score was recorded on a Mac/Logic system. It was definitely a cross-platform effort. There’s still lots to be done. I’m hoping when we get distribution we can go to a Symphony and do a surround mix on a ProTools workstation.
Q: What were some of the challenges you had making the film?
A: The biggest overall challenges (apart from working on a shoestring budget) were making an 11-year-old story relevant, getting beyond the superficial “believe-it-or-not” factor, keeping it moving, and going against industry trends.
Nick had plenty of press that summer, even going on Good Morning America a bunch of times, so some people thought it was old news. I actually had a pitch meeting in 2007 with an industry gatekeeper – let’s just say a representative of a major independent film incubator somewhere out west – and this person told me, “So you’ve got a doc about a fundraising event. Big deal.” It was almost impossible to convince jaded industry people that Swim Lessons is a timeless story about a family, not a rehash of a stale news story. I’m so happy the audience and the jury at RIIFF got what the film is all about!
Also I knew the film had to be a short right from the get-go to keep it moving. Editors always talk about “killing babies,” those perfect takes, priceless moments, or interesting scenes that are good in their own right but end up interrupting the flow of the film. Believe me, I killed plenty of babies on this one! For structure, Kendra (my co-producer) and I used the Mississippi River itself as inspiration. Sometimes it doubles back on itself and heads north for a few miles, but it’s always moving down-river. We had to find the places where Nick and his family struggled, and make those the key turning points in the film, then craft the emotional arc around them, an arc which isn’t necessarily chronological. So we did that with the structure of the film; between scenes of Nick on the river, we doubled back to the scenes about the events in his life that led him there.
Finally, there are so many “sky is falling” and “sick people in hospital” advocacy-docs out there it’s starting to define the genre. To me, that’s low-hanging dramatic fruit. You don’t have to go to a critical care ward of a hospital or some war-torn Third-World country to find drama. Swim Lessons stands out because it’s a feel-good story, but still gives the audience that necessary element of struggle. Dramas can have happy endings. Just look at Michael Phelps. Even he had a moment where it looked like he might not make it. I’m really hoping that with my fellow Baltimore native’s Olympic success, interest in swimming will translate to interest in Swim Lessons!
Q: Were there any problems using the original source video?
A: One of the biggest technical challenges was working with 30i/1.33 and 24p/1.78 source material in the same project. I was pretty adamant about it being a 24p project. I wanted it to feel like film, so I shot all the interviews at 24pA/1.78. Converting the footage was pretty crazy and I’m flabbergasted it actually worked. We didn’t have the budget to run the stuff through a realtime frame rate converter, so we had to do it with software. The process was really complicated, and involved several stages of capturing and exporting my selects to end up with Quicktime reference files which we then used After Effects to convert to 24p. The end result has a really warm, grainy, blurry feel, like it was shot on Super-8 film, not Hi-8 video. It worked, but it was a lot of work! I sure wished for the ability to edit multiple frame rates on the same timeline. Some competing products claim to be able to do this but I can’t imagine it would look as good. I really hope this feature will be included in the next release of Media Composer, along with the ability to control the frame blending. I know I’m not the only filmmaker with this issue.
The 1.33/1.78 aspect issue was also a challenge. I shot the retrospective interviews in 1.78 because I wanted there to be a clear indication that these people were thinking back. It was important to the story for the audience to remember that back in 1997, life was different in many ways.
Unfortunately that left me with aspect ratio issues. Blowing up the 1.33 to fill the 1.78 frame was out of the question. I wanted to keep as much of the raster as possible because only 360 NTSC lines would look like garbage projected on a theater screen. We tried everything to make the horizontal fill the frame: A straight stretch, a “smart stretch” (done with the Bezier Warp effect in AE), similar to what you see on many home flat panels these days, a pillarbox with duplicated, stretched video beneath and fuzzy borders, etc., all purely aesthetic treatments.
But the solution was simple once I refocused on what the home movies did for the story. They put the audience on the river, literally looking through his brother Andy’s eyes. I decided it was important to preserve what he saw though the viewfinder without distorting or masking it in any way to give the audience the most authentic experience.
We went with a straight 1.33 pillarbox with about an 18% grey background to mitigate the hard edges when dissolving between 1.33 b-roll and 1.78 present-day interviews. Even though it’s not the most aesthetically pleasing solution, it ended up working for the film. The net effect is a certain sense of claustrophobia, which helps the audience feel the limitations Nick and his family had back in 1997…no widescreen equals no wireless Internet, no GPS-enabled digital cell phones with navigation, no blogs, travel websites, etc. It was the Stone Age compared with how somebody could do the same thing today. It really emphasizes what an amazing feat it was to coordinate all the logistics and swim the length of the Mississippi River, all for his dad.