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Surfwise: Doug Pray Documents a Fractured Family History
By Jon Silberg
Apr 27, 2008 - 11:10:27 PM
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Filmmaker Doug Pray wasn't sure what he was getting into when he agreed to make a film about the Paskowitz family. Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz became renowned in certain circles as a surfer and an advocate of a lifestyle that embraces healthy eating and exercise, and eschews material wealth. A doctor by profession, Paskowitz dropped out of what he saw as a sick society and embarked on a vagabond existence without financial commitments in order to travel the country and surf wherever he wanted. By the early 1960s, he and his wife, Juliette, had the first of what would eventually be nine children—eight boys and a girl—who were brought up together inside a small camper, living Doc's dream. They existed outside the system, never attended school and rarely had enough clothes to wear. The family had a certain notoriety among those who care about surfing, and a lot of people currently excelling at the sport learned at the Paskowitz Surf Camp on the coast in central California.
Pray, best known for his music documentaries Hype and Scratch—about the Seattle grunge scene and hip-hop DJs, respectively—wasn't quite sure what kind of story there was to tell about "Doc" and Juliette's adventures with their nine, now-grown kids until he started to uncover anger and estrangement among the clan members. Though free of society's demands, the kids were subject to their father's monomaniacal regimen. It turns out that 11 people crammed together in a small camper is not an idyllic situation in which to grow up.
As Pray assembled interviews and went through the large collection of Paskowitz family photos and home movies, he began to see the dark side of the patriarch's social experiment. While Pray continues to admire aspects of Paskowitz's ideas about healthy living (Doc, now well into his 80s, continues to surf regularly!), he also saw a family story rife with conflict and drama. "I'm fascinated by super type A personalities—these people who are almost cult leader types, super charismatic and super demanding," adds Pray.
60i Production
The film was financed by HDNet and, as is typical for HDNet, certain technical restrictions came with the money. Interviews, establishing shots and pretty much everything would have to be recorded with the Sony F900 at 60i. "I would have much preferred 24p, but that wasn't an option," Pray says. "I don't like that 'liquidy' video look. To me, that means television. Not that there's anything wrong with television, but I'm making a film and I want it to play in a theater and I don't want it to look like they're running a TV program in the theater. I was really nervous."
Hawaii-based cinematographer Dave Homcy, who has shot a number of surfing documentaries with 16mm cameras and underwater rigs, was equally concerned about being directed by HDNet to shoot in HDV format, also in 60i, for all the surfing and underwater material for the film. "It doesn't do the material justice," says Homcy, who used a Sony Z1U mounted in a housing he got from underwater photographer Larry Haynes. The rig, made by San Diego-based SPL Water Housings, and the camera enabled him to get material that he's happy with, but, he adds, "The camera just couldn't handle the contrast, and we couldn't do any slow motion. It wouldn't have been my choice for surfing footage."
Editorial
Pray worked with Editor Lasse Jarvi, with whom the director had collaborated on the documentary Infamy, about graffiti culture, as well as on a number of commercials. Material was brought into Final Cut Pro HD systems and offlined over a many-months-long period. "The hard part about editing a documentary isn't all that fun stuff where we have pretty shots of waves with music. That's the icing on the cake," says Pray. "The real work involves spending months and months with a wall of index cards like a screenwriter, and you have 50 or 60 scenes lined up and just shuffle them around and around. When it's all done, you say, 'Of course that's how it comes together,' but when you're working on it, there are so many different possibilities, so many different films that could come out of this material. I'm very glad we were able to take the time to keep shaping it and changing it until we got it right."
Sound Design
For Pray, the audio is a key component in making his documentaries cinematic. "I really am proud to be part of a school of documentary filmmaking that wants them to be cinematic," he says. "Not at the expense of story or reality, but I spend a lot of time on editorial and sound design. We really pore over the dialogue and the music. I want the movies to play big. I want it to be big and booming when you see it in a theater."
Explaining his rather unusual, interactive method of working with Composer John Dragonetti, Pray says, "I want to edit to music even at first, when we're being really loose with the material. Your first edit of a scene might be 12 minutes. Half a year later it might be down to three and a half minutes long. That's really frustrating for a composer. But we'll cut the music to fit and then show it to him. He might be okay with that, or he might say, 'Now I see how I can make that part more emotional or give it a happier ending,' and then he might rework his composition to fit the scene. It's a very different process from scoring a narrative film."
When they had picture locked, they would take their audio, in the form of OMF files, to Subtractive Sound Mixing in Santa Monica. "The sound mix is something I still like to do the old-fashioned way at a mixing facility," Pray notes. Subtractive, working in Avid/Digidesign Pro Tools, took the tracks Pray and Jarvi had built, added sound effects or replaced Pray's with better ones, and then did a number of pre-dubs, which were brought to a bigger Pro Tools-based mixing stage for a two-day mix.
Hollywood-based post house Shapeshifter did the online and color correct. Picture was imported into an Avid Nitris from the Final Cut Pro project using Automatic Duck software; that "offline" version was used as the basis for the Nitris system to rebuild the project from the media, which had been digitized as an Avid HD project. "What was most interesting about the Nitris technology was that it had this setting that was supposed to give the project a 'film look,'" Pray recalls. "I was laughing. 'You're going to push one button and the whole thing will look like a movie!' But the joke was on me because it kind of did. We also went through and color corrected shot by shot, but I was able to get a real syrupy sunset feeling for the movie and we got a consistent look for the archival footage."
Pray sums up, "I would still rather shoot HD in 24p, but I no longer regret shooting at 60i. I think the film really ended up with the kind of look I wanted it to have."
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