Sundance Film Festival

Somehow the tiny budget for Paper Heart paid for trips to Toronto, Paris, and about 12 states including—to the best of DP Jay Hunter’s recollection—California, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee and New York, where the man shot 300 hours of Varicam footage in ten weeks. Not surprisingly he thinks Paper Heart’s lone editor Ryan Brown is a hero.

The film is in Dramatic Competition and premiered last night at the Racquet Club. Directed by Nicholas Jasenovec it tells a fictional story of Charlene Yi (the actress’/co-producer’s real name) through both a narrative thread and a documentary one. (The picture at right shows Jasenovec, Yi, and Brown). While Charlene’s story of skeptical love is fictional, her co-stars are not. Hunter says he shot the many interviews with non-actors—friends and acquaintances talking about love–in a narrative style using primes and very deliberate compositions, but that he also tried to shoot the narrative segments with the frankness of a documentary, “obeying the laws of reality.”

Alone with his Avid Media Composer, Brown started cutting in March 2008 while the others were still on the road shooting, and finished end of August last year. To wrangle the volume of footage without an assistant (so that’s how they afforded Paris!), they came up with a Filmmaker database protocol for logging things in with descriptions, timecode, etc. Brown says it wasn’t “unmanageable” (but next time he’ll have an assistant). Jasenovec had a Media Composer on his laptop tied to some of the media. So the iterative process could begin via email with Brown laying down the major structure of the film; when Jasenovec got home the two refined together in the cutting room (Brown’s downtown LA home).

Hunter chose the Varicam (he shot tape) because he’s comfortable with it and the director needed some over- and under-cranking. “I like Varicam because it feels like Super 16. I’ve shot Sony formats in the past—900 and 950—as well as Arri D20 and the Genesis and there’s just something about the Varicam that’s easy to use in the field under rought conditions. I love the look—I spent quite a bit of time creating a weird gamma curve for this film that lifted the mids and blacks and held down the whites—went really extreme and got this amazing latitude which really blew my mind.”

He says he likes the way the Varicam renders color, softer than the Sony, a little bit more true to life. For this film the ultimate goal was very desaturated–in camera as well as in post. “Varicam is great place to start that look. It made sense for the circumstances.” The camera came from VER in Los Angeles part of R Gear.

Paper Heart screens tomorrow 2:30p.m. at the Library, Wednesday 3:15p.m. at the Eclles, Friday 11:30p.m. at Prospector Square and Saturday 6p.m. in Salt Lake at the Broadway Centre.