Production
Able Edwards was shot on mini DV (Canon XL-1) at a small green screen stage in Hollywood. No physical sets were used.
"I had always been intrigued with the idea of adapting old films to new settings," said director Graham Robertson. As literature has stories that have been retold with modern views, the cinema has classics that are ripe for revisiting. Able Edwards revisits the spirit and structure of Citizen Kane. But we didn't have a lot of money to spend, so using consumer technologies and truckloads of resourcefulness, we managed to shoot the entire feature in 15 days with a budget of $30,000. The plan was this; get a green wall, get some actors, scan some photographs to use as backgrounds (sets) and shoot a "big budget" looking film for no dollars." For starters, I spent a good chunk of time at the downtown branch of the L.A. library going through piles of architecture books; collecting and scanning the images. Elements of the existing photographs were photoshopped and composited to create new, unique environments- the futuristic world of Able Edwards. Twenty-three dollars in late fees and a month later, we had our sets." After getting the footage in the can, I began the long process of importing the green footage and editing it. About this time, a friend told me that she had spoken to Steven Soderbergh about the project and he was interested in our process. Next thing I knew, he was at my house in my office, watching EXTREMELY rough-cut sequences and test composites. Forty-five minutes later, we had a new executive producer." I spent the following year chained to my office chair assembling, editing and compositing the film. There were many days where I felt like Dick Van Dyke's one-man-band in Mary Poppins. It was true desktop cinema."
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Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally to be nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)