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MillimeterQ&A with FlickerLab founder/creative director Harold Moss
Feb 25, 2009 12:00 PM, By Craig Erpelding
We did stretch out designwise in a couple of places during the film, particularly one sequence in which a litany of damning statistics presents the criminally neglected state in which most of New Orleans has been left. Here, I emulated lines of police tape strung across the scene of the crime scene that is New Orleans, post-Katrina. We also used the simple drama of the open title and dramatic vignetting/framing to give the lower-resolution video of the opening shots of the film cinematic heft.
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I've been working with Pamela Yates, Peter Kinoy, and Paco de OnÃs of Skylight Pictures — the makers of the Sundance-selected documentary The Reckoning — for over 10 years, creating graphics for many of their documentary projects. They too rank amongst the most passionate and dedicated individuals I have known. There's clearly something about social justice documentary filmmakers. Skylight Pictures has a long history of creating hard-hitting docs with gripping stories. But their films don't just affect an audience, they effect real change in the world, and I think The Reckoning — a multicontinent-, -decade-, and -conflict-spanning look at the International Criminal Court — is set to be their most impactful work yet. It's easy to feel helpless in the face of genocide, government repression, and crimes against humanity around the world. But the International Criminal Court is boldly and patiently working to bring the rule of law and justice to victims in all corners of the globe. The Reckoning plays like an edge-of-the-seat thriller, looking at the twin dramas of the struggle of the court in establishing and carrying out this mission and the procedural drama of the prosecution of these unspeakable crimes itself.
Given the thriller and procedural character of the story, we went in a somewhat more stylized direction. Our base font was Vinyl, a slightly distressed, though still elegant san-serif font from the font house T26. This film takes even greater leaps in space, from New York to the Hague, from the Congo to Columbia. We created strongly graphic chapter headings, utilizing treated footage and world maps to both reflect the thriller feel and to let the audience know where they are in the story. We also completed a wider range of effects and compositing work on a range of shots, recompositing footage in monitors, and so forth. But again, the hallmark of such work is its complete invisibility.
We also played a smaller role [for], but were just as pleased to be associated with, The Glass House, a documentary by Hamid Rahmanian and Melissa Hibbard that follows the stories of several amazing young women in Tehran in a center dedicated to helping girls overcome abuse and lead healthy lives. It was also at Sundance this year. Hamid is a very talented designer and did most of the graphics work himself.
We depend on the Adobe Creative Suite (CS3) and Macs (G5 Quads) for all our motion-graphic and effects work, and edit on our end in Apple's Final Cut [Pro] (6.0.5). The bulk of the design is done in Photoshop and Illustrator, with the compositing done in After Effects. It's a powerful and flexible toolset that lets us carry out all design, compositing, and effects work within a desktop environment, regardless of the resolution and media we're working with.
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