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Accidental Filmmaking: The
Fair on the Sundance Online Film Festival What happens when you blend an artist’s talent for book making and a love of radio with a Website called Transom, the computer-generated technology called Flash, and the Sundance Online Film Festival? For New York-based multi-media artist Jason Rayles and his project The Fair, it was a wild three-year run with an artwork that began as a limited edition-book, became a radio pitch to National Public Radio, developed into an animated film for the Internet, and finally received an on-screen premiere at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. As unlikely and crazy as it may seem, that is more or less the story (so far anyway) of The Fair, a beautiful and passionate work that explores the distinctly American sights and sounds of the days and nights of the 2002 Brockton County Fair in Massachusetts. A labor of love, Rayles explains, “I wanted to capture these amazing visuals and also to show the dual sides of the fair, with baby contests in the daytime and demolition derbies at night – two completely different worlds existing together in the same spot.” Rayles’ biggest challenge was achieving suitable audio and photos for the book with limited technological resources. After some experimentation, he settled on the simple solution of using a camcorder to capture visuals and stereo microphones to record audio to a minidisc. With this approach the visual element of the project shifted from still photos to video, and in the end it may have been this low-tech multi-media approach that allowed for so many future cross-media evolutions of the project. When the resulting handmade book landed on the desk of Bob Boilen, director of National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, it caught the eye of Jay Allison who became an instant fan. Encouraged by Allison, Rayles pulled video and applied animations to create a piece for www.transom.org, Allison’s radio-meets-Internet Website. Calling on his skills as a computer programmer to re-design and re-think his material, Rayles finally created an animation-motion picture hybrid that is both stylistically unique and effectively captures the highly visceral experience of being at a fair. It was this Web-based version that made its way to the submission pile of the Sundance Online Film Festival (SOFF) in October of 2004. And that is where fate tapped Rayles into one more rendezvous with the project that wouldn’t die. Moved by Rayles’ creativity and by the innovations of work itself, Sundance Film Festival programmers approached Rayles with an invitation to screen The Fair as a short film at the 2005 Festival in Park City. A genuinely surprised Rayles agreed with enthusiasm, making adjustments and converting Flash animation back into video for a film that would finally project on the big screen before the feature film Who Killed Cock Robin? The results, he admits, were a bit hit-and-miss, and although other festivals followed with more invitations, Rayles seems content to let his creation rest after its premiere at Sundance. “As far as America, after Sundance there doesn’t seem to be a way up, and even though there is opportunity out there for it to live on, I’m really proud and pleased to let it end at such an exciting place.” As for his artistic future, Rayles confides that after a recent appearance at Harvard to speak about his work, he began to ponder something new. “I love making my books and I love the radio and I’ve always been drawn to documentaries. But I think I’m going to start a new project soon … it’s a short film … right from the start. I mean, it’s meant to be a short film … on purpose.” You can experience Jason Rayles’
book/radio/Internet/short film The Fair for
free from anywhere in the world at the 2005 Sundance Online Film Festival
–just visit www.sundance.org
and click on the SOFF logo. Anytime … day or night. |