Jeffrey Turboff earns his bread and butter working nights, editing for ABC News’ Nightline—but he’s also got a passion for creative indie projects such as the dazzling music video “Fools Parade,” which he directed for the band Trumpeter Swan. Although our policy is to keep articles to just a few hundred words, Jeffrey’s description of the making of the video is so interesting, we decided to bend the rules.
MMM: For people who never read past the first question, we need to start with “How did you do it?”
Jeffrey: My secret weapon here was the Phototropedelic app. And the Steadicam Smoothee.
MMM: Any special lenses?
Jeffrey: No. Just an iPhone 4s.
MMM: And the editing?
Jeffrey: I edited on an Avid Newscutter, and animated using Phototropedelic.
MMM: How long was the shoot?
Jeffrey: We shot two days; one day for the main scenario, and a separate day for the life-sized Fool tarot card.
MMM: What about post-production?
Jeffrey: The editing took three short late-night sessions after my editing shift at Nightline. I cut the music video working from midnight till 4 or 5 AM, but I’m an editor, so for me editing’s the easy part. However, the animating with Phototropedelic took months, exporting the final picture-locked video as 5,016 stills, which had to be individually processed in Phototropedelic, then re-imported into Avid and superimposed over the original untreated video.
MMM: What kind of arrangement did you have with the band?
Jeffrey: I had a handshake deal with Drew Patrizi of Trumpeter Swan to do the official music video for the song. We’re both Texans and have a friend in common, so the handshake seemed to be enough for both of us to feel comfortable about our collaboration.
MMM: How did you arrive at this look for the video?
Jeffrey: I had just gotten my first iPhone in early 2012, and I Googled “coolest apps” or something like that. One of those apps—Phototropedelic—happened to be a program for processing stills in a real 60’s psychedelic style. The developer is Larry Weinberg, who has an amazing history of his own, but the program itself is just very, very cool. It makes everything look like a Peter Max painting, or like it was ripped out of the Beatles “Yellow Submarine” movie.
MMM: So did you decide right then to use it for a music video?
Jeffrey: No. At that point I didn’t have any idea I could do anything more than treating stills with it, but I was experimenting, and I shot a simple photo of a bottle of Clorox wipes, then put it through Phototropedelic. The program has so many variables that you just want to do lots of iterations of the same image to see how many different looks you can get.
MMM: And this was still photography, not video?
Jeffrey: Right. There I am, scrolling through my dozen or so Phototropedelicized versions of that Clorox bottle, and I had an Archimedes “Eureka” moment. It’s variants of a still, but in rapid succession it looks like motion pictures. In fact, what is a movie but a series of stills? I already knew how to break moving video into an exported sequence of stills and also how to do the opposite: importing a series of stills as moving video.
MMM: You’d think someone else would have come up with this.
Jeffrey: Exactly, so I Google’d to find out if anyone else had figured out this little hack for Phototropedelic, and no one had. I found one music video that used the idea to a limited extent, but they weren’t thinking big. They used it for just a few seconds and it wasn’t all that impressive. It was one still that had been processed, not moving video. I knew I had to GO!
MMM: Why did you do this ambitious project on a phone?
Jeffrey: Well, I knew I was going to have to pass every frame of video through the iPhone in order to treat it with Phototropedelic, so I figured I had to shoot it with the iPhone too, just for the bragging rights. Two and a half years ago there still weren’t a lot of filmmakers looking at the iPhone as a serious filmmaking tool, and I just wanted to be pioneering as much as I could. I would’ve preferred to have also edited on the phone for even more bragging rights, but couldn’t find the tools that would allow me to do it with as much facility as I have with my Avid at work, so I decided to sacrifice that portion of my bragging rights in order to just get the thing done.
MMM: What’s the biggest problem you encountered?
Jeffrey: The biggest challenge honestly was overcoming boredom. That and file management. There were FIVE THOUSAND SIXTEEN stills comprising my picture-locked edit that had to be passed through Phototropedelic. It was mind-numbingly monotonous, and there were times when I thought, why? why? why did I subject myself to this? I was processing stills on the bus, I was processing stills on the toilet, I was processing stills in bed instead of sleeping. There were times when it felt like I would never finish. And if I ever threw out a result, I had to hand-renumber each and every one of an entire series of stills so that they would re-import to Avid properly. Huge pain. And if I ever lost track of where I was in processing a batch, I’d have to start that batch over. And that happened more than a few times.
MMM: Who helped you get the project done?
Jeffrey: I had one production assistant, Dan Levinsohn, who was really a trooper. Also the one guy who made the introduction between me and Drew Patrizi of Trumpeter Swan, our mutual friend Jeremy Phillips, was there to help out, and of course our wonderful actress, Aryn Cole, who is just so beautiful and free-spirited and threw herself into the project wholeheartedly for a pretty measly fee and some food, but I’m grateful to her for the wonderful energy she brought to the project.
MMM: What advice would you give other filmmakers?
Jeffrey: My best advice for filmmakers is, just make films. Make lots of films. Make ’em on the cheap, try out different genres, don’t be afraid to fail. But whatever you do, DON’T wait for the perfect alignment of circumstances. Your first film will probably be just as bad with financing and high production values as it would’ve been without. Because if you don’t know what you’re doing, money can’t fix that. How do you get to a place where you DO know what you’re doing? By doing it. So do it. A lot. Then once you KNOW that you know what you’re doing, THEN get your shit together and get yourself behind a script or other project you can knock out of the park, and THEN beg your friends and family, or max out your credit cards. But until then, just make your films any way you can. Because, the one secret no one wants to tell you is this… budget and production values mean NOTHING if your story isn’t good. And if your story IS good, low production values can be overlooked. (“El Mariachi,” “Pi,” “Slacker,” “Blair Witch,” “Saw,” “Paranormal Activity.”)
MMM: What reception did the video get?
Jeffrey: We completely skipped the whole festival circuit and just went right to YouTube and Vimeo, but the piece has gotten quite a bit of press and over 16,000 views.
MMM: How did you learn to be a filmmaker?
Jeffrey: I went to film school at the University of Texas, in Austin. I also got a great education working at a commercial production company, OneSuch Films. Commercials have a lot to teach filmmakers; in a thirty-second spot, everything is deliberate. There’s nothing in the frame that happens by accident, and nothing that ends up on screen after post-production that is a result of anything other than intent. Bob Foshko at the University of Texas taught me a lot. Bob Ramos, Al Califano, and Bruce Nadel at OneSuch Films taught me even more. And working at OneSuch I had access to hundreds of showreels, from directors, editors, d.p.’s, graphics people, and so on. I was able to develop a fine sensibility of what good filmmaking is. These guys who are tops in commercials are among the best filmmakers in the world. Their attention to detail is just unparalleled. Story by Robert McKee has been huge for me in learning screenwriting, along with some 20 or 30 other writing books I’ve read, but that one’s the biggest influence so far. And recently I’ve learned a lot about acting from excellent instructors such as Bob McAndrew, my primary acting coach, who is fantastic, and Mauricio Bustamante, at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, whose teachings have been very eye-opening and inspirational.
MMM: Can you tell us what you’re working now?
Jeffrey: I just finished my documentary “Modworld”. It screened for two weeks in the online screening room of the Beyond The Beaten Path Film Festival, and I’m hoping to see a few more acceptance letters from other film festivals this year, and will probably post it to YouTube and Vimeo in early ’15. Otherwise, I’m in pre-production on a very exciting short psychological horror project I wrote and will direct, edit, and act in, with the supremely talented Caycee Black in the lead role. We plan to roll camera late this summer.
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