October 2002

Mediation on the State of Planet Earth

Filmmaker Laura Dunn is taking on the sprawling Texas energy industry in her new film, “Become the Sky.” Dunn and camera operator Isaac Mathes shot the feature throughout the Lone Star State during 2001, working with the Sony PD-150 miniDV camcorder, an HHB PortaDAT recorder and a Sennheiser 416 microphone. The pair traversed the state by helicopter as well as car, to capture sites like the Comanche Park nuclear facility, an offshore oil-rig and a windmill farm in the Guadalupe Mountains.

Begun long before the Enron scandal broke, “Become the Sky” examines the destructive practices and effects of Big Energy, from air and water pollution to financial chicanery and influence peddling.

“What I made is a critique of the entire energy and economic system, but it’s a really unconventional film, and its message comes across in a way that’s personal, not polemical,” says Dunn. “The title of the film is ‘Become the Sky’ because we need to get a larger perspective on what we’re doing. The real answer is that we need to consume less.”

Post-It Notes

Dunn began editing the film last fall on a Titanium PowerBook G4 running OS 9 and Final Cut Pro 2.5, upgrading to Mac OS X and Final Cut Pro 3 during early 2002. Shortly after “Become the Sky” premiered in Austin this spring, Dunn was notified that she had received a second Academy Award nomination for her new documentary, which is being distributed by her production company, Two Birds Film.

“I’ve been making movies for seven years, and I’ve never used anything but the Mac,” says Dunn, who began her filmmaking career as a Yale undergraduate with “The Subtext of a Yale Education,” a half-hour examination of labor-relations issues at the University.

“When I was shopping for a computer to edit my footage from the Yale strikes, I decided on the Mac because I wanted to focus my energies on being an artist, not an engineer,” she says. “I’ve learned a lot along the way about things like operating systems and FireWire, but it’s been pretty simple to configure the system and crank out big projects with a lot of complex elements. The Mac has freed me up to be creative.”

Graduate student and environmental activist Laura Dunn from the University of Texas at Austin stepped into the limelight last year, when her first feature-length film, “Green,” captured the 2001 Academy Award in the “Student Documentary” category. Written, directed and edited by Dunn, the 47-minute doc examines the ecological and personal devastation caused by petrochemical plants along a stretch of the Mississippi River known as Cancer Alley. Laura is the Founder and Executive Director of her own production company, Two Birds Film.

The Sky’s The Limit

“Become the Sky” is Dunn’s most ambitious film to date. By turns a road movie, a political éxposé and a poetic mediation on the state of Planet Earth, “Become the Sky” crisscrosses Texas as it illustrates the effects that the petrochemical, nuclear and electric industries have on the air, land and water. Never one to shy away from controversy, Dunn also incorporates archival stills and film footage to examine the way that the political and financial interests of powerful Texans like Lyndon Johnson, Dick Cheney and the Bush family have shaped the economy and the world.

“I was dealing with 60 hours of video footage and 35 hours of audiotape, to cut a one-hour film with hundreds of edits and a very complex soundtrack,” says Dunn. “The Mac and Final Cut Pro are what allowed me to handle everything so easily. I had a total of 300 gigs of storage with three external FireWire drives, so I could digitize everything at high resolution and keep all of it at my fingertips.”

Even in the midst of a demanding project, Dunn found it easy to make the move from Final Cut Pro 2 and OS 9 up to Final Cut Pro 3 and OS X. “There weren’t too many changes to the Final Cut Pro interface with Version 3, but there were a lot fewer things like dissolves and titles that needed to be rendered,” says Dunn. “Mac OS X enabled me to run multiple applications at once, and I noticed that I wasn’t having any problems with the computer freezing up. It’s obviously running the computer more efficiently, but the interface is still so simple that I don’t have to spend a lot of time thinking about how to use it effectively.”

Acoustic Wiles

The film’s sound design was a top priority for Dunn, who wanted the soundtrack to contrast natural and human-made environments. Dunn served as the location recordist for the project, capturing more than 30 hours of audio on DAT tape. As an ironic touch, Dunn also incorporated voiceover narrations from several videos produced by the nuclear and oil industries, exhorting the public to accept the environmental risks of energy production.

Dunn cut together about 20 tracks of audio clips, which she output as an AIFF file for Austin-based audio engineer Wayne Chance, who created the film’s 48-track sound mix using digidesign ProTools running on a Power Mac G4.

“The sound design is really intense,” says Chance. “We wanted to use sound to place viewers in each one of the scenes, whether it was an oil rig or a field filled with crickets and natural sounds. There are a lot of scenes without any dialogue, so we build up a complex soundscape that carries the film. Throughout the project, we were transferring a lot of files between our computers and between Final Cut Pro and ProTools, and the Mac made everything easy.”

For graphics and titles, Dunn called on designer Mat Hames of Austin-based Alpheus Media, Inc., who created motion graphics, effects and titles on Power Mac G4 computers running Mac OS X with Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, and Photoshop, as well as Final Cut Pro.

“We collaborated on the graphics and designs over a period of about four months,” says Hames. “I created all the graphics first in Photoshop and Illustrator, then animated them in After Effects and saved them as QuickTime movies, which Laura imported into Final Cut Pro. “There were almost a hundred elements requested, and the list of deliverables continued to evolve as the film was being edited,” he continues. “Everything went back and forth between our computers, and the Mac really facilitated the process, enabling a creative labor of love to turn into a beautiful, fully realized film.”