2012
“This Is Gary McFarland”
Editor
Director: Kristian St. Clair
Producer: Century67
Camera:
Editor: Kristian St. Clair, Emily von W. Gilbert
Official site >
I’d worked with Kristian on an upcoming project (which is so exciting it pains me not to be able to post clips from it yet…) when he asked me to take a look at his 2006 documentary about the largely unknown jazz arranger Gary McFarland. He wanted to update some of the graphics before mastering a DVD.
Knowing that this was a film that had already been finished and released, to some acclaim (Gilles Peterson from the BBC said “You know I love my slightly obscure music documentaries, well this is a real good one. It’s really worth looking out for it”) I made a version with updated graphics.
And then I made another version. Feeling like I had nothing to lose I started by cleaning up the audio and doing some basic grading, and from there just descended down the rabbit hole of animating whole sequences. When I came out again, the film was more than a little bit changed. Luckily, Kristian liked it.
