Fear of Flying

This film was an experiment in how to shoot on film at a minimal cost. The film itself was shot on a 16mm Éclair. The credits were shot on Jeffrey's personal Bolex 16mm camera inherited from his father. Although digital editing was in full swing, Jeffrey wanted to experience the limitations and creative solutions required in the cut & splice method. He rented a flatbed editor for a month, and had it in his 1 bedroom railroad apartment in Hell's Kitchen. Jeffrey had edit prints made of the negative, and went about cutting and splicing. For the opening train sequence, he wanted the train to enter in hyper speed, but the Éclair could only under-crank so much, and he wasn't satisfied with the speed. If he were editing on an Avid or Final Cut, he would simply speed up the sequence. However, his only option editing on film would have been to have an optical made at the film house, but since he was experimenting with how cheaply he could make this movie, that option was out. So, he decided to take the multiple takes of various trains entering and exiting the station, and cut them all into 3 frame bits. He then put them in a box, shook them up, and pulled out one bit after the other, and randomly spliced them together. There's a total of 8 seconds of these sequences in the film, which took 64 splices in total to create. The total number of cuts in this 6 minute film, not including the credit sequence, is 211.