(bright music) (upbeat music) - Welcome to "TV Film."

I'm Jermaine Wells.

"TV Film" showcases the talents of upstate New York media makers across all genres.

In this episode, we begin with an experimental film by Carl Lee.

"Unity Island" is a personal landscape study of a site over time in an attempt to reveal its beauty, moments, and contradictions.

- This film is about Unity Island, which is the small island, about a quarter square miles just off of Buffalo, the Black Rock neighborhood, between Black Rock Canal and Niagara River.

First impression is this placid kind of park.

Cyclists go there, fishermen.

There's different communities that use the space.

It actually is fairly recent that it was, that it's called Unity Island, like 2017.

Before that, it was called this kind of, well, racist and derogatory name, Squaw Island, which was a derogatory term for female Native Americans, right?

And there was a movement to change the name.

I've probably been going there for actually now about 10 years.

So that's like hundreds of visits.

So I started filming maybe three years ago.

I mean, when I started, I didn't really know what the final form would be.

I was just kind of collecting footage.

Because we take our dog there, he kind of acted as a guide and he, you know, he loves the winter, he loves the snow, he loves to swim in the pond there.

So it was like we were there year round, you know, kind of no matter what.

I had a lot of film stock that I wanted to use up.

So it's definitely, it's a combination of, you know, expired film stock and new film stock, black and white, color.

So yeah, originally I designed it as like this three screen, three projection installation, which I showed at the Buffalo Arts Studio Gallery in Buffalo.

They were kind of a slightly different angles from each other.

So like, you could watch the, you could step back and watch the whole thing, you know, all three screens kind of take it in.

But then also you could focus on individual screens, which I kind of like that as well.

The left screen kind of focuses on the bridge and the turning of the bridge.

The right one focuses on the pond and water.

That's like the pond where our dog swims all the time.

And then the middle one is sort of this, I think of it as more of the montage kind of screen, different seasons, different details.

Unity Island has this really kind of crazy history, fairly recent, like from the sixties and seventies.

It was, there was an incineration plant, and it was like this garbage dump for Buffalo.

And what comes across is this really kind of nice park, suddenly takes on this slightly darker dimension.

And I thought that, I thought that, you know, that's interesting.

Like every site has, you know, almost every site these days.

Like there's some contradiction or something else going on.

I do hope they kind of can see like the beauty of the place.

You know, every site, every corner has some kind of history that you, maybe isn't apparent.

(horn blares) (birds chirp) - [Camera Operator] Rolling.

- [Carl] Hope this works.

Oh, actually you should step in front.

Do a slate.

Okay.

- [Camera Operator] September 14th, panorama shot.

(water trickles) (birds chirp) (birds chirp) (dog barks) (train rumbles) (water splashes) - Next, an experimental science fiction film, shot with very expired film inside a LomoKino and hand processed with vintage 1980s C41 chemicals.

"Planet Signal Lost" is by Vav Vavrek.

- "Planet Blank, Signal Lost" is a film about the sort of last transmission of a crash landed alien cyborg organism.

And its final moments trying to, I think it's trying to get to something beautiful, like that's what I think it's actually doing.

But because the degradation of the film itself happens, you kind of don't get the experience that it had either.

You know, it's lost.

I work as a technician at Alfred State College in Alfred, New York for the animation department, but there's a little dark room there that is a sort of left over from when they did promotional things with film.

And so I raided the, they have like a stockpile of expired chemistry and expired film.

The film mostly expired before '94, and the chemistry expired in the eighties.

So that's what I actually shot the film with.

It's mostly slide film, cross processed with color negative, the chemistry.

I used a cheap plastic LomoKino camera.

They're a little, like, they're about this big, and you can load like a regular roll of film into them, and then you hand crank them.

So I shot a bunch of rolls of it just to be certain I'd get something out of it.

With old film and old chemistry and, you know, you know, hope for the best.

Most of the color in the film itself is from the development process.

Like the purple, the pink, the blue.

Those are all, there's one scene where you can tell it's been digitally altered, but I figured that was aesthetic.

You know, that was a sort of storytelling aesthetic, right?

I mean, the colors are gonna be crazy anyways 'cause I did it by hand.

I'm like filling up, you know, those, the little like pictures that you boil and like adding it, trying to keep the temperature sort of right in a tank of water with the film spools and a huge canister.

And so, you know, I did like 10, 10 rolls at a time or something.

But anyways, so it kind of comes from all that.

I had two LomoKinos, and I broke them both in the shooting.

They're plastic and the plastic handles break off of them, the hand cranks.

And so I broke the hand crank off of both of them.

I actually shot the end of it with a broken one because I needed a little more footage, and I'm like twisting the little plastic, yeah.

I made the soundtrack after I edited the film, so I watched the film and sort of tried to make the soundtrack go with what I thought made sense in the film.

I originally had a different, I had like a completely different film that I wanted to shoot, but I needed actors and I needed time that I didn't have.

And so I decided to come up with something I could do that didn't have people in it, like the film, you know, the character is, you're looking through the eyes of the only character in the film pretty much.

So it was mostly shot at work during lunch because I work full-time, and I'm also a part-time PhD student.

At that time, I think I was halftime at UB so I'm driving to Buffalo from Alfred.

It's a two hour trip, and I was taking a cinematography class there at the time and then a class the next day in the morning.

And I slept in my office in Buffalo so that I could do both classes and then drive back.

I took a vacation day from work to go up there and yeah, it was a, it's sometimes it's hard.

In this film, I'd be happy if people are entertained or like enjoy like the sort of aesthetic of it, you know, the painterly quality or that glitchy kind of, 'cause it both has digital glitches and also analog glitches in it.

I edited it digitally.

I used Adobe Premier and After Effects and I used the, they have that, you can change the frame rate and it has a, you know, optical flow, I think it's called, right?

And so it tries to draw the in-betweens, which it does a terrible job at.

But I like that terrible job, you know, 'cause that's where the glitches in the film actually come from.

Those are the frames that were drawn.

This one was a project that I wanted to give myself as many, like things that could go wrong, you know, as part of it sort of, you know, so it was a, you know, the obstacles make the film in a way.

It also comes, I think from my painting background too.

I see my films kind of as like moving paintings.

(beat thumps) (tense music) (TV static crackles) - Learn more about the films and filmmakers in this season of "TV film" at wmht.org/tvfilm.

And be sure to connect with WMHT on social media.

I'm Jermaine Wells.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] "TV Film" is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the office of the Governor and the New York State legislature.