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About the film

The Lartigue Mechanic was produced for the Frederick Festival of Film 72-Hour Filmmaker Competition. The film is a six minute short about discovery of the spirit of creativity in unlikely places. As dictated by the competition rules, the concept, scripting, storyboarding, filming, and editing all took place in 72 hours between the evenings of Thursday September 15 and Sunday September 18.

The film, produced by Phonograph Films, placed first among 18 entries in the contest. To ensure compliance with the 72 hour requirement (that is, that no production started early), submitted films had to incorporate specific criteria presented to each team at the beginning of the competition. The mandatory criteria included in The Lartigue Mechanic were:

• Genre: comedy
• Location: The Delaplaine Visual Arts Center of Frederick
• Character Name: Jubal Early
• Prop: The Frederick Weekender newspaper

The film was submitted to judging after 71 hours and 57 minutes of near continuous effort by the film crew. While only a single shot was required of our assigned location, The Lartigue Mechanic was filmed almost entirely within the art center. In addition, our assigned newspaper prop featured a prominent role in the film. While not a typical comedy genre film, we felt that the film included enough elements of humor to meet our mandated genre criterion.

The Lartigue Mechanic contains no dialogue, but is narrated in the Estonian and contains a musical score authored specifically for the film. The film was submitted to the judges with the English subtitles.

Tech info

Since the production time constraint was so aggressive, the film crew endeavored to produce The Lartigue Mechanic with as little technical complexity as possible. The film was shot in anamorphic 24p frames/sec on a Canon XL2. The film was edited on Final Cut Pro 4.5 HD on a G4 Powerbook.

Improvised Dolly

The dolly shots were accomplished in two ways: a) with tripod and operator mounted upon an equipment sled which was pulled by crew members and b) with tripod operator stood upon a 20 foot carpet which was also pulled by crew members.

Excluding the film score and narration, all sound was captured during production (i.e. no post-processing sound). In some cases, such as the mechanic's hammering of pipes, sound was actually produced off-camera by the film crew.

Narration and film score was captured and recorded on an Apple iPod modified to run the GNU/Linux operating system.