Some of the projects finished by Rockhopper Post in the past year are finally emerging into the public light. One of these is Vapor Trail (Clark), a documentary by the filmmaker John Gianvito. Gianvito, whose “The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein” was picked by Time Out New York as the 20th best film of the 2000s and whose “profit motive and the whispering wind” won Best Experimental Film from the National Society of Film Critics, tackles the disastrous environmental fallout caused by the US base presence in the Philippines.

Vapor Trail (Clark) has already been accepted to the Rotterdam Film Festival, and other festival presentations are forthcoming. Says the Rotterdam page:

John Gianvito’s epic Vapor Trail investigates what the US does to that land. Take Clark Air Base, once the biggest US military facilities on foreign territory. When the Philippine Senate voted out the presence of US military bases on its land in 1991, the former self-appointed ally forgot to properly clean up the mess it had made, turning huge parts of the island of Luzon into an eco-disaster of monstrous proportions. Vapor Trail (Clark) is a humble act of solidarity, a defiant work of remembrance, a rallying cry to rise and resist: a cinematic prose poem.

Vapor Trail is an SD production, encompassing 4.5 hours of finished material that had to be broken up into three reels for output to digibeta. John’s documentary filmmaking is very naturalistic and verité-style, so the color grading had to maintain that natural quality and not veer into the realm of establishing a “look.” These goals are very different from the typical television style of doing everything possible to make a shot look “good,” saturated, and “contrasty.”

The opening shots of the documentary, depicting sunrise in the Philippines, were very carefully styled to depict the sunrise accurately but also cover up some of the encoding artifacts of the DV source material. While we experimented with some image processing methods of noise reduction, we determined that careful manipulation of basic color curves was the best choice.

Another shot, much later in the film, is beautiful to watch. It’s a single 20-minute interview take that stretches from late evening to sunset. The shot actually consists of two color corrections, fading from one to the other as night sets in.

Filmmaker John Gianvito says of Rockhopper:

“My experience with Rockhopper Post Production has been nothing but positive. Doing post-production on a 4 and a half hour documentary can be a wearying proposition, financially and creatively. Rockhopper accomplished stellar results with efficiency and utmost professionalism. In the critical last stages of completion I knew that they would be not only close listeners and responders to my subtlest or most complicated directions but that they would bring welcome suggestions to the table. I’ve done my last two films with them¹ and I hope to do many more under their care.”

1. to be precise, Owen Williams worked with John on his last film at another company [↩]