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Antonio Ferrera, Director/DP/Editor, "The Gates"
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April 15, 2008
In 1979, artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude proposed one of the largest public art installations in history: a temporary "golden river" of 7,500 fabric-paneled gates in Central Park. The city turned them down. Twenty-four years and several administrations later, the controversial artists finally got the city's approval to complete their vision.
While the artists' decades-long quest to realize The Gates is certainly worthy story material, the making of the documentary that captures that journey is a notable achievement in its own right.
"I wanted to kill myself," says producer-cameraman-director Antonio Ferrera, who led the enormous task of pouring through and restoring a degraded hodgepodge of film reels, some of them shot as far back as 1978, when Christo and Jeanne-Claude began petitioning New York City officials to begin exhibition of a project called The Gates.
Directed by Antonio Ferrera, Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Matthew Prinzing; shot by Albert Maysles and Ferrera; and edited by Ferrera and Prinzing, the HBO feature documentary The Gates captures the soaring majesty of the project, along with its impact on thousands of amazed (and occasionally skeptical) witnesses who flocked to snowy Central Park to experience it over the course of 16 days in February 2005.
Albert Maysles, the filmmaker and cinematographer who helped pioneer the cinema vérité movement in the '60s and '70s with such documentaries as Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens and Salesman, was asked by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in 1979 to film their interactions with city officials and civic groups as they pitched The Gates. Albert and his brother, David Maysles, began filming as the artists began actively pushing their project forward. The Maysles team attended community board hearings, capturing the emerging controversy on 16mm film.
New York City officials eventually denied the artists permission, and the Maysles documentary went into hibernation. It was only when Mayor Michael Bloomberg granted permission for The Gates in January 2003 that Albert Maysles decided to revive the film project. (David Maysles passed away in 1987, though he is credited as the film's co-director.)
Ferrera was called on to fold some of the old Maysles footage into this brand-new digital documentary of the Gates exhibition
. The two-year-long editing process--completed with Gates co-director Matthew Prinzing--started with Ferrera sifting through a mass of brown and brandy-colored 16mm film, which had to be carefully organized before it could be restored and transferred to digital video.
"It was like an archaeological job; everything was in fragments," says Ferrera. "We had to figure out what to do with all of these scenes that were chopped up and missing frames. We had to reconstruct the actual chronological order of each scene so we could tell the story."
Once the archival footage was sorted, restored and transferred, Ferrera had to do some fancy math in Final Cut Pro to sync everything up properly. "It was recorded at 25 frames per second," instead of the 24fps projection rate, he explains. "We had to figure out the right algorithms [in Final Cut] to sync it up right."
Meanwhile, Ferrera and Maysles--who was serving as cinematographer--had to coordinate the digital shooting of the actual Gates exhibition in Central Park, which took place over 16 days in weather ranging from sunshine to snow. "We primarily used a Sony DSR-PD170 camcorder in PAL, thinking that would give us the best quality, especially for blowing it up real big," says Maysles.
Ferrera adds that about 400 hours of The Gates exhibition footage was captured with a Panasonic VariCam. A good 30 percent of the final film is HD. "You have these beautiful, realized landscapes of the transformed Central Park--that's what we primarily used the Panasonic for," he explains.
He says that the blending of very different capture mediums actually works for the film, "adding to the feeling of the time it took to get The Gates started. We embraced those differences," Ferrera says. "For example, you have mono sound from the early 1980s that is later updated to stereo; then, by the time the project is realized, it goes to surround sound."
As for Maysles, there is some satisfaction in seeing his own 27-year Gates quest finished. "It's a beautiful sight," he says. "It's quite a joy to see ordinary people develop an understanding of [The Gates] as art."
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