Thanks to you, our documentary short subject film “Mystery of History”, derived from the essay of the same name, is complete. It’s a brief glimpse of how the topic of race has long been used as a tool to divide and conquer. Told primarily through the illustrations of John Clark Ridpath’s history books. With the reality of an underlying unity being at the heart of our mystery of existence.
Watch on either YouTube or Vimeo:
This one is in the same style as Balanced Opposites and sections of Transmutation, telling the story through old artwork. Which we find is a really decent way to do it for a zero budget project. We always aim to grab artwork that is so old the artists are long gone and also give credit when possible.
On a side note, this piece has a few technical flaws in it such as me buzzing the wide shot of my talking head footage. “Buzzed” means slightly out of focus so my face is a bit soft. Also my eye-line glancing down to my notes will be something to prevent in the future. The scratchy jacket we were wearing was also picked up by the microphone, so there are some un-removable un-desirable sounds of it in the audio. These things are fine for this piece, especially since we made it 100% solo during Covid and am also giving it away freely. Yet, they are all part of the continuing learning experience and we’re conscious to not repeat these imperfections in future projects.
We use to work in Los Angeles at a company called Digital Domain. They have a features department and commercial department. Occasionally certain famous directors would do a project through the commercial department to test future techniques they wanted to implement on features. So the commercial basically amounts to the mindset of “get your client to pay for your research and development”. We like this idea of using shorter length projects to test things for longer form projects so we’ve also adapted it into our filmmaking philosophy.
We’ll also be giving away a zip file of all the images from the film. Stay tuned for that.