The Digital High Priest

Floyd Webb


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(c)Black Filmmaker Publications 1999:
All right reserved

I met independent filmmaker/New Media Producer/Designer and consultant Floyd Webb, in Oak Park, Illinois recently on a trip to Chicago to do research at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

            He describes himself as being born in Mississippi, raised in Chicago and a citizen of the world.

            He was active in the late sixties on various levels as a cultural worker (he was ‘agitatin’ at age eleven after witnessing Martin Luther King get hit by a brick in Chicago in the 60s). He was raised in a military family, but lunch with Ho Chi Minh was one of his early desires, and he has spent years seeking archival photos of Ho at Garveyite UNIA meetings in the 1920s. He ‘missed’ Vietnam by forgetting to register for the draft because his dyslexia kicked in when he was trying to fill out the paperwork and found himself in Luxembourg one day plotting a cheap route to Mozambique.

            Floyd left Chicago when he was 20, working as a freelance photojournalist. His intention was to go to Mozambique looking for the possibilities of a new society being born. He made it to East Africa and witnessed firsthand the expatriate experience in Tanzania, staying for a while on the legendary ‘chicken farm’ run by dodgy African-American expatriates. He found himself in London and Europe for a number of years and has travelled the length and breadth of Africa except for South Africa, where he could not get a visa during apartheid. He has also worked and travelled a bit throughout Asia and Japan and did his bout in Los Angeles out of curiosity.

            As for credentials, he was the founder and director of the Blacklight Festival of International Black Cinema from 1982 to 1994. Blacklight was one of the most critically acclaimed festivals of black cinema in the world. ‘Like many labours of love it was held together by gum and shoe laces and collapsed under its own weight eventually’ said Webb.

            The festival was one of the first to feature cinema of the Black Diaspora, premiering feature films, documentaries, shorts, animation, and even showcasing video with state of the art video projection as early as 1984. But the festival was more than just a ‘black’ film festival. It was a forum for the examination of the black image in cinema on a global basis.

            Webb has worked as a producer/director of commercials and music videos, and produced for foreign film crews. He is most proud of his work as associate producer for Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust. He continues to work with Ms. Dash on digitally based projects such as her interactive CD-ROM Digital Diva. (http:// geechee.com)

            Floyd has worked in new media since 1995, producing CD-ROMs and producing and designing web media for companies such as Oxford University Press, Playboy Corporation, Big Idea, and ‘Cheap Charlie’s 1937 cafe up the street from me!’

            He recently finished projects for France Telecom/New Caledonia Telco (OPT) and Thrill Jockey Records (http:// 8boldsouls.com). He was a panellist at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival New Media Center discussing Web Distribution along with representatives from Atom Films and Haxan Films (Blair Witch Project originators). He maintains relationships with digital artists around the world from Bandung to Chicago, San Francisco and London.

INTERVIEW

PA: What are you working on right now?

FW: Maintaining and surviving by doing production work for entertainment-based promotion with companies like Big Idea. They produce a straight to video animated series called Veggie Tales (http://www.bigidea.com) I admire a company like that for bucking the system, beginning in their bedroom, producing 3D animation, mortgaging the house and usurping college money to create a competitive animated series in the children’s market. Big Idea is a prime example of what can be done at an independent level.

PA: How does that translate to filmmakers who don’t have a house to mortgage?

FW: The cost of production is significantly reduced when you use digital. From a low level you can use a regular 8mm video camera, a $100 or £100 video card to digitize and spend less than $/£1000 to get the necessary software to begin production. For $/£500 more you can purchase a CD-ROM burner to distribute your works and hook up a website of your own to promote it.

PA: Shouldn’t we be aiming at the mainstream and its profit potential?

FW Profit for whom? That is always the question. It’s like Chuck D says on his Internet MP3 on Swindler’s Lust... ‘if you don’t own the master then the master owns you.’ It’s time we seize productive and distributive power and learn all we can about this technology and how to exploit it to its maximum potential for e-commerce, merchant accounts, etc. We then creatively increase our market by providing access ourselves.

PA: What should we be aiming for, the bucks or the control?

FW: Both, but on new terms. I see a way that I can control my content and not have to acquiesce to the demands of studio execs due to warped and distorted marketing statistics or just plain not giving a damn. I can avoid having to conform to the unspoken status quo broadcasting standard that says all work broadcast must tread bland ideological ground and that characterization of non-European people must be limited to the one dimensional stereotype textbook. I want to create work that has an opinion, is aesthetically appealing, contributes to world cinema, and does not sledge hammer the audience with ideas. As black filmmakers we do tend to hammer at them points! It is sometimes the fine point, not the broad stroke that has the most impact.

PA: You mean create propaganda...

FW: Look at the music video and how the gangster lifestyle was promoted and perpetuated...how the baggy prison garb of under-aged accused felons became a lasting fashion statement. Nobody was concerned about the ‘propaganda effect’of that material. Who defines ‘hot,’ ‘hip,’ or ‘necessary?’

PA: We do most of the time don’t we?

FW: Yes that’s true but the sell out is fast, while the appropriation is faster...because, as the jazz musicians used to say ‘We make it and they take it.’ The reggae singers talk about Uncle T.O.M. and Uncle S.A.M. ‘Steal Away Music’and ‘Take Our Music’ Our culture is a commodity and the best example we got of someone controlling the dissemination of our diasporic culture on a mass popular level is Master P and Spike Lee...and to say diasporic is problematic because African Americans are so landlocked and regional in their mentalities...If we ain’t thinking global we ain’t thinking!

PA: So tell me about your personal project?

FW: Well...it is a mythic drama about jedi drug dealer assassins. It is titled Throwdown and is about an effort to decriminalize drugs in America by two guys who want out of ‘the life’. I am working with an awesome team of production artists including Simmie Williams in Chicago and Tom Hamlyn in London and in London, Ontario. We do much of our production collaboration remotely.

PA: You’re doing a gangster film? Doesn’t that sort of negate all you have espoused this past few hours?

FW: No. This is about making good product. I chose a project that allows me to say some things I feel like saying about a subject that needs examining in a way not done before. I am not an image policeman, never wanted to be one. I think we need a wide range of stylistic expression, that’s all.

PA: I see...are you going to shoot this digital?

FW: Yes. For me it is the only way I can afford to do it. That is, unless you know someone ready to give me 2.5 million samollians no questions asked, and no control required!

FLOYD WEBB’S 13 POINT RECIPE
FOR DIGITAL PRODUCTION

1. Take one GOOD screenplay of any length and break it down to its bare production designable minimum.

2. Get the best actors you can find that ain’t gonna use up all your meagre budget eating up all the food service from your minimal crew.

3. Get the best small, digitally savvy crew you can find and convince them to work for minimal fees or nothing on a reasonable production schedule that fits your budget...(biological/social identity should not become an issue here)

4. Obtain whatever digital camera you can get your hands on. I prefer, for the time being, the Canon XL1...it has interchangeable lenses...and I can get my hands on one right NOW.

5. Get to know some computer savvy design and non-linear editing students. They will be your lifesavers if they are good and consistent and provide some access to state of the art technology...if you got no money treat them with kindness and respect and always always feed them. Know that there are visions better than yours and control is not always wisdom.

6. Shoot your film with the best sound you can get. SOUND is key, ask Kurosawa (he’s dead peace be upon him). Good sound is not expensive.

7. Finish production as quickly as is reasonably possible.

8. Post non-linear with whoever you can get the best deal...

9. Obtain music from the innumerable talented DJs running all over the streets these days. Make a deal to let them have the music rights, that’s right, exhibit some generosity. You will have more problems than you need keeping track of things as it is.

10.  Mix the best music you can and score the film then lay-off to Digital Beta.

            You are now ready to get on with the film to video transfer...

11. Find the most significant festivals for your work and promote the hell out of it, that means having excellent stills, lots of cassettes to send out without expecting them back (unless you send a self-addressed, stamped envelope). Produce well-written promotional materials with the ability to follow up and dialogue with the festival programmers.

12. Promote, promote, promote. Get a website first thing with all of your promotional materials available for download. Include hi-resolution image download because you never know when you will get a feature article for your work written and most newsrooms are on line and have the bandwidth to download large files...

13. Last but not least, study, study study the new means of promotion and distribution. Take a look at http://www.proteintv.cm, http://www.atomfilms.com and see what indie filmmakers are doing on the web. Get involved!

(fw@itutu.com - http://itutu.com)

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