Clink – SATO48 2010 | Monday Movie Review

CLINK \ Nathan

BACKSTORY: SATO48 is an annual film challenge in which teams compete to make a film from start to finish in only 48 hours. Each film must be based on the components of the “inspiration package” given at the start of the contest.

For this week’s Monday Movie Review I thought it would be interesting to “review’’ the film that Megan and I made this past weekend for the SATO48 film competition. I’ll give you a little insight about what the film is about and what we went through during the making of it so if you choose to watch the film this weekend, at The Moxie Cinema, you’ll have the inside scoop.

If you’ve read this far you may have gathered that the title of our film is called Clink. It’s named after the wonderful people that this documentary type film is about, Don & Betty Clinkenbeard. The Clinkenbeards have been together for over 60 years now, so the stories they have to tell about themselves and the Springfield, MO area are fascinating to listen to. They’re also known for being the parents of Jeff Clinkenbeard, one of the organizers that has put SATO48 together since it began, five years ago.

Clink explores the surface of how the loving relationship between Don and Betty came to be, through a few simple questions that I ask them during an interview. They reveal to us some lesser known information about themselves, as well as humor us with their sarcasm. Their honesty is apparent when watching, in fact, it wasn’t until shooting was almost complete that Betty remembered that the film was going to be shown to the public! So much of this film was made especially for Don and Betty that some things, such as the closing distinctive sound of a toy dog, are only intended for them to understand the meaning. Feel free to ask me questions though.

Another hidden feature of Clink is that Unknown Films had the pleasure and opportunity to work with a few extremely talented piano musicians! Taylor Baldwin (age 25), Colin Turnbull (age 18), Elvis Fritz (age 8), and Mia Frerking (age 7). With their help and creativity we were able to create the underlying classical sounds you hear through the entirety of the movie. A special thanks to the musical talent!

From a production point of view this was a challenging film for us in some ways. I decided to work on some effects I wasn’t very familiar with. One being the opening credits which consisted of Nodes connecting each portion of text as they move around the screen. It took me many hours to get the text the way I wanted it to move and interact. I also worked with Tilt Shifting during the “memory sequences”, an effect that miniaturizes objects within a framed shot. It took so many hours for the effects and 60‘s color filters to render into the completed film that I had to sleep in my office, waking up every 30 minutes for 5 hours to make sure nothing went wrong during the final process.

With such a short amount of time to produce a movie and only five minutes to tell a story on screen we were only able to scratch the surface of Don & Betty’s life together. With so much extra footage and longer portions of the stories they tell I wanted to include it all but I knew we couldn’t, due to time. With that said we plan to release a short vignette online that dives deeper into the story and includes everything we got to hear but couldn’t put in the film. We’ll let you know as soon as this Special Feature titled It “Don”ed on Betty is posted.

Thank you to everyone who supported us and followed us during the making of Clink!

Join us at The Moxie Cinema April 24th & 25th to watch Clink
SHOWTIMES FOR CLINK:
SATURDAY APRIL 24TH 2010: 2:30pm & 6:00pm
SUNDAY APRIL 25TH 2010: 2:00pm