INTERVIEW WITH MAX CANTOR
Explain a little bit about the technique you used in this film and how you go about editing it.
Shooting in Amsterdam was great, mostly just because it was in Amsterdam which is a great city and so fun to explore. I was abroad in the fall and was lucky enough to get to go around on little weekend getaway trips to other countries. By the time I got to Amsterdam, I felt like I’d been taking a lot of the same kinds of pictures in all these beautiful cities and I wanted to try something different. The idea for the video came about kind of by chance. We obviously wanted to get the full Amsterdam experience, so we spent a lot of our time in the coffeeshops. I am always shooting, so I was taking pictures in there the light was so low in the shops that my shutter always open for long exposures. Because I was shooting digital, I wasn’t worried about the number of frames I could take, so I just held down the shutter and took hundreds of photos framed the same way in these shops. As a result, I started noticing that all the pictures blended together to tell a story in fractured time, like an old Lumiere film shot in 16 fps. Then I decided to just shoot constantly as if holding a video camera and even adding a little movement to the camera that you can’t get in photographs. It was a bitch to edit but I had a blast doing it. It’s my little homage to a beautiful city.
How many photos did you use? How many did you take?
I took about 2,500 and I used almost all of them.
Do you feel any different when you’re working with subjects you know (like your friends) versus ones that you don’t (like people in Elon’s athletics department.)
I like to do both really but it’s totally different. When you’re working with a subject you know you can kind of lull them into a state where they totally trust you. It can be a lot more fun sometimes because it feels like just hanging out with a friend. When you’re shooting with strangers, half the battle is getting them to be comfortable with you. But that’s a great time in itself because it gives you the chance to meet people you might otherwise never meet. It’s crazy how holding a camera gives you the justification to walk up to a stranger and strike up a conversation, totally invade their privacy, follow them, get to know them, etc. I love that. That’s the best feeling – making a connection with someone just for the hell of it. That’s something you can’t get out of working with friends.
Learn more about Max Cantor by clicking on the “Meet the Artists” link at the top of this page.
Great video! I love the style you create with it. I Shazamed the song, but nothing came up. Could you tell me what the name of the track is?