At first glance, the graffiti-painted school bus
looks like something most moms would steer kids away from. But this
is no vandalized vehicle--it's a Mac-based video production studio
piloted by an edgy group of Los Angeles filmmakers working to bring
movie making to a wider audience.
The bus belongs to the Los Angeles Filmmakers' Co-op,
or LAFCO for short, and it's a rolling testament to the democratizing
power of personal computers. The bus and its drivers are three months
into a yearlong, cross-country road trip focused on enabling artists
in rural areas to experiment with the medium of film. When I caught
up with them, the bus was parked next to an artist's barn near the
Mendocino County town of Albion, population 398.
LAFCO was founded by Tao Ruspoli, who in 1999 was
the sole bidder on an EBay auction for a 1985 Chevrolet Bluebird
school bus. After driving his $3,000 find from Colorado to Los Angeles,
he replaced its seats with custom-built furniture that now houses
video-editing workstations. In the back of the bus, a seating area
doubles as a screening room, complete with a ceiling-mounted video
projector and surround sound audio system. "The idea grew as people
brought their visions to it," said Ruspoli, 25. One of those people
is Alfonso Gordillo, 26, a UCLA film school graduate who helped
found LAFCO and shares in bus-driving duties with Ruspoli and a
third member of the team, photographer Roger Mona Webster.
Eloquent and Euro-handsome, both Ruspoli and Gordillo
are multilingual, and when their trip began, they made ends meet
by working as interpreters for international conference calls. Now
that their travels have taken them to areas that often lack cellular
phone service, they're relying largely on donations and video sales.
They've also received funding and advice from other LAFCO members,
including independent filmmaker Julian Dahl, who serves as a consultant
to the group.
The LAFCO bus got its initial road tests in the
L.A. area, where the team toured local high schools. After longer
jaunts to Tijuana and the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah,
the bus was ready for its current mission, which began at this year's
Burning Man festival in Nevada and ends there next year.
LAFCO describes this trip as a "Cine Circus." The
team rolls into town like traveling troubadours and seeks out local
artists--or is sought out by them. "We want to give artists the
chance to see how their art translates to the medium of film," Gordillo
said. "We end up learning something from everybody we work with."
Artists make most of the creative decisions behind
their films, with guidance and technical assistance from Ruspoli
and Gordillo. When a movie is finished, it's screened--in the bus,
in a barn or, in one case, in a small town's movie theater.
LAFCO's editing workstations are a Power Mac G4
and a Cube. An older G3 system handles scanning and image-editing
duties, and all three systems are networked to one another and an
iBook via Ethernet. Several high-end video decks and four FireWire
hard drives round out the mobile studio. LAFCO shoots footage using
mini-DV-format camcorders and edits using Apple's Final Cut Pro
software, which has become the high-end editing program of choice
in the Macintosh world.
Despite the technical and mechanical challenges
of making movies out of a converted school bus, the LAFCO team feels
a certain liberation in being away from film-crazy Los Angeles.
"In L.A., everybody pulls out a script when the bus pulls up," Gordillo
said.
You can monitor their progress and tour the bus
at http://www.lafilmmakers.org.
The LAFCO bus bears a spray-painted quote from Jean
Cocteau: "Film will only become art when its materials are as inexpensive
as pencil and paper." Said Ruspoli: "We aren't there yet--but it's
within reach."
* Jim Heid is a contributing editor of Macworld
magazine. He can be reached at jim@jimheid.com.
