Baird’s Beaked Whale
Douglas Schultz, yr, format, 10’, San Francisco
I had recently moved to the Outer Sunset in San Francisco and I came upon all these news vans parked along the Great Highway. At the time it looked like there was an overturned boat about a quarter mile off shore, but as it got closer to shore it became evident that it was a whale of some sort. So over the course of three days I returned many times to film the changes going on. This film is a documentation of a dead whale, a rare Baird's Beaked Whale, and how the community responded to its unique and odiferous presence.
I received an MFA in Sculpture from SF State in '92 and started making films as a result of super 8 parties friends and I started having around 1998 a la Steve Parr. A major influence on my filmmaking activities was the fact that CALA supermarkets developed rolls of Kodachrome for $3.99. Now that Kodak stopped making Kodachrome 40 I principally work in mini dv's, but I liked the preciousness of the footage with super 8 and the hands on quality of working with it. We started an Exquisite Corpse film project in 2001 and produced more than 30 films between 2001 and 2004 with some exciting results. I continue to make film shorts, many of which are surf films, and 'experimental' films using found footage. I've shown regularly at the Zeitgeist Film Festival.