Surveillance Film: A New Experimental Feature Film by Matt Barry

 

 

  Since the last update on this blog, production of Surveillance Film has been completed, and post-production is well underway.  The majority of the principal photography took place on Saturday, December 15, in Baltimore, Maryland, when Cullen Gallagher and I recorded our conversation about the relationship between cinema and surveillance. This conversation (shot with the Zoom camera designed for recording music performances) forms the structure of the film, which is interspersed with selected silent film clips and original footage that I shot myself (some with the Google Pixel 5 smartphone camera, others with a $20 camcorder purchased at a bargain outlet store).  The rough cut of the picture edit was completed in January 2025, and the process has now moved on to the final stage of scoring the film and finalizing the sound mix. Cullen is composing and recording an original score for the film, which will accompany the original video and found footage segments. There may ...

      Surveillance Film is a new feature film about an independent filmmaker who has been hired to shoot surveillance footage, which in turn leads him on an investigation into the history of surveillance in cinema.    As with my other recent feature films, I'm taking an improvisational approach with this film, working with an outline of ideas/topics and then developing that as filming unfolds. It's a fiction film structured like a video essay, and the details are found in the process of shooting it. Filming of the main portion of the film begins on December 14, 2024. Some of the B-roll of the "surveillance footage" has already been shot, some of it with a $20 camcorder purchased at a bargain outlet store, allowing me to explore the possibilities that come out of the limitations of consumer/low-grade video equipment. These topics will be explored in the film. The image above is from the Lumiere brothers' film Workers Leaving the Factory , the film that is often ...