Silver Award at the 19th Annual Tokyo Video Film Festival, February 1997

-->> VHS; running time: 25 minutes

Tracing the lives of five people who lived through the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 5:46 a.m. on January 17, 1995, Kobe, the First Year After is about survival. How is it that some people successfully deal with major disruptions to their lives and others become stressed out? Produced by the award-winning team of Dave McLane and Sueko Tani, the video lets the five people tell their stories directly to the camera, providing a moving viewing experience for those interested in real-live drama. Available from Kay Vreeland, who appears in the video, or from Dave McLane.

Synopsis

This twenty-five minute video traces a year in the post-earthquake lives of five people who survived but were dislocated by the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 5:46 am on January 17th, 1995, and how they dealt with the disruption to their lives.

The introduction is presented as if on TV with images broadcast by NHK on the day of the quake changing to images of each of the main characters: Kay Broderick, Takeshi Nakano, Osamu and Yoshiko Inaoka and Yoshiko Betty Doi. Following the introduction come the stories of each of the five characters superimposed with images of damage from the quake.

Events of spring, summer, and winter are shown as a combination of full-motion/full-color plus still images of the characters. They change from overall monochrome with patches of color in Spring to almost full color in Autumn.

The conclusion starts at 5:46 am on January 17th, 1996 and is full-motion/full-color. It ends with a group photo being taken again inset into the same still picture of a TV set as in the introduction.

Awards

Kobe: The First Year After received a SILVER AWARD at the 19th Annual Tokyo Video Festival. Judges' comments were as follows:

Mr Hiroshi Minami (Hitotsubashi University Honor Professor) said the peoples' endeavors to get over the disaster moved him profoundly, beyond superficial documentation.

Ms Fujiko Nakaya (writer) said the program didn't deal with material loss nor did it criticize national or local governments but rather showed heartwarming encounters and relationships with people in Kobe.

Mr Hakudo Kobayashi (Professor and Dean of Student Affairs Seian University of Art and Design) said the theme of how people got over their sadness and led their lives positively is a message for society and people in the future.

QUESTION & ANSWER

Question: What was the main thing you tried to say in Kobe: The First Year After?

Dave McLane: The main point was an attempt to answer the question posed by Kay Broderick: "What's the secret of the people who are not stressed out?" It was so strange ... one of the people who attends my Tuesday morning group at NHK Bunka Center in Osaka had gone with Sueko and me to help carry water for Kay, who I've known for a long time. We met her in a supermarket on Port Island and went up to her new place (the old one being destroyed) and I shot the part where she asks "What's the secret...". And then we went downstairs and out to the water wagon where the "Three-Times-Man," as I like to call him, suddenly ran up and started talking to me. Actually if you look closely at the part just before that, where Kay is getting water, you can see him in the background, but at the time he seemed to just materialize out of thin air. But I felt very strongly that this really didn't happen only by chance but was some kind of reply to Kay. In any case, Sueko and I watched the tape again and again and thought about it for a long time and thus we were more or less prepared when Betty said, "We're very happy..."

While I don't think Kay's question was fully answered, I would hope that people will get some idea of "one of the mysteries of Japan."

Question: Why did you decide to make this video?

Dave McLane: We didn't really decide in advance to make the movie; we just started with some vague idea to do something and the movie emerged.

The first day it wasn't clear exactly how much damage had happened but the next day when I went over to Osaka and could see the smoke from the fires from the building where I work, it began to sink in. When one of my colleagues made the remark about how Kobe seemed like a foreign country I began to feel very uncomfortable. This discomfort increased when I watched the news on the big TV in the safety and comfort of Umeda station but I didn't really know what to do. A friend of mine rode his motorcycle over to Kobe to see if he could help but reported that they didn't seem to need him so I was left with the vague feeling that I should be doing something but I didn't really know what.

Then Sueko's sister said that she had gone over to help some people and that we really should go as the reality of Kobe was very different from what was being shown on TV. So we bought some food and drinks at Lawson's and went to Ogi station on the Hanshin line and walked around shooting video. It was hard to eat the food we had brought as we felt sick from experiencing the continuous and complete devastation. With the smell of burned-out buildings and the sound of broken glass and concrete under our feet, I had the feeling that I was walking on the bones of the people who had died.

But when we got back and looked at the tape we had shot, the feeling was gone! Comparing the images of our feelings and the images on tape it became clear that what was lacking was the smell and the sound of the broken glass and concrete. There's no way to capture smell on video but we when went to Sannomiya we held the mike next to our feet to made sure we captured the sound. This was better but the sequences were too short and lacked impact. So we decided to go to the most burned-out area we had seen on TV-Nagatacho-and capture some really long, continuous sequences. And it was there that by chance we ran into Nakano who was wandering in the same area taking pictures.

It turned out that I had met Nakano before when I ran a small telecommunication host called Aegis and after re-establishing our connection we taped the story about his friend's mother. We asked if he knew any other people we could tape and over the next few weeks he introduced us to various people, including Osamu and Yoshiko Inaoka at the Symphony cake shop and Betty Doi and we taped their stories.

During this time we had been in contact with Nancy Cain and Judith Binder of CamNet (the CamCorder Network) in Los Angeles who were interested in the "actual life" programs we had been making where people in Japan talked about their daily life in English thereby providing those outside of Japan with more realistic images of life than what is usually shown by the mass media. Nancy and Judith thought Nakano's story was very moving and said they were going to include it in their presentation at the Video Journalism conference in Toronto at the end of March. So we went to the conference where the footage we had shot was well received.

At the conference, we talked with one of the other presenters, Jon Alpert, who seemed to doing the same kind of work we were interested in. While Jon is based in New York, his wife is Japanese and had gone to college with Hakudo Kobayashi, one of the judges of the Tokyo Video Festival, where Jon had won the Grand Prize twice. We were interested in what he had to say as his work was acceptable to both Japanese and non-Japanese audiences. The main point we got from talking with Jon is that it's necessary to follow people over a relatively long time to get material that authentically captures not just the surface of their life but that part which they will only reveal to someone they trust. Thus we decided to keep on going to Kobe and talking with the people who seemed to have the most interesting stories.

We stopped shooting on January 17th, 1996 and started editing in August. That may seem like a long time between shooting and editing but it was very unclear how to present the material. Plus there were huge problems with the tapes which had somehow practically self-destructed and had many unusable sections. We had to work out an effective way to present this sensitive material and we believe the result is worth the wait.

Question: How long did it take then?

Dave McLane: Shooting the original material took place more than a year. We went over to Kobe about a dozen times and shot more than 20 hours of tape. I thought I would be able to edit it in maybe a month, but it took more than 500 hours spread over five months to make the completed 25 minute version. The version for the Tokyo Video Festival had to be limited to 20 minutes and was missing anything shot in the summer and fall. I've just now completed a second 20-minute version which contains condensed version of the spring, summer and fall sections of the 25-minute program.

Question: What kind of equipment did you use?

Dave McLane: We shot mostly on Hi8 (Sony TR2000) except at the end where we used DVC (Digital Video Cassette, Sony DCR-VX1000). Most of the time the camera was hand-held but for moving shots it was mounted on a stabilization system (Cinema Products SteadiCam JR).

The material was digitally edited on a Power Macintosh (8100/100). The tapes were digitized to disk (Targa 2000 digital video card). Hardcopy was scanned to disk (Epson ES-800C). Both kinds of material were combined with movie-making software (Adobe Premier); special effects were accomplished with various software (Adobe Premier, Adobe Photoshop, Metatools Final Effects and Xaos Tools Paint Alchemy). The digitized clips, scanned images and final movie were saved in digital form on backup tape (Exabyte 8205) and the final movie (QuickTime) played to a S-VHS/VHS recorder (Sony SLV-RS7).

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