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| Kara Blake: The Delian Mode |
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| Filmmaker Interviews | |||
| Written by Dixon Christie | |||
Kara Blake: The Delian Mode
 MyDocumentary.ca: Hi there, this is Dixon Christie from mydocumentary.ca here with Kara from ‘The Delian Mode’, movie, hi how are you?
Good, how are you?
MyDocumentary.ca: Wonderful, thank you; so you’re premiering a movie here at Hotdocs?
It’s a North American premiere here, yes.
MyDocumentary.ca: Must be exciting…
Yes, I’m very excited!
MyDocumentary.ca: Good, so tell us a little bit about your background as a filmmaker, what brings you up to this point in time?
I have been making a number of short films and music videos, and this is my first documentary.
MyDocumentary.ca: So what I said about the bridge between music video and documentaries is pertinent to you...
Yes, that’s kind of been my path, so...
MyDocumentary.ca: What kind of music videos have you been making? What videos would we know from you?
I’ve been doing some work with a lot of Montreal bands: The Besnard Lakes and The World Providers.
MyDocumentary.ca: Tell us about this step from music videos to filmmaking; what brought you in that direction?
This film is about a musician, and so it integrates my interest in music also, and I just became really fascinated with this one particular artist, and decided to make a documentary.
MyDocumentary.ca: And it’s called the Delian Mode. Tell us about it.
Is a short film about the woman Delia Darbyshire; one of the first people doing electronic music in the 1960’s; her most famous piece of work was the Dr. Who theme music, pretty well known TV theme.
MyDocumentary.ca: Theromen work?
No, all created in analogue terms recording pure electronic sounds, and found sounds, then cutting and manipulate them together on magnetic tape, so it was quite a laborious task.
MyDocumentary.ca: The 60’s would have been pre-move-synthesizers, so she’s not even patching sounds together; how is she... The sound generator creates a tone, and so she’d be manipulating that how?
Just by manipulating the frequencies on the actual piece of equipment, but its pretty low-if, I would say. She had to come up with whatever techniques she could to create these unworldly sounds.
MyDocumentary.ca: Where did you meet her?
Well, unfortunately I didn’t get to meet her, she died in 2001, and so this film was created after her death.
MyDocumentary.ca: Where did you get to meet her work, know her work?
A friend played me some of her work she had made for radio, and I was just really kind of captivated me, then I heard she was the one who created the Dr. Who music which really affected me as a child, so yah, I just found it very interesting.
MyDocumentary.ca: Tell us about the step from becoming interested in her music, and deciding to make a documentary about it, and then how did you set forth to do that?
Her music to me really called forth a lot of interesting visuals, I immediately started imagining things that would go with the music. So I thought it would be the perfect subject for a documentary. I just started researching her, I went to the UK; she’s from the UK, so I went there a number of times to interview people who had worked with her, and been inspired by her work, and that’s how it all started.
MyDocumentary.ca: Now when you started to get into the movie, obviously matters like story arc, everything must have been a concern to you; did you know going in what the story arc would be or the climax of the movie would be? Or was that something you were wanting to discover yourself, as you were telling your story?
That’s something that came about in the evolution of the project. I really didn’t know how the story arc would work; I knew certain highlights of her work and things she had done in the course of her life that I wanted to include, but it really started to come together when I was given a telephone conversation of her, and that kind of provided a backbone really great piece of audio.
MyDocumentary.ca: Lucky break.
Yes! What all documentary filmmakers hope to find.
MyDocumentary.ca: How far into the process were you before that presented itself?
I received the interview pretty near the beginning of the project; but it wasn’t until about half way through that I was given permission to use it, so I always had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to use it.
MyDocumentary.ca: So what’s the story about?
The story follows her journey from her early days at the BBC Radio phonic Workshop where she made most of her work, and then in the 1970’s she left the workshop and kind of didn’t make music for 30 years and it wasn’t until the 1990’s that she got back to make music. It kind of follows the history of her life.
MyDocumentary.ca: We like to ask our directors the amount that was shot and what the final cutting time was?
The running length is 25 minutes, and I shot a lot of interview material, but there’s not a lot of that in the film. I wanted to focus on more abstract kind of visuals and things I really felt worked with the music. Not a lot of talking heads, but I did shoot a lot of interview material just to get the information about her.
mydocumentary.ca: Were you influenced by the psychedelic intro of Dr. Who? Is that something that set the visual in your mind for you?
No, I didn’t really do too much psychedelic stuff in the film, but definitely the music set the tone for the visuals; dark kind of mysterious look to it.
MyDocumentary.ca: What did you shoot it on?
Super 16 and HD.
MyDocumentary.ca: Did you deliberately use Super 16 for a certain part of it?
I wanted it to look like an old educational film from around the time that she was really creating her work, so it was kind of why I chose the 16mm.
MyDocumentary.ca: Some would shoot it in HD and then go in and finish it to look like a super 16; did you think about that? Or were you absolutely married to the idea of shooting it and then that’s basically all you got to work with?
Yah, I’m kind of a bit of a film purest, and also I wanted to do a bit of some hand processing, which I did on black and white. So I’d shoot with a Bolex and then process the film myself. That to me was a film equivalent to the way she was working with music, all in analogue terms; channeling her spirit a bit in the creative process.
MyDocumentary.ca: She really just missed the best of electronic music, because by 2001 there were a lot of samples, and samplers and everything, but it wasn’t until 2005 until electronic music really kicked off and people got a way from keyboards and sound modules and went to all samples…so but it still would have been interesting to see the difference between how the analogue being a representation of the very hands on methods that she used in the beginning.
That’s one of the fascinating things I found about her in the beginning was that she was doing very similar work to that you hear today; but without any of those tools. To be able to create a dance track with only analogue equipment is pretty impressive.
MyDocumentary.ca: By today’s standards as well, for sure.
Yes.
MyDocumentary.ca: We like to ask our directors if there is anything unusual or anything special you learned in the telling of the story; anything you didn’t know, maybe about yourself, electronic music, or something particularly profound for you?
Sorry, I can’t think of anything.
MyDocumentary.ca: Nothing really special…
That’s a hard question…
MyDocumentary.ca: Can be. What did you learn about yourself in telling the story?
I learned that I really enjoy the editing process; and for me that’s really where I find really interesting ways to tell the story.
MyDocumentary.ca: We also like to ask about budget; if the filmmaker wants to give details, give some details to empower other directors out there and if you were to come in on budget for the project?
I don’t know if I feel comfortable…in this case the major expense was purchasing the music rights and archival footage; it was all owned by the BBC so that was really expensive. Dr. Who theme music was $200.00 a second and archival footage was about $100.00a second. That really added up fast.
MyDocumentary.ca: Were you like, “can we buy five seconds’?
Yah, well in the film there’s only about seven seconds; it was all I could afford.
MyDocumentary.ca: Where can people learn more about you and the Delian Mode?
Kara Blake www.karablake.com and I will be posting information about future screenings.
- Thank you.
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