Niagara Falls: the View from the Parking Lot (30 sec. 2001) Shot, directed, edited by Lester Alfonso. Super8 film photography with two unlikely interviews.
9/360
Day 9 of 360 videos from my archive. This one is from the time I was given a bit of a budget from a friend of a friend who worked at Travel Channel to make a couple of thirty-second ads for places (anywhere around the world) mixing super8 film, video, interviews.
It was probably even a momentary dream to work for Lonely Planet scootering around the globe with cameras in tow. They offered me the chance to show them what I got.
I made one for Plateau Montréal and this one for Niagara Falls, where I interviewed parking lot attendants and photographed tourists taking pictures. I was interested in the way people obsessively took pictures to preserve their memories of places. It was a pitch. Unfortunately, Travel Channel didn’t like it so I didn’t get to make any money but I ended up using parts of it for my film Trying to Be Some Kind of Hero.
I produced the music with talented musician Tammy Foreman to emulate one of the John Zorn thirty-second pieces he made for the Wieden & Kennedy advertising agency in the 1990s.