The script is the thing...

Caption: Nick Baldelli-Boni's translation
of the script from English to Italian.
Note: the only words in English (*, **)
are Nick's attempts to let off a little
steam as I made him do take after take
after take!


The key ingredient that made creating a documentary from the hundreds of hours of video available was a fairly precise script for the majority of the movie. I had a general idea of, not so much the flow of the story, but a dozen or so specific topics I wanted to touch upon. And much like the musical moments in Hi8 1/2 where what we hear during a certain segment informs what we see, the narration would be the glue that binds the disparate imagery together--visuals that were captured on tape from any given school year over the past decade.

It was important to me to remove myself from as much of this movie as possible. Damn near impossible task, one might think, since the doc is about my class and I appear (much to my constant objection) on tape all too often! I soooooo did not want to narrate the documentary, so I noodled around at the edit station with some footage sans a voiceover, but the segments just didn't work. I had to come up with a person with the right voice. And then it hit me! Since a few former students signed on to provide some of their own originally produced music for the documentary, why not make the whole audio experience of Hi8 1/2 totally driven by former students. It didn't take me long to whittle the list of possibilities down to the only former student that had the right sensibility, the only one with the right "panache", the only kid that could...well...speak Italian! Why Italian? Two words: narrative unity. How else should a documentary that steals part of its title from "the maestro's" semi-autobiographical cinematic delight be narrated? Yep. Try it in its native tongue. Bellissimo!