Category Archives: Power Trip

Hanging out with Eli Roth

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Post by Paul Devlin:

Film Festivals are the great payoff for many filmmakers. You’ve worked hard for years, and now you’re being flown around the world to great places to show your movie to appreciative audiences, who venerate your role as artist. It’s addicting. When the festivals slow down, you want to make another film again just so you can go back out on the road.

My movie Power Trip played at dozens of film festivals and I tried to attend as many as possible. At the San Francisco Film Festival, I spent much more time than expected because the SARS scare in Toronto cancelled my trip to the Hot Docs Film Festival (Power Trip won the Grand Jury Prize there – whoops). So I had time in San Francisco to meet some talented, exceptional people, another great benefit of Film Festivals.

Eli Roth (Hostel, Inglourious Basterds) was touring with his first film Cabin Fever, and we had a chance to hang out.

The San Francisco Film Festival starts this Thursday, April 25th, and will last through May 9th.  Make sure to check out some of the amazing films if you’re in the area!

Power Trip DVD
Power Trip Trailer

Dox Magazine: 4:3 to 16:9 Transition

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4:3 to 16:9 Transition

Paul wrote this article for DOX Magazine during the Power Trip era.  Check it out for some interesting information on the 4:3 to 16:9 conversion.  After all, you still come across 4:3 content stretched to fit a 16:9 screen, even now.  How do we make it all look good?

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“Versioning” has become an inevitable burden for non-fiction filmmakers as they adapt their work to fit various television time-slots in an effort to squeeze every drop of revenue from a project.

My film Power Trip now has four different length versions with another in progress, and I am approaching twenty distinct Masters, with iterations for NTSC, PAL, Texted and Textless. Tape stock expenses alone are burdensome.

Now comes a new dimension to versioning as TV transitions from the traditional 4:3 aspect ratio to 16:9 – finally catching up to cinema, which went wide-screen decades ago, reacting to the perceived threat when television was new. There seems to be little consensus across borders about the best way to make this transition, so the process has become bewildering.

In Europe I’ve seen 16:9 TV’s stretching out 4:3 sports broadcasts, making the athletes look ridiculously fat. Channel surfing on a sophisticated wide-screen TV produces a startling variety of shape contortions to fit the screen size. Broadcasts in 4:3 from the US, such as MTV, suffer most, blown up and cropped on top and bottom to fit 16:9…CONTINUE READING HERE!

Power Trip – Zaal’s Winemaking Tour

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Posted by Paul Devlin:

Zaal Kikodze was a wonderfully colorful and popular character in my movie Power Trip, as is clear from this excerpt at his farm in the hills near Tbilisi, Georgia. He was also a scholar, a professor of archaeology and an accomplished mountain climber. I was happy to be his friend and enjoyed his company whether it be on the jeep adventure we took in the mountains of northern Georgia near Chechnya with journalists Wendell Steavenson and Lika Basiliai or just sipping vodka in his warm and friendly apartment in central Tbilisi.

In July of 2005 Zaal Kikodze and a climbing companion were caught in a storm high up on the difficult Ushba cliffs in the Georgian Caucasus where they lost their lives.

Zaal has been dearly missed by the friends he made all across the world.

Power Trip DVD
Power Trip Trailer

Georgia’s President Concedes Defeat in Parliamentary Election

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Posted by Valeri Odikadze:

(Valeri Odikadze is the Georgian co-producer of Power Trip.)

These elections were the most important in my life.  Bidzina Ivanishvili seems like a good choice to lead our country and I am really glad the Georgian Dream coalition won the election.  After all, almost all of Georgia wanted change.

For the last 4-5 years Mikheil Saakashvili lead Georgia in the wrong direction.  There were too many problems with free media, human rights, free law, and a huge high level elite corruption and business monopoly.  There wasn’t any economic growth.  Ivanishvili promises a lot and Saakashvili is now in opposition. Saakashvili will try to come back in several years or even earlier and the USA and Europe consider him a very democratic President.

Last year I worked for Ivanishvili ever since he started his party.  I filmed all his pre-election actions and provided a live TV signal for his campaign.  I also had several ongoing contracts with TV9 and I provided them with consulting services and video production equipment & cameras since the government had damaged his equipment at customs.  Many people were afraid to work with him under the pressure of the KGB police revenue service.

At the beginning of last summer the Revenue Service started an urgent 2-phase audit of my company, Videoscope, as a result of my cooperation with Ivanishvili and the Georgian Dream coalition. They initially fined Videoscope a penalty of GEL 120,000, rougly $72,154 USD – a huge and unjustified sum of money for my small company that nearly bankrupted us.  The fine was over allegedly unpaid taxes, but my company had paid several thousand GEL in advance tax payments so far.  The 2nd audit was concluded in August 2012 and I am still waiting for the results.

But I continued working with Ivanishvili and hope that I will someday get this money back. Even more importantly, I hope that Georgia will become a better country under the leadership of this fantastic new team!

Read some details about the election here!

 

 

Power Trip – War In Abkhazia

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Posted by Paul Devlin:

While I was shooting Power Trip in Tbilisi, I kept hearing about a war that nobody seemed to know of outside Georgia. The territory of Abkhazia had split away from Georgia and many young Georgian men headed north in a fever of patriotism to take it back. Unfortunately, these ragtag militia were mismatched against far superior Russian-backed forces. The result was massive casualties and many horror stories for the Georgians.

One of the characters in Power Trip, Datto Tabidze experienced this conflict first hand. As can be seen from this piece, the trauma was too much for him to talk about. Now of course, a more recent, much higher profile conflict over Abkhazia between Georgia and Russia has brought this issue into worldwide consciousness.

Datto was a compelling character. In addition to working for AES-Telasi, he was an entrepreneur. On the side of a hill above Tbilisi, the rock had been hollowed out as a passageway between two park areas. Datto had developed a huge project to convert part of this cave area into a giant dance club. Unfortunately, some unsavory characters wanted a piece of the project and Datto refused to pay the extortion. On camera, he showed me the scars from the bullet that went through his knee and out the back of his calf.

The project was never completed and the segment did not make the final film.

Power Trip DVD
Power Trip Trailer

Power Trip Extra – “Paraskiing Music Video”

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Posted by Paul Devlin:

This is a fun, extended scene that was cut out in the final version of Power Trip.

One of the fringe benefits of going through the struggle of living and working in a developing country, is that you also have opportunities you could never get away with in developed countries.

Everything is cheaper and less regulated. Piers would have never been able to build his own chalet in a ski resort in the States. Paraskiing straight off the mountain would be a nonstarter and helicopter skiing would be prohibitively expensive, if it were allowed. But for an expatriot in the Republic of Georgia, all this is possible.

Not that regulations are bad. I had no intention of going Paraskiing myself – looked way too dangerous. But then I realized I needed to get the POV shot to make the scene complete, shrugged my shoulders and almost got killed when my guide bungled the takeoff.

The version of this scene in Power Trip generated criticism at some festival screenings: “How could Piers and his colleagues be enjoying themselves when they’ve created so much suffering for the people of Tbilisi. Shame on them!” Fair enough – I’m documenting, not defending. On the other hand, I suppose you could make that argument against any fun, any time, anywhere, when people are suffering elsewhere in the world.

So enjoy this little adventure – but not too much.

Power Trip DVD
Power Trip Trailer