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POSTING INDIE FILMS www.postmagazine.com 26 POST SEPTEMBER 2016 and shortly before he was scheduled to screen his pioneering work in New York. So why has no one ever heard of him? Well, that's not strictly true. As a Yorkshire schoolboy, Wilkinson was taught about Le Prince, and historical markers identify sites in Leeds related to the filmmaker. But most motion picture professionals are unfamiliar with Le Prince. For more than 30 years, it's been Wilkinson's passion project to tell Le Prince's story. Largely self-financed at the beginning, Wilkinson knew he couldn't shoot unlimited footage only to have much of it end up on the cutting-room floor. He scripted as much as he could with co-writer/co-producer and re- searcher Irfan Shah, structuring 14 filming blocks that took him from Leeds to multiple locations in France and the US. An actor himself, Wilkinson served as the documentary's on-screen presenter. Forty-two scenes were shot in one take with Wilkinson "learning in the moment" about Le Prince's lost work and disap- pearance. "I purposely didn't want to know from the start where the film would end up," he says. Wilkinson recalls legendary British director's John Schlesinger's claim that "films are only ever made in the edit, no matter how good the writing and acting. I wasn't sure what he meant, but now I really get it!" During production, however, Wilkinson was "dreading the edit. It was my first time as a director. As a producer, I found the edit so dull. I thought it would be this time, but as it turned out, I loved it." He knew from the outset that he had to make The First Film visually engaging for audiences, and that would happen in the edit suite. With only 18 seconds of Le Prince's original film surviving, Wilkinson and his editor would have to deftly weave together Le Prince's biography, the tale of his rivals striving to be the first with a true motion picture, location footage from sites important to Le Prince's story, historical documents and artifacts, and interviews with people with Le Prince expertise — from a Leeds craftsman who makes exquisite recreations of Le Prince's cameras to a Le Prince descendant in Memphis, TN. Wilkinson teamed with editor David Hughes, then on staff with 400 Company in London and the former editor of the original Who Do You Think You Are? They worked together for 14 weeks over a 17-month period as cameraman Don McVey, Hughes and the 400 Company were available. Hughes cut the film on an Avid Media Composer. Student assistant Spencer Burke sug- gested using the time-lapse technique of hyperlapse photography to showcase the beauty of Leeds as The First Film opens. "I knew I wanted time-lapse as a quick way to show Leeds that wasn't a locked off shot," says Wilkinson, a fan of Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi. "I had never heard of hyperlapse, and the cameraman we had couldn't do it. But Spencer said a friend of his was experimenting with it, so we gave him his first professional job." Still, the technique was so new, that "we only knew the hyperlapse really worked in the edit," Wilkinson says. Hughes applied some image stabili- zation to the footage, and Wilkinson asked composer Christopher Barnett for "Philip Glass-like chords" reminiscent of Koyaanisqatsi to accompany the stun- ning shots. Graphic artist David Palser devised the visual treatment for the historical documents, pulling out and highlighting certain lines of text as voiceovers read them. He created a multi-image view of the motion picture pioneers, which plays on Le Prince's early 16-lens camera. He also worked on the film's concluding sequence in which Wilkinson and friends recreate a fragment of Le Prince's film in the suburban cul de sac that was once the site of a country cottage. The sequence morphs between the origi- nal clip and Wilkinson's recreation, and ends with the image flaking into ashes. "David's graphics really lift the film from a low-budget, TV-type production to a rich, cinema experience," Wilkinson says. 400 Company performed the color Filmmaker David Nicholas Wilkinson also narrates The First Film.