A Short Documentary About a Giant Pencil

Daniel Straub remembers spotting a video on social media of a crowd gathered around a 20 ft. tall wooden pencil, cheering as someone sharpened it with a chainsaw. He wrote “Giant Pencil” in his phone’s film ideas folder. “I didn’t fully understand the significance of the story yet, but the art and community response felt so unique and special,” Daniel said. A few cold calls and emails later, he and his brother, Cinematographer and Editor Austin Straub, booked flights with SkyMiles and loaded a rented minivan with gear. They were headed to Minneapolis.

The story they found was stranger and more human than the video suggested. A homeowner near Lake of the Isles had lost a massive oak tree in a storm. Rather than haul it away, he and his wife brought in a Minnesota chainsaw sculptor to carve the trunk into a giant pencil. The pencil was never meant to last. Every year, thousands gather for a sharpening ceremony, sacrificing a piece of it and renewing a collective promise to “do something.”

“A Short Documentary About a Giant Pencil” premiered at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, where it won the jury award for Best Documentary Short Film.

Walking In with a Plan, Then Letting Go

Daniel and Austin knew the opening, the closing, and that the climax would be the sharpening itself. Everything in between was a question mark. ”That’s how I like to work in documentary,” Daniel said. “Part of the joy is walking in with a plan but still letting the story reveal itself.”

With a surplus of interview moments and verité footage from the ceremony, the structure came together quickly once they started cutting. One of Austin’s favorite sequences to build was what they call the “ideation volley,” a tightly paced interview scene where homeowners John and Amy recount how they landed on the idea of carving a pencil. They approach the same idea from different angles, finish each other’s sentences, and riff off each other’s energy.

“We decided to keep their faces on screen the whole time and used a series of sound effects as essentially imaginary b-roll as they rattle off potential objects they could have had sculpted,” Austin said. “It’s all set to a wonderful original jazz piece by musician Jesse Meyers. It’s a scene that puts a smile on my face every time I see it.”

Daniel’s favorite edit was less expected: the credits. “It’s all one shot, but we have the credits scroll diagonally up the tilt of the pencil, which is incredibly fun but more complicated than it seemed,” he said. “When we premiered it in Santa Barbara, the person in front of me noticed the slightly diagonal movement and did a hand gesture to the person next to him to tell them about it. It made my year.”

The Value of One Post Package

The Straubs shot the film on an ARRI Alexa 35, pairing it with an ARRI/Zeiss LWZ 15.5-45 and a Cooke 25-250. From the moment the footage landed in DaVinci Resolve Studio, it never left. They edited, graded, mixed sound, and delivered DCPs for festival exhibition all within a single application.

“Knowing that we were going to stay in Resolve end to end allowed us to start working on our color as well as the sound design and mix really early in the process, which made the entire process a lot more enjoyable,” Daniel said.

Daniel has graded every project Austin has shot, and over the past five years, the two have continually refined a PowerGrade node tree for Austin’s look. “One of the banes of my existence as a DP is when footage gets ingested into an NLE with poor color management, especially on a long-form project, where the error won’t be apparent to me for months,” Austin said. “By then everyone is used to the incorrect look, and restoring original intent in the grade can be an uphill battle. What I loved about editing this film in Resolve is that it was correctly color managed from end to end, and we were able to edit in real time with my PowerGrade applied to the entire timeline. The look of the film changed very little from beginning to end because we were setting looks for scenes as we went. Unconventional, but in our workflow, it was a walk in the park.”

Shaping the Image

DaVinci Resolve Studio’s HDR wheels helped the pair handle footage from the Alexa 35 that carried more dynamic range than most displays can show. “They really came in handy for defining exposure zones and creating crisp contrast in the clouds while maintaining a gentler curve on people and faces in the midtones,” Austin said.

The production also ran into wildfire smoke drifting into Minneapolis from the Canadian fires, which threw a heavy magenta cast across the entire shoot. “The entire shoot had pretty terrible spectral pollution from the scattering of light through the haze, but we were able to use the Color Warper to gently squish it out and get everything and everyone looking much more natural,” Austin noted.

Scale is a running theme of the film, so the pair used a small drone for select shots of the sharpening ceremony and applied a tilt shift effect on DaVinci Resolve Studio’s Fusion page. “Color matching the drone to the main camera was super easy with the color space transforms in Resolve to get everything into the same family,” Austin added.

Remote Work and Festival Delivery

Midway through post, Daniel got sick with a festival submission deadline looming. The two normally edit and grade side by side, but this time they fired up DaVinci Resolve Studio’s Remote Monitor feature and kept working with Daniel still in quarantine.

“As independent filmmakers, the ability to create DCPs right inside of Resolve, correctly and accurately translated into XYZ color space from our Rec. 709 grading environment, gives me huge peace of mind when delivering files for exhibition,” Austin said. “I know that all the hard work we put into the look will not be in vain in the final and crucial step of exporting for a theater.”

“A Short Documentary About a Giant Pencil” is currently screening on the festival circuit, including a recent appearance at the Berkshire International Film Festival.

Production Credits

 

CREW
Producers	Daniel Straub, Austin Straub
Director	Daniel Straub
Cinematographer	Austin Straub
Editor	Austin Straub
Colorist	Daniel Straub
GEAR
Camera	ARRI Alexa 35
Primary Lenses	ARRI/Zeiss LWZ 15.5-45, Cooke 25-250
Editorial Software	DaVinci Resolve Studio
Color Software	DaVinci Resolve Studio