Could there be a sortof combination of the two, if we wanted? Where if we decided to make this sort of movie about a movie thing, we'd have the doc footage of them talking about the film, but when we cut into the "storytelling," it would be super structured and narrative. Like a condensed, followable version of what we shot/what we could shoot. In this way, Manuel could still structure the story into a 4 day act or something, but it would beway shorter/tighter since we'd have a lot of air time of the doc discussing the goings on to make the movie. But i think for the audience it would be more interesting for them to still be watching a narrative film that we made instead of just sortof abtract poetic bits.

What if we filmed the doc bits in 16mm? I guess that wouldn't leave much room for error.

I'm also just wondering what kind of potency their stories are going to have. What if we had the documentary portion focus less on the villagers talking about how Big Hug has changed their lives, but rather just another format we, as the filmmakers, are using to inspect this weird community. And then we will have this nice footage of them in their real lives, doing the things they do, which we could stylize, if we even want to, and contrast that with this cheesy/overdone short story we are trying to convey in Big Hug, with Manuel still providing songs as breakers.

i'm not sure, i'm going to think on it, and start making an edit. Can you send me your edit ? I have finalcut 6.0, so not the newest version.

itd be a doc/musical/epic short wound up.

I had a long talk last night with my two friends about festivals and what not, and they've gotten work into venice and sundance and sxsw, but they were saying that 60 minutes is the new minumum for feature length films, that its pretty acceptable, which i couldnt believe. Thats even shorter than a disney movie!