Na-qoy-qatsi: (nah koy' kahtsee) N. From the Hopi Language. <eachother-kill many-life> 1. A life of killing each other. 2. War as a way of life. 3. (Interpreted) Civilized violence.

A motion picture experience beyond words, NAQOYQATSI merges the power of image and music to plunge into the heart of the hyper-accelerated, globally wired 21st century. Mesmerizing images plucked from everyday reality, then visually altered with state-of-the-art digital techniques, stream across the screen in synch with a hypnotic score by Philip Glass, featuring the passionate cello work of Yo-Yo Ma. Despite the film's nonverbal nature, the ultimate effect of its starkly futuristic, computer-enhanced visual fabric is to get people talking about how technology is altering everything: media, art, entertainment, sports, politics, medicine, warfare, ethics, nature, culture and the very face of the human future.

NAQOYQATSI is presented by Academy Award winner Steven Soderbergh, who was drawn to the film's vision of a brave new globalized world in which the coming battles include humans versus computers, money versus values and life versus its simulation. "Godfrey Reggio has created yet another landmark film," says Soderbergh. "NAQOYQATSI is an explosion of ideas and imagery; a riveting, rigorous, provocative, and breathtaking exploration of how we've allowed technology to infiltrate our everyday lives."

Nearly every image in NAQOYQATSI is a special visual effect. Some 80 percent of the film's footage is culled from stock footage (from such sources as scientific and military films, newsreels, corporate videos, sports documentaries, cartoons, television shows and commercials), most of which has been radically altered with digital technology. Images have been colorized or de-colorized, stretched, slowed or speeded up, re-patterned, re-textured and "re-animated," turning the familiar into something startlingly new. By using the cutting edge in filmmaking technology, NAQOYQATSI provides a dizzying view of today's world as seen through the lens of the very machinery that has created it.

NAQOYQATSI is the third and final feature film in "The Qatsi Trilogy" which began with the groundbreaking "KOYAANISQATSI," a revelatory, kaleidoscopic view of clashing urban and natural landscapes in North America, and continued with "POWAQQATSI," a journey around the world unfolding primal traditions and the influx of new technology. The films have been described as cinematic "head trips" that take audiences into a realm of pure sensory experience. Together, they have also become a rare artistic chronicle of the turbulent transition between the 20th and 21st centuries and its as-yet-unseen consequences. NAQOYQATSI now leaps ahead to capture the essence of globalization as barrier-breaking advances in robotics, quantization and digital communications spread like wildfire across the planet. This final part of the "Qatsi" series presents one man's vision of what we are hurtling towards in a world where technology reigns: unprecedented extremes of promise, spectacle, tragedy and finally, hope.

Like a concert, NAQOYQATSI unfolds in three movements. MOVEMENT ONE explores the newly wired world and the ongoing evolution from human language to numerical code. MOVEMENT TWO delves into the realms of sports, competition and gaming, which have become worldwide addictions. MOVEMENT THREE takes off on a journey into sheer speed and the breakneck acceleration of 21st century life -- pondering what it is like to remember the future and truly experience the present.

NAQOYQATSI is written and directed by Godfrey Reggio, with an original score by Philip Glass featuring cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Jon Kane is the editor and visual designer. The executive producer is Steven Soderbergh and the producers are Lawrence Taub and Joe Beirne. The co-producer is Mel Lawrence, and the director of photography is Russell Lee Fine.

THE MAKING OF NAQOYQATSI

"To the degree that he masters his tools, [man] can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image." --Ivan Illich

With the third film of The Qatsi Trilogy, director Godfrey Reggio turns his attention to the explosive phenomenon of globalization - a world held in unity through the vice of technological homogenization. While his acclaimed films "Koyaanisqatsi" and "Powaaqatsi" revealed the final battles of nature and native cultures, with NAQOYQATSI, Reggio acknowledges that globalization and lightning-paced technological change are remaking the world in their own image and likeness. In a conscious embrace of contradiction, he has chosen to use cutting-edge filmmaking techniques to pose powerful new questions about the global order: what does our ultra high-tech future look like now that it is inevitably approaching? To respond to this question, Reggio offers his viewers the themes of technological happiness, civilized violence with war as ordinary daily living and sanctioned aggression against the forces of life. From the point of view of NAQOYQATSI he stands with Illich in saying that freedom is the ability to say no to technological necessity.

NAQOYQATSI presents Reggio's essential vision of the newly wired world: of human beings on the brink of a shift that will bring us closer to the melding of mind and machine, language and numbers, pleasure and simulacra, meaning and marketing, life and war -- and asks questions about what it will mean for the human experience.

Alternately breathtaking and shocking, digitally "re-animated" images from the hum and roar of modern life - from psychedelic fractals to athletes shattering the limits, from roiling tidal waves to frenetic riots, from primal infant smiles to G-force grins - stream across the screen set to and against the rhythms of Philip Glass's hauntingly melodic score. The result is a sound-and-image adventure that goes somewhere unexpected: into a direct experience of this high-tech moment in history, with all of its potential for both breaking new barriers and accelerating out of control.

"In NAQOYQATSI, technology is not so much something that we use any longer as something that we live, that we breathe like the very oxygen around us, that is transforming us without our awareness," says Reggio. "But what price do we pay for the pursuit of this technological happiness? I see NAQOYQATSI as a film about an event that is unnamable. It is my deep feeling that we no longer have the language to describe the world in which we live. So this film without words is an attempt to re-animate that old adage 'a picture is worth a thousand words.' Only in this case, hundreds upon hundreds of images add up to its meaning."

Adds producer/technologist Joe Beirne who collaborated with Reggio and editor Jon Kane on the film's extreme look: "I feel that NAQOYQATSI reveals how the material of our globalized culture might look to an alien being, to someone with a completely different set of criteria for evaluating it. Godfrey uses the means of our hyper-image-oriented culture to reflect the strangeness and awesome wonder of that culture back to us."

Godfrey Reggio has thought deeply about the nature of image and spectacle in contemporary society. "The image is approaching the point of omnipresence," he says. "It is reality, it is location, it is idea. And now, with digital technology, image has become pure illusion. There are no limits to the images we can create. But images become iconic to culture in that they become so familiar, and so resonant they're not even seen. They have enormous control and power over our lives. What we see without question we become. But there is ample reason to question each image in NAQOYQATSI."

Reggio has also long been concerned about the impact of technology not only upon the environment but also on human happiness, and has researched a wide variety of philosophical and scientific viewpoints on the subject. Among the inspirations for NAQOYQATSI are two seminal books about the future of the technocratic society: Ivan Illich's Tools of Conviviality, in which Illich critiques modern industrial society and suggests rethinking technology on a human scale; and French sociologist Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society, in which Ellul explores how human beings sacrifice their humanity to efficiency, the ultimate law of technology. Both Illich and Ellul express concerns that technology has become our master, rather than the other way around.

But NAQOYQATSI is not about theories. It's about experience. So Reggio asked the question: "If we are so bound up inside this 24-hour, non-stop, all-pervasive technological life, how can we see what it looks like or what its effect is upon us?" To get a better look at things, he began assembling a catalogue of images from everyday reality in our millennial times - images which, removed from their everyday context, become exotic, alien and surprisingly impactful.

For his previous films, Reggio traveled throughout the world, capturing original images. But this time, he decided to picture our world in a different way. Instead of going to locations, he made the decision to "use images as locations," giving stock footage entirely new meanings by manipulating and dissecting them in startling and emotionally provocative ways.

Reggio: "The iconic images of today are images of consumption, of the good life, images that are like wallpaper of the world we live in, images that we see everyday and that blend into the background of life itself. So the idea of this film is to take these iconic images and make them the 'location' for this film. We didn't so much 'shoot' this film, as 'create images' that are re-contextualized from the way you normally see them."

Reggio began by creating a most unusual "script," which was more of an outline of the images he would seek than anything resembling scenic directions and story line. The script provides insight into the themes behind each of the three movements. Briefly stated (in Reggio's words) they are:

MOVEMENT ONE/NUMERICA.COM: Human language, real place gives way to numerical code and virtual reality; metaphor is consumed by metamorphosis; body to disembodiment; natural to supernatural; many to one.

MOVEMENT TWO/CIRCUS MAXIMUS: Competition, winning, records, fame, "fair play" and the love of money are elevated to the prime values of life. Life becomes a game.

MOVEMENT THREE/ROCKETSHIP 20th CENTURY: Electronic acceleration can best be described as 'exit velocity,' an event that blurs all perception, shatters all meaning, drains all content, breaks the bonds to earth, producing a world that our language can no longer describe. The resulting explosive tempo of technology is war, is civilized violence.

Reggio: "My films have no screenplay per se because there are no spoken words in the film. Instead, I write the equivalent of a dramaturgical shaping of the film that serves as the point of view of the project, which serves as a way to get us off the platform. From there, each person involved in the film brings their own creativity to the event."

For Reggio, intense creative collaboration is part and parcel of the style of his films, especially NAQOYQATSI. "This project was predicated on a collaborative mode wherein each person was considered an artistic player," says Reggio. "I brought a feeling, a motivation, a point of view and intention but NAQOYQATSI was way too complex to be realized by just myself. Only collaborative energy could pull it off." * * *

The creative process of NAQOYQATSI began over a decade ago when Godfrey Reggio first began discussing the idea of a third and final "Qatsi" film with his friends and colleagues, including composer Philip Glass, who provided the acclaimed scores for "Koyaanisqatsi" and "Powaqqatsi." For a long time, the project existed only in discussions and in lists of ideas, images and sounds - and these lists and discussions constantly evolved.

Recalls Philip Glass: "For years, I was absorbing the concepts, intuitions and visions that Godfrey had. I wasn't writing, I was just listening. And over time, our idea of the film changed because Godfrey changed, I changed and the whole texture of the world changed."

Meanwhile, through all these changes, bringing the film to life at times seemed a far-off dream. Desperate for the funds to make the film a reality, the filmmakers began seeking what they called "an angel." After the New York Times ran an article about Reggio's quest to make NAQOYQATSI, Academy Award-winning director, writer and producer Steven Soderbergh stepped forward. "Soderbergh said he was astonished that we couldn't find funding for the project. He had one word for us," remembers producer Larry Taub, "and it was start."

Once production began, Reggio brought the entire NAQOYQATSI team, many of them like himself and his long-time producer Lawrence Taub natives of New Mexico, to a small studio in Lower Manhattan where they could be close to Philip Glass and respond to his creative process while providing him with images and research to inform his score. Here, a close-knit team of researchers, animators and technicians, together with editor/visual designer Jon Kane, spent two intensive years searching out and culling images from stock houses and film archives across the world, evolving a distinct vocabulary of digital manipulation while weaving picture with sound.

It was difficult, seemingly endless, sequestered work. Then, in the midst of the process, the September 11th, 2001 attack struck a few blocks from their studio. "I think the events of 9/11 certainly had an impact on this film," says Reggio. "When the crew returned to work, I think everyone was in a deep state of shock, but I found that within one week many people, in particular Jon Kane, ended up totally revved, because now more than ever the importance of the film's subject was crystallized."

To bring a bracingly unfamiliar view of the images that surround us to NAQOYQATSI, Reggio brought on board media technologist and co-producer Joe Beirne, who creating the production's state-of-the-art digital production facility and oversaw the film's extensive array of computer-generated effects and visual manipulations. More than mere eye candy, these experiments with visual effects led to some of Reggio's most emotional, otherworldly and uplifting images.

Producer Joe Beirne estimates that about 20% of NAQOYQATSI is made up of original photography (including much of the prologue). The rest of the images were culled from scientific laboratory and military films, old newsreels, recent news coverage, commercials, television programs and documentaries - then digitally transformed in myriad ways.

Explains Beirne: "We broke down the scope of potential visual transformation of every image into color, contrast, image layering, grain structure and resolution, pattern and texture, aspect ratio, scale, speed and transition dynamics and used a comprehensive battery of these techniques in the film. Most of the images in NAQOYQATSI are presented in a transformed state, but it is the dynamic interaction of images that is most transformed. The fluid character of this transformation was achieved through manipulating the degree of image-upon-image across the screen and over the duration of the shot or sequence of shots. This was often achieved by masking parts of the image and then evolving those masks to change with the internal structure of the image. Editor/visual designer Jon Kane is fluent in this visual language, and it evolved into the basic visual vocabulary of the film."

Even the original footage shot for the film utilized transformational techniques, including an extensive use of slow motion and other techniques such as thermal photography.

Beirne describes NAQOYQATSI this way: "This is a film made of everything except pure motion picture film. Even the portion of 35mm film that was shot for NAQOYQATSI was super high-speed, making it very different from the normal elements you knit a movie out of. I've never worked on a film before where you had 90 minutes of opticals; where the whole movie is a visual effect from beginning to end, but that was Godfrey's challenge to us."

Despite the fact that Reggio massively distrusts technology and feels it is the most misunderstood reality in our world, Beirne found the director had a vast and open-minded curiosity and creativity when it came to experimenting with new techniques. "Sometimes I think you respect your enemies more than your friends, and Godfrey has tremendous respect for technology," explains Beirne. "Godfrey's innocence when it came to how these technologies work might actually have been an advantage, because he has far fewer prejudices about what to expect than someone who is obsessed with technology. For him, this film became a genuinely open experiment, and experiment is not a word I think can be seriously used about filmmaking very often."

It was Beirne who was responsible for finding ways to achieve the look Reggio envisioned for NAQOYATSI. "When Godfrey described this project to me for the first time, he brought with him a stack of cards done in Photoshop that had been distorted and re-colored…altered so as to make them distinct from their original source. He wanted to explore a similar style, of what he called re-animation," explains Beirne, "by which he meant 're-vivify' rather than 'animate again.' It seemed to me that what Godfrey was describing was a kind of false color image of our culture, to give us new tools to evaluate what we see."

One of the biggest technical challenges of making NAQOYQATSI was the sheer volume of information collected - it has been estimated that NAQOYATSI utilized some 3.5 terabytes of information (3500 gigabytes). Explains Joe Beirne: "NAQOYQATSI is unique in that in order to find out what the final product would be we had to preview virtually every possibility in its final form. And then since the film is a mixture of imagery, not only did the individual frame have to be perfected, but the combination of those images had to be taken to a certain level. The practical result of that is that we had an enormous amount of media - and very large files - at play at any given time. What we wound up doing is effectively making 25 different feature films from which we then selected our favorite ten percent. Then we began editing."

From the beginnings of the "Qatsi" trilogy, Godfrey Reggio felt that the images in his films should flow almost like music and share equal weight with an equally emotional musical soundtrack. It was for this reason that he originally approached one of America's best known serious composers: Philip Glass. Glass' rhythmic, hypnotic lyricism seemed to be the musical equivalent of Reggio's visual style.

Although Glass has become an indispensable collaborator in the entire "Qatsi" series, he notes that he originally tried to evade Godfrey Reggio when the two first met in the 1970s. "I didn't consider myself a film composer then," says Glass, "so I avoided him as long as I could, but he wouldn't go away."

Glass could not have predicted then that their first film together, "Koyaanisqatsi," would become one of his most beloved and acclaimed musical works, noted for its vast breadth of instrumental colors, for its broad global influences and for its hauntingly cyclical refrains of chanting, reeds and keyboards. It was the very first film score Glass ever composed, but he went on to compose dozens of acclaimed and award-winning soundtracks afterwards. Now, for NAQOYQATSI, Glass has created a score in an entirely new vein: perhaps his most distinctly melodic and lushly orchestral piece.

Glass and Reggio talked at length about the making of NAQOYQATSI for over at least ten years, discussing the sensory and aural equivalents for the image lists Godfrey was simultaneously preparing. But, when at last Reggio began collecting, editing and re-animating the film's imagery, the music flowed from Glass. "When I finally sat down to write the music, the pieces came very fast, boom, boom, boom, one after the other. It just came out," he says.

Glass knew that this score would be palpably different from his other "Qatsi" scores - because the images were also so startlingly new. "The visual language of this film is radically different from anything else," says Glass. "Working from digital images changes the essence of everything because these are images that don't exist in the real world. The world of NAQOYQATSI had to be created, envisioned and revisioned and that is a big change from 'Koyaanisqatsi' and 'Powaqqatsi.'"

Glass hopes that the score will provide a kind of touchstone for the audience as they make their way into the alien world Reggio creates visually. He continues: "Godfrey and I surmised early on that the best musical complement to the images would be something more in the traditional orchestral vein since the images are so disconnected from the familiar world. The orchestra provides some kind of entrance, like a doorway, into the film. I feared that if the piece were too abstract people wouldn't connect with it. For that reason I went with a very acoustic, symphonic piece that could be played by a real human orchestra."

Glass and Reggio also decided early on to use one instrument, in this case the passionate voice of the cello, to play a single line running through the entire piece. But neither man realized that Glass's soundtrack would become a de facto 21st century cello concerto for Yo-Yo Ma.

Glass wrote the piece before Yo-Yo Ma became involved, but as serendipity would have it, the piece spoke to Ma almost magically. "When I showed the music to Yo-Yo, he said 'oh, you wrote it for me,'" recalls Glass. "And, it really appears that it was. It was one of those strange coincidences where the music really seemed to become his music. We didn't want the cello to become an over-powering presence, but we wanted it to be woven in as a kind of voice and unifying force, and I think that's what Yo-Yo has done."

In addition to using traditional classical instruments, Glass added out-of-this-world touches by melding in such folk instruments as the Australian didgeridoo, noted for its eerie, droning wind sound, and an electronically-created Jew's Harp. In the end, Glass found his music adding a lightness and an accessibility to some of the film's darkest images and themes - and for the film's finale, he composed an exhilarating denouement. Says Glass: "The idea from the beginning, Godfrey said, was to not let things be as dark as they seem. When it came to the ending, my problem, if you can put it that way, was to write something that would step away from the rest of the piece and open up a door we didn't even know was there."

Glass' ecstatic musical climax reflects some of Reggio's most open-ended and provocative image-making to date. In fact, Reggio says that he himself maintains an unexpected optimism about humanity's future -so much so that the final act of NAQOYQATSI is indeed labeled in his script: "Startling Hope." He explains: "To me the hopefulness of NAQOYQATSI is that we had the freedom to make this commentary on what to me, not necessarily to the crew or the audience, is a tragic event: the transition out of our basic human state into what I call the vivid unknown. We find ourselves in an environment of acceleration that is causing complete annihilation of many life forms. Yet, my own life is suffused with hope. I don't see this as a contradictory. I feel that we should embrace things that are contradictory. I don't believe in black and white or good and evil. I believe in this and that."

Ultimately everyone involved with the project agrees that NAQOYQATSI is best experienced rather than described. Sums ups Joe Beirne: "I think as a cinematic experience, NAQOYQATSI is quite unique in that it demands more of the viewer emotionally than retinally. It requires active involvement from the viewer. You aren't being led in a specific direction; the film leaves you at a fork in the road."

Q: NAQOYQATSI offers up images that have been radically altered from their original nature - what was your visual mandate from Godfrey Reggio?
Godfrey's earlier films had managed to show the world as no one had shown it before so the challenge was to continue in that vein. Our task with NAQOYQATSI was to show very familiar images from our high-tech existence - but to show them as no one has ever seen them before. We become explorers - exploring each image with a variety of visual manipulations involving color, speed, aspect ratio, contrast, grain resolution and more. As Godfrey told us when we began: "The image is our location."

I don't think there has been another film in which the digital process was used as freely or as broadly to affect the nature of the picture as it was on NAQOYQATSI. This is a movie that was made almost as a painting is made, in layers.

Q: NAQOYQATSI used some 3 1/2 terabytes of storage space - isn't this unusual for a film of this nature? It's not unusual for the most complex digitally animated films but it's certainly the first time that a film that is essentially a documentary has done anything like this. The reason so much media was necessary has to do with our fluid working method: we essentially needed to "reshoot" the film many times in post-production to assess how the images would best unify in the final product.

We had no "rough-cut." All the images were assembled in their more-or-less fully realized form: effected, filtered, color-corrected, composited and developed into complexly layered sub-sequences. This material was for NAQOYQATSI analogous to what "original photography" is for a conventional feature. Only then did the process of editing the film in the conventional sense begin.

Because the visual and textural character of the evolving material was only evident when working in a reasonably high resolution, we used enormous amounts of disk space. It was not uncommon for us to purge the rendered files of tried-but-discarded events every few weeks and in doing so delete 100 gigabytes of media at the push of a button.

Once the elements had been re-edited, all the spatial, chromatic, temporal, textural and transitional effects were further refined, particularly in response to Philip Glass' music, which itself was evolving in response to the imagery.

Q: What were some of the biggest technical challenges on NAQOYQATSI?
The film was first finished at 30 frames per second (fps) but then was entirely reconstructed at 24 fps for output to film. This was an enormous technical challenge, requiring the use of custom-built software and long weeks of intricate manual adjustment of complex, many-layered sequences. Many low-budget digital cinema projects are converted en masse to 24 fps film for projection, but ours was completely converted in all its component elements: shot by shot, effect by effect, layer by layer.

However, like many technically significant achievements, this one is completely invisible to the layperson. Something that is very visible in the film is the extensive use of slow motion. Godfrey's earlier films made groundbreaking use of variable frame-rate photography, and while those techniques were also used for NAQOYQATSI, we also took footage shot at normal "sound" speed and slowed it down significantly.

This required interpolating new "in-between" frames from the existing frames of the footage. Fortunately, powerful tools have been developed lately for this purpose. We used several of these tools, including a not-then-released version of temporal blending software from Avid called "FluidMotion," which had the advantage of working directly within the interface that we used to cut the film. Some shots were slowed down with FluidMotion to as little as 5% of their original speed, with dramatic and sometimes unexpected results.

Q: Can you talk about your set-up - both in terms of hardware and software -- at the NAQOYQATSI studio?
NAQOYQATSI required very flexible tools and a way of working that combined spontaneity with control. I attempted to address this by creating a highly networked facility that encouraged and enhanced a very elliptical workflow. Specifically, we used Avid Symphony as our primary editing platform. Rather than use stand-alone visual effects workstations, and in order to preserve the organic, content-specific character of the work, we made extensive use of VFX plug-ins, notably Boris RED, within Symphony. Without these the multi-layered look of the film would not be possible.

Most of the work was done with off-the-shelf software: we used Alias Maya for most of the 3D animation, and AfterEffects for compositing and procedural 2D animation. This was all done on ordinary PCs, albeit PCs networked via very fast, multi-layered networks and tied to very fast, shared storage. We did some of our most complex animation and biggest renders on groups of no-name PC's that we bought new for $500 a pop.

We had custom software written for the 30 frame to 24 frame conversions, and also up-converted some PAL and NTSC interlaced video source footage to 24P HD using TeraNex hardware. After 80% of the film was conformed at ITU-R 601 (D1) resolution at 24 fps (progressive) in Symphony, we then conformed the remaining 20% at 1080/24P on Quantel's iQ. Quantel's iQ allows seamless manipulation of 2K data, HDTV and 601 in the same sequence, which was extremely useful. My original intention was to build the entire program at HDTV resolution and then record that HD intermediate to film. What we discovered was that, in many instances, the product of the algorithm that we used to "up-rez" the NTSC images to film resolution was visually indistinguishable from an image that originated at HD or even at film resolution. Some material did need to be handled entirely at film resolution. This footage was either acquired as HDTV tape, was transferred from 35mm to HD or was rendered as original 2K resolution animation, where required.

We had done some image manipulation tests very early in the process, and saw that certain treatments of native low-resolution sources could be made to hold up beautifully on 35mm. Jon Kane and Godfrey used these experiments as a general guide when refining the visual language of the film. Jon also responded to the peculiarities and flaws in the sources to create compensatory or enhancing techniques that developed a life of their own: in the end we wound up "distressing" some very clean footage and then re-enhancing it to allow it to compete with low-quality footage that had itself been enhanced.

Tape House Digital Film used the data captured from our digital intermediate to output to film using an ArriLaser film recorder. David Kuttner from Tape House has written a scaling algorithm for film output that was ideally suited to our process. We also experimented with different print stocks to find one that delivered the greatest fidelity to our intermediate: Fuji High Contrast wound up giving us the best result overall. In general we found that the transformation from a digital master to an optical/chemical transparency gave a specific materiality to the projected image that is very pleasing.

Q: What are some of your favorite sequences in NAQOYQATSI?
Manuel Gaulot built a couple of animated sequences that use complex chains of source-triggered macros to produce "flocks" of swirling, cascading graphic icons. Although this was an elegant technical solution, and his work always interests me very much, I mostly responded to it because I think it is breathtakingly beautiful as used in the movie.

Similarly, I was quite moved when I saw the extreme color effects used on one series of 'natural world' images. This very simple technique that at once charges, unites and abstracts this imagery in a way that I feel is very powerful.

These effects gain their power not so much from what they do as from the context in which they are used: from the mise-en-scene, and from the emotional character of the music and the edit.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE "QATSI" TRILOGY

In 1975, Godfrey Reggio, a man who had spent 14 years as a member of a teaching religious order (the Christian Brothers) and devoted his life to community organization, latched onto an idea for a film that would create an entirely new motion picture style. His idea was to grab images from real life - emotional, raw, honest images - and present them in a non-verbal, non-linear fashion, forging a kind of concert cinema.

Seven years later, Reggio's first film, "Koyaanisqatsi" was released to critical acclaim. The film's Hopi-language title translates roughly as "Life Out of Balance," and this was Reggio's simple but searing theme as the film unveiled a vision of an urban society moving at a frenetic pace, detached from the natural environment and overwhelmed by technology. In images at once stark and beautiful, assaulting and hypnotizing, the film worked as a kind of visual aperitif to conversations that could last for days or weeks.

During filmmaking, Reggio had invited the daring experimental composer Philip Glass to create a score for "Koyaanisqatsi" that was also to have a great influence on the film's reception -- and to spark a continuing collaboration between the two artists. Glass became an integral part of the film's creation, sitting in on editing sessions to help meld his trademark syncopated rhythms and rapid arpeggios to the images seamlessly.

The film won passionate fans around the world, including Francis Ford Coppola, who lent his name to the film as a presenter. In the 1980s, "Koyaanisqatsi" joined "A Clockwork Orange" and "Eraserhead" at the top of rentals on U.S. college campuses. When broadcast on PBS' "Great Performances" it drew the second-highest over-night rating in the history of the series. The film is also part of the permanent collections of 7 international art institutions including The National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, The Museum of Modern Art and the British Film Institute. The artistic influence of Reggio's style has also been seen extensively in music videos, motion picture cinematography and effects and the IMAX film phenomenon.

Fellow filmmaker George Lucas joined Francis Ford Coppola in presenting the second film in the "Qatsi" series: "Powaqqatsi," which translates to "Life in Transformation." For this new film, Reggio chose to go out into the world, into parts of developing nations rarely seen on screen in any format, and capture the impact of technological progress on native cultures. Over six months, he and his crew journeyed to twelve countries, including India, Egypt, Brazil, Peru, Kenya, Nepal and Nigeria, capturing ordinary people at work and play and revealing their complicated relationship with such new additions to their lives as cars and high-rises. The film drew a wide-range of critical and even political responses - attesting to its ability to touch audiences strongly. In Europe, the film received the 1988 Leonardo de Vinci Award for Best Film and Best Musical Score.

Since their initial release, "Koyaanisqatsi" and "Powaqqatsi" have been in theatrical release in over 60 countries, televised and on home video in over 30 countries, invited to over 70 worldwide film festivals and performed live with the Philip Glass Ensemble. The films have been seen by over 35 million people worldwide.

Each of the "Qatsi" films have utilized their own unique style: "Koyaanisqatsi" used time-lapse photography to bend the mind around its images, while "Powaqqatsi" turned to slow motion to focus on the visceral details of native life. With NAQOYQATSI the series again enters new visual territory, delving into images of advanced technology and digital manipulation with what Godfrey Reggio terms a "re-animated look." Unlike the previous two films, NAQOYQATSI features little location work, but instead uses a method described by Godfrey Reggio as "image as location."

ABOUT THE NAQOYQATSI WEB PROJECT

Godrey Reggio always intended for his "Qatsi" series to provoke ongoing debate, discussion and artistic participation. For NAQOYQATSI, he and his team have created a unique online forum where leading artists, designers, innovators and experts are invited to present their own visions of how technology will impact the future.

Located at www.qatsi.org, the forum is intended to use the tools of the Internet creatively and critically to reflect or comment upon technology itself (including the technology of the Internet itself). Projects can involve interactivity, animation, photography, text, sound or other digital media and will focus on such areas as media, politics, sports, weather, religion, warfare, medicine, food and culture.

The site is not intended to directly discuss NAQOYQATSI as a film - rather it is expected to be a dynamic forum presenting original work on the subject of the technological future.

For more information, see www.qatsi.org.

ABOUT THE NAQOYQATSI TEAM

Godfrey Reggio (Director/Producer)
With the "Qatsi" Trilogy, Godfrey Reggio invented his own film style - which puts the emphasis on bringing audiences images of extraordinary emotional impact and thought-provoking relevance. Part essay, part image-and-music extravaganza, the three films chronicle the rapid evolution and astonishing impact of the modern world over the last few decades.

Born in New Orleans in 1940 and raised in southwest Louisiana, Reggio entered the Christian Brothers, a Roman Catholic pontifical order, at age 14 and remained there for 14 years. Based in New Mexico during the sixties, Reggio taught grade school, secondary school and college. In 1963, he co-founded Young Citizens for Action, a community organization project that aided juvenile street gangs. Following this, Reggio co-founded La Clinica de la Gente, a facility that provided medical care to 12,000 community members in Santa Fe, and La Gente, a community organizing project in Northern New Mexico's barrios.

In 1972, Reggio co-founded the Institute for Regional Education in Santa Fe, a non-profit foundation focused on media development, the arts, community organization and research - which was the progenitor for The Qatsi Trilogy. In 1974 and 1975, with funding from the American Civil Liberties Union, Reggio co-organized a multi- media public interest campaign on the invasion of privacy and the use of technology to control behavior. He then began to develop the idea for a nonverbal film formed from a non-stop collage of images from real life.

Thus started Reggio's seven-year odyssey to make "Koyaanisqatsi," which won acclaim around the world. He next traveled to 12 countries making his second film "Powaqqatsi" (1987) which shifted his focus from North America to the more remote corners of the planet.

Reggio followed the second "Qatsi" film with the short film "Anima Mundi," which was commissioned by Bulgari, the Italian jewelry company, for the World Wide Fund for Nature which used the film for its Biological Diversity Program. Accompanied by the music of Philip Glass, the twenty-eight minute "Anima Mundi" is a montage of intimate images of over seventy animal species that celebrates the magnificence and variety of the world's fauna.

In 1993, Reggio was invited to develop a new school of exploration and production in the arts, technology, and mass media being founded by the Benetton Company. Called Fabrica - Future, Presente, it opened in May, 1995, in Treviso, Italy, just outside Venice. While serving as the initial director of the school through 1995, Reggio co-authored the 7 minute film "Evidence," which provides another point of view to observe the subtle but profound effects of modern living on children.

Reggio is a frequent lecturer on philosophy, technology and film. He resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Philip Glass (Music)
Philip Glass has collaborated with Godfrey Reggio on the entire "Qatsi" trilogy, melding hypnotic symphonic scores to Reggio's images.

Born in Baltimore on January 31st, 1937, Glass discovered music in his father's radio repair shop. In addition to servicing radios, Ben Glass carried a line of records and, when certain ones sold poorly, he would take them home and play them for his three children. These happened to be recordings of the great chamber works, and the future composer rapidly became familiar with Beethoven quartets, Schubert sonatas, Shostakovich symphonies and other music then considered "offbeat." It was not until he was in his upper teens did Glass begin to encounter more "standard" classics.

Glass began the violin at six and became serious about music when he took up the flute at eight. But by the time he was 15, he had become frustrated with the limited flute repertory as well as with musical life in post-war Baltimore. During his second year in high school, he applied for admission to the University of Chicago, was accepted and, with his parents' encouragement, moved to Chicago where he supported himself with part-time jobs waiting tables and loading airplanes at airports. He majored in mathematics and philosophy, and in off-hours practiced piano and concentrated on such composers as Ives and Webern.

At 19, Glass graduated from the University of Chicago and, determined to become a composer, moved to New York and the Juilliard School. By then he had abandoned the 12-tone techniques he had been using in Chicago and preferred American composers like Aaron Copland and William Schuman. By the time he was 23, Glass had studied with Vincent Persichetti, Darius Milhaud and William Bergsma. He had rejected serialism and preferred such maverick composers as Harry Partch, Ives, Moondog, Henry Cowell, and Virgil Thomson, but he still had not found his own voice. Still searching, he moved to Paris and had two years of intensive study under Nadia Boulanger.

In Paris, he was hired by a filmmaker to transcribe the Indian music of Ravi Shankar into notation readable by French musicians and, in the process, discovered the techniques of Indian music. Glass promptly renounced his previous music and, after researching music in North Africa, India and the Himalayas, returned to New York and began applying eastern techniques to his own work.

By 1974, he had composed a large collection of new music, much of it for use by the theater company Mabou Mines (Glass was one of the co-founders of that company), and most of it composed for his own performing group, the Philip Glass Ensemble. This period culminated in "Music in 12 Parts," a 4-hour summation of Glass' new music, and reached their apogee in 1976 with Philip Glass / Robert Wilson opera "Einstein on the Beach," the 4 1/2-hour epic now seen as a landmark in 20th century music-theater.

In addition to "Einstein," Glass has collaborated with Robert Wilson on several other projects including: "the CIVIL warS - Act V (Rome Section)" of the multi-composer epic was written for the 1984 Olympic Games; "White Raven," an opera commissioned by Portugal to celebrate its history of discovery and premiered at EXPO '98 in Lisbon; and "Monsters of Grace," a digital 3-D opera.

Glass's very first film score was for Godfrey Reggio's "Koyaanisqatsi," which went on to garner extensive praise, receive live orchestral performances at special screenings and become one of his most popular recordings. His many subsequent critically acclaimed film scores include Peter Weir's "The Truman Show," for which Glass was awarded the Golden Globe for Best Score and Martin Scorsese's "Kundun," which garnered Best Score nominations for the Academy Awards, Golden Globes and Grammys. His other scores include Reggio's "Powaqqatsi," "Mishima," "The Thin Blue Line," "A Brief History of Time," "Candyman" and "Dracula." Glass most recently composed the score for the forthcoming "The Hours" and created a series of live performances of his scores entitled "Philip on Film," a touring show that includes renderings of his scores for "Koyaanisqatsi" and "Powaqqatsi."

Glass's extensive work ranges from operas ("Satyagraha," "Akhnaten," "The Making of the Representative for Planet 8," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Juniper Tree," "Hydrogen Jukebox") to symphonic works ("The Light," "Itaipu," "The Violin Concerto," "Low" Symphony) to string quartets (Nos. 2 - 5) recorded by the Kronos Quartet. He has created music for dance ("A Descent into the Maelstrom" for Molissa Fenley, "In the Upper Room" for Twyla Tharp") and such unclassifiable theater pieces as "The Photographer," "1000 Airplanes on the Roof" and The Mysteries And What's So Funny?." He also composed the dance/theatre work "Orphee," "La Belle et Bete" and "Les Enfants Terrible," a trilogy based on the work of Jean Cocteau.

Glass' most current composing projects include: "Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra" which premiered at Avery Fisher Hall in November 2000; "In the Penal Colony," a musical theater work based on the short story by Franz Kafka, commissioned by A Contemporary Theater, Seattle in 2000; "Voices for Didgeridoo, Organ and Narrator," commissioned by the City of Melbourne Australia; and "Concerto for Cello and Orchestra," commissioned for Julian Lloyd Webber's 50th Birthday premiering at the Beijing Festival in October 2001.

Yo-Yo Ma (Cello)
The many-faceted career of cellist Yo-Yo Ma - and his collaboration with Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass on NAQOYQATSI -- are testament to his continual search for new ways to communicate with audiences, and to his constant desire for artistic growth and renewal. Whether performing a new concerto, revisiting a work from the cello repertoire or exploring musical forms outside the Western tradition, Ma strives to find connections that stimulate the imagination.

Yo-Yo Ma gave his first public recital at age 5 and by the time he was 19 was being compared with such masters as Rostropovich and Casals. He went on to graduate from the Juilliard School and Harvard University. One of the most sought-after cellists of our time, he has appeared with eminent conductors and orchestras in all the music capitals of the world. He has also earned a distinguished international reputation as an ambassador for classical music, music education and their vital role in society and cross-cultural exchange.

Ma's discography of some 50 albums includes fourteen Grammy Award winners. It also demonstrates his wide-ranging interests. In addition to the standard concerto, chamber and solo repertoire, he has recorded many of the works he has commissioned or premiered. Among his most recent recordings is a collection entitled "Classic Yo-Yo Ma," which Sony Classical released internationally in the fall of 2001. In addition to three never-before-released tracks, the disc includes performances of works by Bach, Beethoven, Dvorjak, Gershwin, Paizzolla, Rachmaninoff and three of his favorite contemporary collaborators, Tan Dun, Edgar Meyer and Mark O'Connor. He also recently was featured on Sony Classical's "Heartland," an anthology of new American roots music that features favorite tracks from two of the cellist's recording, "Appalachia Waltz" and "Appalachian Journey."

Ma recently founded and serves as Artistic Director of The Silk Road Project, which is intended to foster cultural exchange by uniting artists from Asia, the Middle East and the West in creative collaborations that illuminate the diverse artists expressions found along that historical trade route. Ma is currently performing with the Silk Road Ensemble and appears on the new CD "Silk Road Journeys: When Strangers Meet," on which he plays the "morin khuur," a Mongolian horsehead fiddle.

In 2000, Ma joined with composer Tan Dun to collaborate on the Oscar-winning original score for Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," and his solos were also heard in the film's Oscar-nominated end-title song "A Love Before Time." Ma previously collaborated with Tan Dun on the Sony Classical recording of the composer's "Symphony 1997 (Heaven Earth Mankind)," a large choral-orchestral work commemorating the return of Hong Kong to China.

Other recent releases include "Simply Baroque II," a collection of Bach transcriptions and Boccherini concertos and the sequel to the best-selling "Simply Baroque" on which he plays his own Stradivarius reconfigured as a Baroque instrument; the Grammy-winning "Appalachian Journey" featuring traditional and original music written by Edgar Meyer and Mark O'Connor and featuring such guests as singer/songwriter James Taylor and violinist Allison Krauss; and a disc of Dvorjak chamber music with the late Isaac Stern, Jaime Laredo and Emanuel Ax, the sixth and last recording by this acclaimed quartet.

Yo-Yo Ma's most recent solo recording, "Solo," (1999), was his first to explore the musical folk traditions of the Silk Road regions. In 1988, Ma released "Inspired by Bach," a unique multimedia collaboration with artists from six different disciplines. In addition to the soundtrack recording, with Ma's new interpretation of the six solo cello suites of J.S. Bach, the release also includes six short films capturing the cellist's creative encounters with garden designer Julie Moir Messervy, choreographer Mark Morris, Kabuki actor Tamasaburo Bando, filmmaker Atom Egoyan, the 18th century architect Piranes and ice dancers Christopher Dean and Jayne Torvill. The films have won numerous honors, including 2 Emmy Awards and 16 Canadian Genie nominations. That same year saw the release of Ma's performance of John Tavener's celebrated work for cello and orchestra, "The Protecting Veil," and the continued success of "Appalachia Waltz."

Two of Ma's recordings of the 1990s - "Hush" with vocalist Bobby McFerrin and the soundtrack to "Immortal Beloved" - have been certified gold records by the Recording Industry Association of America.

In 1997, Ma was named Artist of the Year in the Gramaphone Awards, which capped off a year that included many achievements, including the release of "Soul of the Tango," which won a Grammy Award for Best Classical Crossover Album; a trio of new cello concertos by Richard Danielpour, Leon Kirchner and Chrisopher Rouse; Tan Dun's "Symphony 1997"; the string quintets of Schubert and Boccherini; the music of Andre Previn, recorded with the composer and soprano Sylvia McNair; and the soundtrack recording of "Liberty!," a PBS documentary about the American Revolution.

Yo-Yo Ma continually works to expand the cello repertoire through performances of lesser-known music of the 20th century and the commissioning of new concertos and recital pieces. He has premiered works by a diverse group of composers, among them Stephen Albert, Chen Qigang, Richard Danielpour, John Harbison, Leon Kirchner, Peter Lieberson, Christopher Rouse, Bright Sheng, Tan Dun, John Williams and Elliot Carter. In many instances, he has not only had new pieces written for him, but has also played an active role in their composition.

Ma plays two instruments: a 1733 Montagnana cello from Venice and the 1712 Davidoff Stradivarius.

Jon Kane (Editor/Visual Designer)
Jon Kane brings together all of his skills and interests - including in editing, shooting, design and music - in his feature film debut as an editor/visual designer in NAQOYQATSI.

Jon Kane began college as a pre-law student but two fortuitous events, happening in the same week, lead him to a career in film. One was seeing "Koyaanisqatsi" at the Alfred University Theater; the other was witnessing the seminal DJ Red Alert spin records at the Roxy in Manhattan.

His career as a club DJ began immediately. Video editing came next for the purpose of creating home made music videos for the club where he worked. After graduating his cut and scratch editing style lead him directly to MTV, which at that time was just beginning to invent its style. Soon after, in the late eighties, when big advertisers wanted their commercials to look like MTV, Kane was recruited into the advertising business. He has been directing commercials, as well as documentary films and music videos, ever since. He has created ads for virtually every major ad agency in America and his company opticnerve™ is considered a forerunner in the business.

Steven Soderbergh (Executive Producer)
To date, Steven Soderbergh is the only director to have two films nominated for Best Picture and Best Director in the same year: "Traffic" and "Erin Brockovich." His Academy Award for Best Director of "Traffic" marked the first time since the 1928-29 Awards that a director has successfully competed against himself. Including Soderbergh's nominations, "Traffic" and "Erin Brockovich" each received five Oscar nominations and took home a total of five awards. Since then, Soderbergh made his eleventh film, the high-energy caper "Ocean's Eleven." Next up is the contemporary comedy "Full Frontal," starring David Duchovny, Nicky Katt, Catherine Keener, Mary McCormack, David Hyde-Pierce, Julia Roberts and Blair Underwood.

Soderbergh began making films at age 13 and as an adult, continued making short films and writing screenplays. After shooting a documentary profiling the rock group Yes, Soderbergh was asked to direct a full-length concert film for the band. The result was 9012LIVE, which received a Grammy nomination in 1986.

Two years later, Soderbergh completed the script for "sex, lies, and videotape." Shooting commenced in Baton Rouge in the summer of 1988 with James Spader, Andie MacDowell, Peter Gallagher and Laura San Giacomo. The film premiered at the Sundance film festival in January 1989 and four months later won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

This was followed by "Kafka," a black-and-white mystery-suspense film combining elements of Franz Kafka's life, letters and fiction, starring Jeremy Irons; and "King of the Hill," a Great Depression drama based on the memoirs of A.E. Hotchner. In 1995, Soderbergh reunited with Peter Gallagher for ""The Underneath," a dark tale of obsession and betrayal set in present-day Austin, Texas. He then turned to offbeat comedy with the experimental "Schizopolis" and "Gray's Anatomy," the filmed version of Spalding Gray's acclaimed monologue.

In 1998, Soderbergh's sexy crime caper, "Out of Sight," starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez was released to great critical acclaim. The National Society of Film Critics honored the film with its top three awards: Best Director, Best Picture and Best Screenplay while the Boston Society of Film Critics gave the film it's Best Picture and Best Screenplay Awards. In addition, the film received Academy Award nominations. 1999 saw the release of "The Limey," an action-drama starring Terrence Stamp, Peter Fonda and Lesley Ann Warren, which earned five Independent Spirit Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Director.

As a producer, Soderbergh's credits include Greg Mottola's "The Daytrippers" (1997) and Gary Ross' "Pleasantville" (1998). As well, he served as the executive producer on David Siegel and Scott McGehee's "Suture" (1994).

In 2000, Soderbergh and George Clooney formed Section Eight, a film production company based at Warner Bros. Soderbergh and Clooney executive produced the recent "Insomnia," directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hilary Swank. Forthcoming is "Welcome to Collinwood," written and directed by brothers Anthony and Joe Russo; "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," directed by George Clooney, who stars along with Sam Rockwell, Drew Barrymore and Julia Roberts; and "Far From Heaven," written and directed by Todd Haynes.

Lawrence Taub (Producer)
NAQOYQATSI marks Lawrence Taub's fifth collaboration with director Godfrey Reggio, following "Koyaanisqatsi," "Powaqqatsi," "Anima Mundi" and "Evidence."

Born in New York in 1948, Taub moved to New Mexico in 1974. His association with Reggio dates back to 1976 with financial structuring and legal affairs for the Institute for Regional Education (IRE). He continued his involvement as a producer on "Koyaanisqatsi" and "Powaqqatsi" with managing the business and legal demands of the intricate twelve-country shoot. Presently, Taub continues to serve as the general counsel and administrative director of IRE.

Taub is licensed as an attorney and certified public accountant in the states of New York and New Mexico. In addition to his duties for the IRE, Taub is actively engaged in his Santa Fe based law practice, specializing in the taxation of nonprofit organizations, the arts and entertainment law. He and his wife Laurel have two grown children, one of whom, Sam, has a credit for working on Naqoyqatsi.

Joe Beirne (Producer)
Joe Beirne is a producer and technology advisor for film and television post-production. His clients have ranged from visual-effects pioneer Zbigniew Rybczynski to the rock band Talking Heads to PBS's award-winning documentary series, FRONTLINE. Beirne has made a particular specialty of taking on projects that are completed about two years before the necessary technology is actually finished. He is currently working on a feature-length documentary for filmmaker Errol Morris.

A native of New York City, Beirne was educated at New York's Cooper Union and lives in Manhattan with his wife Catherine K. Tice and their son, Gus. He is an active member of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM/SIGGRAPH).

Mel Lawrence (Co-producer)
After twenty years in the music business as a concert producer, festival producer and director of musical events such as the legendary Monterey and Woodstock festivals, Lawrence was a producer on Godfrey Reggio's "Koyaanisqatsi" and "Powaqqatsi." He directed the distribution and promotion of these films throughout the world.

Lawrence has also produced film projects from Brazil's Amazon to Kathmandu in Nepal and directed and produced an Emmy nominated documentary for HBO on the Lakota Sioux and their struggle to regain the sacred Black Hills of South Dakota.

Kurt Munkacsi (Music and Soundtrack Producer)
A long-time associate of Philip Glass, Kurt Munkacsi is president of Euphorbia Productions, which owns the Looking Glass studios where Philip Glass records his music. Munkacsi has produced all of Philip Glass's recordings since the beginnings of his career. He has also designed the sophisticated sound systems used for such Glass theatrical works as "Einstein on the Beach," "Koyaanisqatsi," "La Belle et La Bete" and "Monsters of Grace."

Munkacsi has also produced all of Glass's soundtracks, including those for "Koyaanisqatsi" and "Powaqqatsi" and in so doing has worked with directors including Martin Scorsese, Peter Weir, Errol Morris and Paul Schrader. He and Glass also created the record label Point Music in a joint venture with Polygram International. Their score for Scorsese's "Kundun" received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations and won the L.A. Film Critics Award for Best Score and their score for Weir's "The Truman Show" won a Golden Globe.

Munkacsi has also worked with many other artists, including Diamanda Galas, Brian Eno, David Bowie, The Waitresses and Gavin Bryars.

Michael Riesman (Conductor)
A composer, conductor, keyboardist, engineer and all-around studio guru, Michael Riesman has had a long-lived collaborative relationship with Philip Glass. When Glass received his Golden Globe Award for "The Truman Show" score, he publicly proclaimed Riesman "a genius."

Riesman has conducted all of Glass's film scores, starting with "Koyaanisqatsi" and including the award-winning score for Martin Scorsese's "Kundun." His work with Glass also includes conducting, engineering and production credits for "Einstein on the Beach," "Songs from Liquid Days" and "La Belle et La Bete."

In addition to his association with Philip Glass, Riesman has worked with such artists as David Bowie, Paul Simon, Ray Manzarek, Gavin Bryars and Uakti. His own compositions include film scores, ballets, theater music and concert works. He also released his own album entitled "Formal Abandon."

Russell Lee Fine (Director of Cinematography)
Russell Lee Fine has worked extensively in independent cinema and his work will next be seen in Ed Burns' "Ash Wednesday" starring Burns, Elijah Wood, Oliver Platt and Rosario Dawson. In addition to lensing Tim Blake Nelson's "The Grey Zone," "O" and "Eye of God," he has worked with Cindy Sherman on "Office Killer," Bruce Wagner on "Women in Film" Tony Gerber on "Side Streets," Jim McKay on "Girl's Town" (winner of the Audience Award and Special Filmmaker's Trophy at Sundance) and Richard Schenkman on "Pompatus of Love."

Russell Lee Fine's work has also been seen on the VH-1 concert series "Storytellers" with Elvis Costello, Lyle Lovett, James Taylor and Garth Brooks, among others.