NTSC/4:3/TRT 43:05/Color/2003
If I Fall… is an experiment in digital cinema, telling the story of three childhood friends, united after many years apart, who find that their lives have taken remarkably different paths. The movie begins slowly, with a great deal of exposition as the friends catch up with each other, but soon long-buried rifts begin to emerge as they question what makes for a Successful Life. The sometimes painfully intimate, home movie-ish visual aesthetic of digital video provides an appropriately uneasy atmosphere in which the already tense events of the story can unfold.
If I Fall… was shot in one single unbroken forty-minute take by three synchronized roving cameras. There are no temporal edits. The film in effect drops in on its characters for forty real-time minutes of their lives. Working from a rough outline created by the actors and the director, the story was improvised – the cast was given free reign to move anywhere they wished in the real world, without worrying about lighting or editing or blocking. The result is a film with startling senses of intimacy and immediacy, and an emotional unpredictability that heightens the dramatic narrative.
Prof. Morrow’s films are viewable at his Vimeo channel.
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