The Unspoken Speech Project
Two films for The Unspoken Speech Project, made by the Dallas agency Resident Alien with Ultralite Films for the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy's death. Dallas citizens deliver, word by word, the speech he was due to give at the Trade Mart on November 22, 1963. I was chief editor on Words Alone, which won Best of Show for Broadcast at the 2014 American Advertising Awards, and director of photography on Dissident Voices, which won Silver.
The brief
On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was on his way to speak at the Dallas Trade Mart. He never gave the speech. Fifty years later, Cliff Simms and Peter Wood of the Dallas agency Resident Alien set out to have the citizens of Dallas deliver it for him, one word at a time, through photography and video. Ultralite Films, the company I co-founded in Dallas in 2012, made films for the project with them.
Words Alone: chief editor
Words Alone is the first film of the project. Dallas residents each hold a single word of the speech on a card, in their kitchens, offices, churches, and streets, and the words add up to Kennedy's sentences.
I was chief editor. The film has no narrator and no dialogue, so the edit carries the speech: each cut has to land on the next word, at the pace of a sentence being read aloud. Some words get a single portrait. Others build across split screens and grids, where one word repeats down a wall of faces before the line moves on.
Dissident Voices: director of photography
Dissident Voices started as a 68-page book of words taken from the speech, photographed by students at Texas Woman's University and three guest photographers. We filmed the whole book at the Union Cafe in Dallas, inviting customers to turn the pages so the words played out in sequence. I shot it.
The recognition
At the 2014 American Advertising Awards, Words Alone won Best of Show for Broadcast and Gold for Public Service Audio/Visual, with me credited as chief editor. Dissident Voices won Silver in the same Public Service category, with me credited as director of photography.
The same awards show credited me on six wins across four films: two Gold, two Silver, and a Special Judges' Award.
Why I include it
It is the oldest project linked from my Dallas cinematographer page, and it is a Dallas film in the plainest sense: the people of the city where the speech was meant to be given, finishing it fifty years later.