Glenn Kulka Documentary Journal

Time beats all.

First, I must apologize because I have been neglecting the blog.  But with good reason I promise… check out the trailer for the documentary on YouTube under “Glenn Kulka Documentary Trailer”.  That’s what we’ve been doing.

I’ve been going through a lot of firsts on this project and one of those firsts is having to figure out how to store and view my footage when all I own is an outdated laptop.  I found some rugged compact hard drives and managed to borrow a computer with Final Cut on it, not that I knew how to use Final Cut but at least I could view my footage… saved my bacon.

I had a deadline to cut the trailer… 10 days.  In that time I had to review 55 hours of footage, write the assembly script and deliver it to my editor Kyle Summers in time for him to put it together for our producer Mike Grudman to take to the Cannes Film Market.  Needless to say we were a bit rushed.

At first, the footage I was reviewing didn’t seem familiar to me, I wondered who shot it and how it ended up on my hard drives.  Then, key interviews started to come up, moments with Glenn that trancended what I thought was possible on this shoot… and the memories came flooding back.

I remembered every image I wanted to show, every word I wanted to hear.  I transcribed the words, images and timecode cues on Final Draft and ended up with a rough script of just over 60 pages.  Over the next few days I distilled those 60 pages down to a dozen clips and 30 cutaways that I thought Kyle and I could use for building rhythm.  It worked out to 5 pages of script that would boil down to just under 3 minutes cut together.  I gave it to Kyle.

Through that whole process, I kept flashing back to conversations I had with a guy named Nuno Fonseca in Toronto.  Nuno is a personal trainer from Xtreme Couture.  I met him the first day I came to film there.

We got to talking.

We got to talking about quality people.

Time and competition both have a way of bringing out the true nature of people, revealing their quality.  Time is a sculptor, carving out a person like waters cuts a valley.  Competition, particularly at the intense level that combat sports delivers, hews more like a wrecking ball.

When Nuno told me a little bit about his life, I realized that, though his story is unique, it mirrors the experience of a vast majority of the men and women who seek out combat sports.  It was a story of survival, a story of pain, a story dominated by the wrecking ball, and seldom soothed by water.

Both Nuno and Glenn have come through their experiences as quality human beings, who recognize quality in others, but such is not always the case.  Too many souls are crushed long before they even have a choice to climb into a ring or not.

There are a thousand tragedies I could have filmed, but they wouldn’t inspire… and these days, I think we could all use a little inspiration.

The day I went over to Kyle’s to see his assembly of the trailer, I knew I had made the right choice.