Short doc started with one frame of video
Controversial police shooting in South Carolina given a closer look in Frame 394
When Daniel Voshart first saw the shaky cellphone video of a white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., shooting a black man in the back five times, he couldn’t look away.
Waves of disgust washed over him as Walter Scott fell to the ground and as, moments later, officer Michael Slager crept over and appeared to drop and then retrieve what looked like a Taser next to Scott’s body.
Hundreds of kilometres away, in his Toronto apartment, Voshart, a then 28-year-old cinematographer who had recently been toying with video stabilization, thought he could unravel the mystery of the Taser and help get Slager indicted.
Within an hour, he had stabilized that portion of the clip and posted a gif that he says nabbed the most comments on Reddit.
But within weeks, he had discovered something else in the clip’s 394th frame that had him cancelling his plans, consulting ballistics experts and reaching out to the FBI.
It threatened to upend Slager’s trial and has become a key part of Frame 394 — a short documentary following Voshart’s insatiable quest for the truth, which is up for a prize this weekend at the Canadian Screen Awards.
The idea for the 30-minute documentary, which screens free on CBC’s website, came after Voshart called his friend, filmmaker Rich Williamson, to his apartment in April 2015.
By then, Voshart had made the footage so clear that as Slager reached to unholster his gun, Scott could be seen holding what looked like Slager’s Taser — potentially enough to make Slager fear for his life and maybe meet the grounds needed to use lethal force.
Voshart’s discovery was, perhaps, the proof Slager needed to fight the life sentence he could get if found guilty.
“I wasn’t quite sure if I was losing it,” Voshart said. “There were hundreds of thousands of views on the footage online and I assumed people would have noticed the Taser by then.”
In a state of disbelief, he reached out to Williamson, with whom he had studied film at Ryerson University.
“I want you to tell me if I am having my Beautiful Mind moment,” Williamson recalled Voshart asking, implying he was worried he might have become too invested in the project.
Williamson didn’t think so. Something about the video and Voshart’s dedication intrigued him.
“I said to (Voshart), maybe for future things, we should document it, but we didn’t plan to make a film. It was more creating a video journal so that he might have something to look at afterwards,” Williamson told the Star. Voshart agreed a video journal was a good idea, but with Black Lives Matter and the media rallying around the case, it didn’t take long for them to realize Voshart’s work was meant for something more.
With the CBC’s backing, they started turning it into a documentary.
At first, Voshart said, it was “bizarre” to have a friend pointing a camera in his face, but he quickly grew comfortable and even stipulated that his pal abide by a journalism code of ethics to ensure their friendship didn’t get in the way of the film being objective, factual and authentic.
“I knew I had to have no control and give him freedom to do whatever he wanted with the footage,” Voshart said. “I knew I would look weird and ugly in half the footage and my neckbeard would show up or here I am in a dress shirt and shorts, looking bizarre and being filmed in my s---ty apartment.”
The camera was also rolling when Voshart headed to the U.S. to show Slager’s lawyer the stabilized video and discuss potentially becoming an expert witness in the case, and when he chatted with a then-incarcerated Slager via Skype.
“I asked countless people if I should even do that,” Voshart said. “Someone who (taught) political ethics at the University of Toronto said the best thing to do was to delete what I found.”
But even when calls to the FBI to show the video were fruitless, he refused to forget about it and says, “I don’t have many regrets because it was me making peace with the situation.”
Not everyone has seen his work or Frame 394 that way.
Some have attacked him online. “One person wanted me to die in a fire,” he said.
But for the most part, the film has been met with praise.
“It’s sparking people to have conversations where they might be uncomfortable with each other,” producer Shasha Nakhai said, adding the awards season attention it’s been getting was a pleasant surprise. The short doc had also been shortlisted for an Academy Award.
“The Oscars and Canadian Screen Awards are something that people see as a far-off thing and I wasn’t necessarily aiming for that, but I lined the dominoes up and hoped they would fall in the right direction and they did, but it ended up being a runway train.”
That “runaway train” took Frame 394 to film festivals in St. Louis, Rhode Island, New Orleans, Edmonton and Amsterdam. And though the documentary made a whirlwind tour of North American festivals and screened at Hot Docs and the TIFF Bell Lightbox, Voshart said he hasn’t turned into a local celebrity yet.
“There are a lot more famous Internet cats out there,” he joked. “I was looking forward to touching Ryan Gosling ’s face, but those dreams are gone.”
As for Slager, he’s on house arrest awaiting his next day in court after his case ended in a mistrial.
Voshart turned down a retainment offer from Slager’s lawyer and doesn’t expect to testify in the case, but said, “I’ve kept up with the court proceedings as much as I can.”
“I feel invested in it. I want to follow it all the way through. I just have to know the verdict.”