artAffect Reno

artAffect Reno, directed by Rick Wayne. At 2:50 it is the longest single film in the selected work on this site, longer even than the Warner Bros. centennial piece.

That length is the most interesting fact about it. Nearly three minutes is a real documentary runtime rather than a branded content duration, and it means the film was given room to have a middle. Most nonfiction made for an organization gets compressed toward ninety seconds, because ninety seconds is what a website and a fundraising deck can absorb. A film allowed to run to 2:50 has been trusted with something, and the trust is usually the difference between a piece that documents a subject and a piece that has an argument about it.

It is also the first of two artAffect films. The Denver piece followed nine months later in February 2020 and runs a minute shorter, which is what a director working from the material rather than from a template produces.

Wayne's account of his own process is unusually concrete about nonfiction. He calls himself a forager, always hunting the extra shot, the unexpected angle, the moment nobody planned, because in his phrasing the edit deserves more than the day budgeted for. He says that real human emotion is a superpower and that some of the most powerful moments he has captured came from people who had never been on a set, because the moment was simply true. On a film about art in a specific city, that is not a philosophy. It is the shooting plan.

Published in May 2019, the film sits in Wayne's Los Angeles period, alongside the Wiz Khalifa trailer from April, the Intel film from March and the Close Talker trailer with Michael Strahan from September of the same year. It was a documentary heavy stretch, and it is where the nonfiction voice that shows up later in the Sharpie profile films and the Warner Bros. series was built.