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Gotterdammerung San Francisco Opera, 1990 The joyless Rhinemaidens (Ann Panagulias, Mary Mills, Sandra Walker) await the arrival of Siegfried. Photo: SCHERL "The Ride of the Walkures," is sung at galloping full volume by the eight Walkures, while the stagehands kill time backstage playing chess, watching a ball game, knitting, balancing their checkbooks, and wishing the divas would just "sing faster." Siegfried's battle with the dragon is the showdown between destiny and free will. Cameras were mounted inside, above, and below this two-ton hydraulic reptile as it lurched around the stage, with four prop men pushing the undercarriage while the fifth, holding on for dear life, controlled the jaws from a cockpit inside the brain cavity. The final cataclysmic destruction of the gods' world in Goetterdoemmerung, with the funeral pyre, the Rhein "overflowing its banks in a mighty wave bearing the Rheinmaidens on its crest," Valhalla in flames, and the stage crew orchestrating the destruction like a well-oiled machine. The impressive time lapse sequences in SING FASTER were created by bolting an Arriflex camera to the rail of the balcony at the San Francisco Opera House. The camera was automatically triggered by an intervalometer, exposing one frame every twenty seconds for two months. The blizzard of images was edited into two sequences, one which chronicles two months of construction in two minutes, and another which squeezes the entire seventeen hours of The Ring Cycle performance into one minute. Producer/Director, Jon Else, has spent virtually his entire career making documentaries about American history including The Day After Trinity, Eyes On The Prize, Cadillac Desert, and The Great Depression. This year he won the 1999 Sundance Film Festival's Filmmaker's Trophy for SING FASTER. Cinematography is by Else and Michael Chin. Chin's pervious work includes Chan Is Missing. Editing is by Deborah Hoffman of Complaints Of A Dutiful Daughter and Jay Boekelheide, winner of an Academy Award for his sound work in The Right Stuff. SING FASTER is Producer Jon Else's first film in which no one actually dies. SING FASTER was first conceived in 1988 as a four-minute film about a single scene in La Traviata. It was photographed in 1990 as a thirty-minute film about The Ring Cycle's sets. The film was completed in 1998 as a full hour documentary about an entire story of The Ring Cycle. Richard Wagner took twenty-one years to write his epic, Der Ring Des Nibelungen, from 1853 to 1874. Jon Else took nine years to complete SING FASTER, during which he submitted 137 funding proposals. The Story | Film Facts | Press | The Filmmaker | Interview | Resources | ITVS