Tucker still has to pinch himself when he thinks about the critical reaction to his film and how quickly it was noticed and distributed. “I mean, this husband and wife filmmaking duo are sitting in an apartment in Berlin and we managed to pull this off with two PowerBooks and two desktop Macs,” he says. “And just by posting a QuickTime clip, we’re able to get people interested in the movie to the point where we get an agent and a rep and a distributor and all these things. I never dreamed that it would be in theaters and it’s happening. It’s kind of outrageous when you think about it.”

He adds: “We’re talking about a film that was purchased for a considerable amount of money where there will probably be at least 100 prints made, which is a huge expense. And that it was done, literally, from the desktop. Only a few people have done that. That’s one of the most exciting things about all of this in relation to the whole Apple philosophy — we achieved so much with so little.”

“I was so impressed the first time I saw [the video] transferred to film, thinking, ‘God, we did all of that without any high-end hardware.’”

Off the Shelf and Out of the Box

In Iraq, Tucker shot all the footage using off-the-shelf digital camcorders, a Canon XL1 and XL2. When he could, he edited at the palace using his PowerBook and Final Cut Pro. But most of the editing he finished back in Berlin in less nerve-wracking surroundings with his wife and co-director, Petra Epperlein.

Safely back home in his living room, Tucker found he needed little else to finish the film. “Final Cut Pro is so sophisticated now in what it can do right out of the box,” says Tucker. “Even without any additional plug-ins, for this kind of thing it’s perfect. We could start applying effects and doing color corrections and fixing the footage like we wanted it to look without going to the additional step of saying, ‘OK, we’ve done a rough edit and now we have to go to a suite that costs $200 an hour to fix this.’”

By the time he was ready to output to Digital Betacam and transfer tape to film, the movie was done. “Nobody else had touched that video,” he says. “And that’s coming out of our living room. I was so impressed the first time I saw it transferred to film, thinking, ‘God, we did all of that without any high-end hardware.’”

For the audio, Tucker and Epperlein used Nuendo, a multi-platform mixing tool. “With Final Cut Pro, you’re able to export .omf files that any audio mixing system can read. We were able to go into a small theater — a screening room, with another Mac — project the film and then mix, not with a real mixing desk, but sitting with a mouse doing all the premixes for this film in a real audio environment. And all of that in Dolby DIgital 5.1. And then we were able to move this over to a megastudio [at Studio Babelsberg outside of Berlin] with a very expensive desk, and spend two days mastering and getting everything perfect. Then the Dolby engineer comes in and it’s all done.”

Taken Seriously

Tucker is excited about what his success with “Gunner Palace” means for other talented yet cost-conscious independent filmmakers. “There’s so much enthusiasm about independent films now,” he says. “These are not anomalies, and you’re taken seriously — that’s something that’s changed in the last 10 years. You can be sitting at home doing what anyone else can do. And for me, that changed our professional life — not having to be dependent on other people so much. There’s truly a kind of democracy there.

”If you make something that’s good and something that’s interesting, you will float to the top. It creates true competition, so that’s exciting. It’s up to you, and if you believe in it, you can make it happen.”