Early works revisited: Four Rocks Down (2001/2003)

This is a continuation of a series in which I look back at various video projects I have worked on, mostly for my own records. More information can be found here.


It might not seem like much now, but this is a big one for me. When I mentioned "Marco Polo" was a turning point, it is because "Four Rocks Down" came after it and then "Quit" after that. These weren't the most time-consuming or most beautiful looking projects I've worked on, but they are the peak of fun I've had with the filmmaking process and the two best examples of storytelling in a catalog that does not have much emphasis on storytelling.

"Four Rocks Down" was shot almost entirely over 24 hours with two collaborators, Tom and Mark. It was a long, memorable night with a short follow up in my apartment the next morning. Months later I grabbed the shots of the burning shed when my dad conveniently decided to dispose of an old outhouse next to our hunting shack.

I had made my previous three films alone. Well, my brother stood in front of the camera for me a few times, but more often I pointed the camera at myself or some (other) inanimate object. There are limitations to that. Collaboration was necessary. Three people is still a small number, especially when they are the cast and the crew both, but it was enough to tackle an actual story. Whoever was not in front of the camera was shooting it. It was a luxury to be able to frame a shot and not have to worry about where I would fit into it and to have someone else trustworthy behind the camera not only hitting the record button but also moving the camera as needed (camera movement, imagine that!).

Mark had been trying to start up a film club during our senior year at college -- not a club where you watch films but rather where you make them. I got to know him in a film theory course we were both in. I enrolled to meet my art requirement, but honestly I was looking forward to it more than any other class I'd ever taken. The professor was an old film critic and a tough grader. I watched David Lynch's Blue Velvet six times over the course of the semester, paying attention to different aspects of the production each time and writing papers on them. Instead of a final exam, I received special permission to write a screenplay and used the opportunity to flesh out my script for "Dreamer," a project I had started a few years earlier.  My professor ripped it to shreds but gave me an A. I still have his feedback and always planned to rewrite based on it (hasn't happened yet).

Mark and I, along with our mutual friend Tom, were the three interested in joining a film club. The trouble was we had just graduated. Mark was moving out of the state in, literally, a few days. (We made "Quit" together a year and a half later during one of his visits back home). I had let Mark read the "Dreamer" script and he wanted to shoot that, but we didn't have the locations or the cast or nowhere near enough time, so we came up with something more manageable instead.

"Four Rocks Down" starts with a languid pace timed to some Twin Peaks music, which is appropriate enough as this was made at the height of my obsession with that TV series. I was also watching a lot of film noir and was influenced by the movies with non-linear structures that were coming out around this time (e.g. Memento). That is what led to the ambiguous, "earlier" and "later" time jumps and the twist ending that holds up pretty well if you're able to follow everything that leads there. I really liked the idea of needing to watch a movie multiple times to understand it and seeing things differently when viewed from different perspectives.

Take the scene where Detective Gomez visits my apartment at night to bring me in for questioning... We see part of the scene and it fits perfectly into the original context. Later we revisit the scene, this time extending it, and it fits perfectly into the new context as well. It was a concept we would later revisit in "Quit", but it works better here.

The story concept was conceived during an evening at Plum's bar, which gets a shout out in the movie. I don't remember much from that night other than being absolutely thrilled to be discussing a project like this with two other people that cared about it and were interested in making it a reality. It's a bummer our partnership didn't last longer because I would love to have more results from those years following college. I made "Cottage Cheese" and "Drunken Laundry" on my own instead, but imagine what could have been.

We shot "Four Rocks Down" on Mark's Sony 8mm video camera (except for the burning shed scenes again, for which I used my dad's camera). Looking back, the camera was so easy to work with. I don't think it had the option to turn off auto-focus or auto-exposure, and it did pretty well in low light as long as you don't mind the grain that comes with it. We never could have recorded as much as we did in such a short amount of time if we had been using one of today's DSLRs. Setting up a shot with my camera now is a hassle... back then we just ran with it.

Obviously amateur entertainment like this requires a serious suspension of disbelief. I wish we'd had some more realistic looking guns. The fight scenes are stiff and obviously staged. And, come on, we fit half a million dollars in a shoe box? There's also no character development and bad acting (although we passed this off as the characters being bad actors since much of their dialogue is lies to each other). The movie is full of flaws and the casual viewer may not be able to look past them, but I have learned to love them.

Guess what -- you can't make a perfect movie with no budget. Lately I feel like my standards get too high. I think if I can't do something well, I won't do it. 15 years ago my creative life was filled with a "just do it" attitude... I was okay making something less than perfect. It's inspiring for me to watch this now.

I wasn't able to edit the movie until two years after we shot it. I didn't have a computer that was capable of editing video and I no longer had access to the college's editing suite. I wrote in an old journal at one point that the project was "doomed to the graveyard of incompletion." I guess I thought we didn't even have all the footage we needed and there would be no way to get everyone back together to continue filming.

When I did buy a new computer in 2003, I set to work on it immediately with what we had and somehow it all fit together. There was supposed to be more to the story, but when I was done I couldn't imagine it any other way. It was a magical experience and I absolutely fell in love with the editing process.

How about that twist ending? We were pretty proud of the ambiguity of who gets thrown from the car.

Sorry for the lack of "bonus material" this time. If I were to revisit the source tapes, I know I could find something to share. I'll add to this entry if/when I ever get around to that.

I promised myself I would get this entry posted before the end of the year, so here I am on New Years Eve trying to conjure up fading memories. The purpose of this retrospective is to get these memories written down so they are not forever lost. I'm afraid I can't do that fast enough these days -- too many other priorities, including a new short film that I am really excited about. I am so thankful I have the finished films themselves preserved (at least for now).

Early works revisited: Marco Polo (2000)

I shot "Marco Polo" over Christmas break during my junior year of college with my dad's Hi-8 video camera and put it together in an analogue editing suite at school during the month of January. I had access thanks to the suite my involvement with the campus TV station. I remember NOT asking if I was allowed to use it for personal projects because I didn't want to be told no. Since the J-term was pretty quiet at school and I knew the guy who work-studied at the front desk, I slipped in under the radar once in a while.

It was an unforgiving editing machine -- once you laid down a clip, it stayed there. Each time you recorded over a section of VHS tape, the quality noticeably degraded, so the every cut was planned out ahead of time by going over logs of the tape in my dorm room.  The audio could only be laid down while the video was playing, with all adjustments happening real time, manually with a dial.  But all of this was an improvement over the "two VCR" method of editing that I'd used prior to this project.  Now you can do non-linear editing of HD video on your phone.  But in the year 2000, the opportunity to edit video was worth a great deal to me.

The news packages I was making at the time were each a few minutes long, contained hard cuts (i.e. no dissolve transitions), and were overlaid with one track of music and one track of voice -- all the same elements that comprise "Marco Polo".  If you dare, here's one of those news packages.  As rough as it is, it remains one of my favorites from the time because we had one day to record it and it was pouring rain outside the whole day.  We had to get creative and shot almost the entire thing from inside a car.  I lived for challenges like that.

While "Marco Polo" is meant to stand on its own, it ended up acting as a loose sequel (or epilogue?) to a collaboration between me and my brother called "The Winter War" that was worked on both before and after this one. "The Winter War" expands on the school-as-war metaphor by actually diving into the battles described in "Marco Polo." It was more ambitious in every aspect and took me over a year to edit (and this was back when I even had a lot of free time).  I can't wait to discuss that one in its own blog post eventually.

The first shot of "Marco Polo" sets the pace -- and it's a slow one. It doesn't hold up so well with the short attention spans found online today (I should talk).  The movie I made prior to this, "A Night In January" was something like 20 minutes long. "Marco Polo" was actually a response to that length, something that would be more likely to get into a no-budget film festival. Back then I thought it was streamlined, but who has time to sit down and watch a six-minute amateur movie these days?

There is very little camera movement in the film. Using a tripod was important because the steadiness was the only production value separating this project from a home video.  Once the camera was on the tripod, I didn't touch it.  Any movement would have been too jerky.  If there are jitters present, they are probably the result of tape degradation.

The film is scored by a slow burning Depeche Mode song. That's a band that will show up again, quite memorably if you ask me, in "The Winter War" along with all of my other favorite bands of the time. "Marco Polo" is shorter and the mood is more singular, so it felt right to limit the soundtrack to one song.

The opening and closing credits are not in their original form. Originally, they were typed up in Power Point, displayed on a computer monitor, and then I simply pointed the camera at them. Unfortunately the camera wasn't quite level and I didn't notice the problem until I was in the editing suite, so I used them anyway. A couple of years later when I transferred the film to a computer for the first time, I replaced the credits with the current digital title cards. I know it's only in my head but they still appear not-quite-level to me.

I don't want to dive too deep into the intended meaning behind the film. You can probably tell there are some personal bits in it, although don't get too caught up in that thinking because there's still plenty of artistic license at play. The overall theme comes from the feeling I would get being on Christmas break during 5th or 6th grade. Those were rough years for me. I felt like the world was trying to corrupt me or at least bully me.  It probably would have been more poignant (but perhaps more typical) to represent the horrors of war by telling a story about kids in school, but I swapped it around and used war as a metaphor for school because that was more meaningful and relate-able to me.  I like small-scale, personal films, not global or political ones.

So there's all these lines like "they taught me so much" and "playing with such a toy..." and references to childhood like the monster under the bed scene and birthday parties and the game Marco Polo itself.  There's the shot of Trev wearing a graduation gown in front of a mirror.  I loved the idea including bits that couldn't be literally explained but still conjure up some meaning.  I was much more interested in moods and atmosphere at the time than I was with plot.  Those are still the types of movies I like to watch today.

My favorite scene is in the middle when we see the black and white movie playing on a TV screen. The footage playing was originally it's own project called "Five Years" and it was edited entirely in-camera. By cutting between it and the "Marco Polo" footage I was able to eliminate some of the roughness and gaps "Five Years" had as its own film. It made a nice home for this other video project that wasn't good enough to stand on its own and didn't seem to fit anywhere else. As far as what is happening in this movie within a movie... It has something to do with calling a girl.

My least favorite scene is the one with my cameo as the friend who gets "eaten by the monster under the bed."  First of all, it's not very well shot. I had to frame the sequence without seeing me in it, hit record, and then get into position. I had very little to work with while editing and reshooting wasn't an option because by the time I realized it wasn't going to work I was already back at school. Then there's the ridiculousness of the acting. It doesn't look like a monster is pulling me under the bed so much as I'm pulling myself under. And the animated making of the bed was just a bad idea that doesn't fit, even within the internal, skewed logic of the film.

I'm not sure where I got the idea for "Marco Polo" from, but the narration was inspired by the narration in Fight Club.  That movie had a huge impact on me, as mentioned here.

At one time I had the entire narration in "Marco Polo" memorized. I had spent a lot of time working on the words, tossing them around in my head over and over again, until they felt right. There's a point in that process where you cross a line between what might actually be poetic and what only sounds good because you've heard it so many times. I couldn't even tell you what side of that line this narration falls on because of my closeness to it.  I would literally recite the whole thing aloud to myself while driving or taking a shower or whenever, and I don't even know why.

If you want to take a closer look at the narration, I transcribed it below:

The winter war was over. Upon my homecoming, my loved ones greeted me at the door. They were unaware of the monster I had become. I was now the living, breathing embodiment of everything they hated. I had built a wall surrounding me – blocking me from all love and humanity. I was every woman’s broken heart. My parents had missed me, but they would continue to miss me because their son would never come home.

The war began in September. I forget the year. My friends were still spending their allowance on cigarettes. I had to roll them myself, but I got cigarettes for free. I got a lot of things for free. I’m just glad they let me keep my gun. Playing with such a toy could be dangerous, but I could handle it well. They taught me so much, including some valuable life lessons.

I was home in time for Christmas, but that made no difference. I guess not even love was enough to save me.  

I discovered my friend was dead. He was eaten by the monster under his bed. I’m sure we all know by now, human nature leads to bloodshed.

I must have been an emotional kid. I remember crying when I bit into a piece of candy with the plastic wrapper still on it. I cried other times for no reason at all - just to cry. I remember attending a birthday party where I didn’t know any of the boys very well. I started crying, and I told the birthday boy’s mom they were all picking on me. I’m not sure why I did that.

I had nice parents, but I remember them turning on me once. They made fun of my crying once. I used that moment to fill my head when I started killing. I can imagine people doing much worse things if their parents had acted that way more often.

Thucydides, a Greek historian, once said, “War is a stern teacher. In depriving them of the power of easily satisfying their daily wants, it brings most peoples minds down to the level of their actual circumstances. War also brings envy and revenge to the surface and frantic violence becomes the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of defense.”

I never noticed how alien the ears on the sides of my head looked until my return from the winter war.

My emotion has escaped me. I feel none. I wasn’t even upset when they took my eyes.

-----------------

I recently reviewed some of the uncut footage for "Marco Polo", and I can see I was demanding on my actor, Trevor.  I sound pretty bossy.  To be a filmmaker, you need a strong ego.  That's another thing I have lost in the years since, humbled by life in the real world and from watching amazing work from all kinds of creative people online.  That could be part of the reason for my lack of output lately.

I don't have a lot of "extras" for this project. I wish I had my original notes/script, but they are either somewhere in my parents' garage or lost forever.  I did find this blooper reel from when I was trying to get a line from Trevor for "Five Years."  It goes on a little long, but it fondly reminds me of the hours Trev and I used to spend working on projects like this.


After all that trouble, the line didn't get used anywhere, probably because it didn't make any sense.

Well, this has been an unorganized stream of thoughts about the film.  I'm trying not to spend too much time perfecting my writing.  I'd rather just get more of it out there.  I'm sure I'll be clarifying/expanding/fixing each of these entries as time goes on, so let's just consider this a rough starting point for now.

Early works revisited: Introduction

Since my creative output has been limited lately, I figured I'd take the opportunity to look back at some earlier projects of mine that haven't yet been documented on the web. This will allow me to record some of the details before I forget them entirely and also share them with anybody who might be interested (granted that may only include my future self).

I was going to start at the beginning and work my way forward, but that would just be too embarrassing too soon, so instead we're going to start at what I consider to be a turning point and go in both directions through time from there. At the rate I've been blogging, it will take multiple years to cover everything I want to cover, so I hope you are by no means expecting this to be wrapped up quickly with a constant stream of entries.

Another disclaimer: The works I will be discussing are ridiculously indulgent and pretentious and hold very little entertainment value. But at the time they were made I considered each of them to be a personal, artistic statement. I still hold them dear, even if they are dated and laughable. I'm aware of their flaws... they were made by a kid after all.

And just to set a little context, most of these videos were made before YouTube and some of them before digital, non-linear editing (at least for me). It was a time before everybody carried a video recording device in their pocket. There was still some magic in the medium for me. I knew nothing about photography and was training myself in video production. For a long time it felt like anything was interesting if you put it in front of a camera. Believe me, I tested that hypothesis by shooting some pretty mundane subjects.  Editing was a thrilling puzzle. I loved putting two shots together and discovering what fit and what didn't.  So much of it is based on intuition rather than hard science, which was a nice change of pace from the track I found myself on during school and in my career.

By working on my own movies, my appreciation for watching movies deepened, especially lower budget, independent films because those are the ones in which you could still see the seams.  There was a local film festival held at my college my freshman and sophomore years that was incredibly inspiring to me.  I was a no-budget filmmaker and I liked to see what could be done with similar / the same constraints.

Projects I want to discuss (in a rough order):

- Marco Polo
- Four Rocks Down
- A Night in January
- Quit
- The Winter War
- Placebo Road
- Drunken Laundry
- Cottage Cheese
- Dreamer
- Unproduced scripts

A few of them are already online and clips from almost all of them show up in my early demo reel, but I have some additional things I want to document about each.  Maybe I'll scan some handwritten notes and shot lists for the projects or include some deleted scenes.  I even have a campus-televised interview with me discussing the meaning behind "Placebo Road" that I might share. This is going to be fun!