"Grind" commentary

This is the first cut of my latest short film, which you may have seen posted on my other blog in March or on Facebook, if the site's algorithms deemed you worthy.

It is an experimental film in the sense that I didn't know where it was going when I started. And I wasn't sure if it would hold anyone's attention. And I wasn't sure if it would stick together considering I worked on it half hour increments over the course of two years. Did it succeed? Possibly not. But that doesn't mean I'm not proud of it. I want others to appreciate it too, so I guess that's why I'm writing this up.

The film is not 100% complete because I would like to re-cut it to some original music produced by musician friends. I don't have rights to the current soundtrack, which is a restriction from submitting it to most film festivals. The more I distance myself from the project, the less of a chance I think it has to play at a film festival -- it's meant to be more of a personal project, and there's just so much competition out there -- but I feel like I need to give it a try. First, I need a little more distance from it.

While parts of the film were obviously inspired by personal details and moments, much of it is exaggerated via artistic license. I invite you to dig into the subtext of the images and unravel the story behind them, but please remember the people you see are fictional characters and I have taken liberties to add drama and/or make it more relatable.

A few people I talked to seemed to be confused by... well, all of it, but in particular the opening shot:

Look at it this way: Raking leaves is work. Here's a man disappearing into his work. He's also disappearing from his kid's life. Based on the tone you can assume it's a negative thing, more of a nightmare than a daydream.

Disappearing is a motif in this film. You'll see it again and again, but there's a key moment near the end where you don't see it. That's meant to make a point. We'll get to that...

The audio in the opening shot sounds like the wind or is it an espresso machine? The plinking music sounds like a distorted dream version of the piano music that starts up in the film's reality.

I started working on this project before Omri was born. I don't know what it is about having a child, but it makes art so much more powerful. I wasn't consuming a lot of art at the time, but when I did it was extra inspiring to me. The feelings from it were absorbed into my own project.

I picked up David Lynch's Eraserhead on Blu-ray around then. It was the first time I had seen it in a while, and it looked and sounded amazing. I realized then it was a perfect movie. It's about the struggles of becoming a new dad, so I connected with it in a way I hadn't earlier.

It doesn't have a lot else in common with my film, but I wanted to pay homage, so I tracked down the distinctive font (vertically elongated Times Roman) of the title and used in in own title and credits:

I probably shot myself grinding coffee in the basement around 40 times, but the lighting was acceptable in only about half of those. The shot looks like it's lit by a single bulb above me, but behind the scenes it looked more like this:

The shot below shows that I'm missing in bed. Also, seeing an ear here gives you an indication why I'm grinding coffee in the basement:

This scene below was shot the night before Omri was born:

I came downstairs one spring morning and found the sound of birds to be overpowering. I recorded the sound the next day and laid it over this scene. It felt like the start of a new day, a new season, a new life.

R mentions a bad dream and wanting it to go away (i.e. disappear). We recorded these lines a year after the visual:

90% of this film was shot and edited in the early morning before anyone else in my house was awake. It was important for me to not deduct much from family time to work on it, and that's partially why it took so long to complete.

In the last few years especially, I came to love a quiet morning. My mind is its sharpest then. If I was struggling with something at work, I could log in the next morning and find the bug in the code pretty quick, although I would much rather put the effort toward editing photos or deciding how to cut this film. One of the goals of the film was to soak up that feeling of the early morning similar to how I wanted to capture a late night in my Fake Empire video. Maybe it doesn't do much for anybody else, but I love to return to these films and soak up that atmosphere.

This is one of the first videos I made after learning something about photography, and I wanted every shot to be a frame-able image. By no means I did accomplish that at 100%, but it's an approach that leads to better work.

Another disappearance below... this one was tricky because of the rocking chair in motion. I had Fridays off when Omri was little and I could count on him crying when it was time to put him down for a nap. I set up this shot while he was happy and simply hit record at nap time.

The rhythm of Omri's cries kind of matches up with the rhythm of my grinding in this next shot. Both are grating to the ear:

In order for me to appear in so much of the film, the camera had to stay locked on the tripod. I wasn't able to dolly or pan, so I tried to make up for it with motion on screen and by editing to the beat (or sometimes intentionally off the beat) of the music. I feel like the first third has a nice flow, almost a poetry of motion. It's the kind of thing you pick up on the more you watch it.

Lighting the film so dimly was another challenge. If it's not done properly the whole thing can end up looking like a dark mess. My light didn't have a good diffuser, so I bounced it off walls a lot.

What a precious little guy. I'm so glad to have some of his early days captured on video.

The differences are sometimes subtle, but I attempted to shoot myself grinding coffee in different states of being. Here's tired:

And angry:

My wife is not looking at me but rather a reflection of me. I look very small. My arms are crossed. There's a statuette of a slow-dancing couple between us. This is a loaded shot:

There's not a lot of dialogue in the film and I didn't want to waste a single word, so I attempted to boil down any and all arguments that could be had into a single sentence. "One day you'll miss this more than you ever hated it" was what I ended up with. It's not clear what precisely is being referred to, but I like it that way. "Hate" is a strong word, and I definitely don't hate my life. It adds a little more power to what this character may be going through, however.

The dual meaning of me yelling "Wine, wine, WINE!" is not an accident. It wasn't meant to be funny, but people tend to laugh here. That may not be a good sign.

A wide shot of us doing our own thing with a division between us:

Covering up blemishes, making life look better than it is, was something I just had to include here. Of course I do this myself when I post photos on my blog or Facebook--and I don't intend to stop--but I at least wanted to spread awareness that it happens.

This starts the sunny, glowing middle sequence that shows our baby growing up:

I have a lot of extended or alternate shots for this sequence that would make a good home video montage. I had to keep things short in the film.

That's a cute one:

If you look closely when Omri moves forward, you can see my father-in-law in this shot sitting next to R:

I don't like the framing of this one at all, but I needed one more shot of Omri before we switch to Veronica and before we cut his hair. I did my best to avoid dressing him like a girl, but I did use a hair clip:

And then we switch to Veronica. This shot was taken in Santa Barbara when she was 2.5 years old, before I even had the idea for this film. I don't have much usable footage from back then, so I'm lucky I had this and it just happened to be in 24 frames per second, matching up with the new stuff I was shooting:

The sequence below was originally longer. V asks me to read this book and at first she's cheery and cute but then she gets less patient, asking me more desperately to "read!" And then I originally cut to the shot of me putting my own book in my backpack before leaving the house. I had to split it up in order to continue the time lapse, however. These decisions were difficult!

I like this swivel transition into the basement sequence:

This project started as a time lapse of our basement construction project and sort of grew into a swirling distillation of years of my life.

I got my haircut between these two shots, but they are reordered so it looks like my hair grew that quick instead. It's not that noticeable but it's there.

This shot is meant to remind the viewer that caffeine is a drug:

This image of me walking down shadowy steps was one of the first ideas I had, but one of the last I shot. One of the nice parts of shooting at home with hardly anybody other than me in it was I could take my time composing each shot and reshoot as often as necessary.

I won't post screen shots of the entire time lapse, but here's first one of this setup. That looks like one of my tripods on the left side of the screen, but it's actually a saw horse for the construction. I should have moved it anyway.

And here's the last one. I wish we have had our mini fridge in place for this one to make the kitchenette look more complete, but I got to the point where I just had to finish this shoot. Notice Omri's name on the blackboard in the background:

Whoa, my sideburns actually looked pretty good here! And this shot includes a small shout-out to Veronica (see the V in a heart):

The black and white scenes are meant to be dreams. If you notice, the snow flakes are falling UP, another distortion of reality. And another disappearance happens, away from home:

V used to put all of her stuff animals to bed like this at night, so I thought it was cute (and accurate) to include here. Cookie Monster is meant to lighten up the tone a bit.

Here's a fake girl:

And a real girl:

All this time passed, but I'm still not able to close the door on the kids. I want to be able to hear them if they call out for me, even if that means having to grind my coffee in the basement to not wake them.

I finished reading Anna Karenina early in the shoot and, again, the tone seeped into my project. I originally wanted to use some quotes from it as dialogue between me and R when we were fighting, but I was worried people would think I was ripping it off rather than paying homage, so instead I just show a copy of the book:

I shot this scene with really nice continuity, cutting right on the action, but it was just taking me too long for me to get out the door, so I shortened each shot and settled for the jump cuts.

I had a hard time matching the colors from one shot to the next in this sequence. I never thought so much about light temperature until I got into photography. I wish I would have been more consistent with our light bulbs used in our house before starting filming.

Day light. The outside world looks cold and gray... and suburban:

Leaving for work... I'm meant to look out of my element and nervous:

Running parallel, we start the dream sequence of me leaving the house. The decision to intersperse this sequence with the remainder of the film came late in editing, but I love how it's timed to start with me leaving the house in reality.

If you've seen the episode of the Twilight Zone called "Time Enough at Last," my reference to it here should be pretty obvious. The episode is about a poor soul who loves to read, but his wife thinks it's a waste of time and she goes out of her way to stop him, The usage here is meant to be more ambiguous (it could be his kid that scribbled out the book) and possibly add a little something outside of reality.

I literally crossed out every single page in this novel because I wasn't sure which page would be flipped to. This shot is a very close recreation of a shot from the TV show:

Here's a screen shot from the Twilight Zone:

During summer months there were mornings I woke at 3am so that I could shoot a scene, like this one, before the sun rose and before the kids woke up.

The dream sequence continues. I'm leaving some baggage behind:

There's been a lot of grinding, but this is the first shot of me actually making coffee:

The Aeropress looks like a big syringe, making another loose allusion to drug usage, another reminder about addiction or at least routine. By the way, I highly recommend the Aeropress!

To get this shot I used my tripod to push a skateboard with the camera on it. I used the same technique in one of my ThreadSpinner backdrop videos:

This might leave people scratching their heads. It's my dad sitting at my desk, but it's meant to be a vision of an older me. (In the slightly wider shot that precedes this one, you can see he's still editing "Grind" on the computer screen!). This idea of my dad showing up is another that came from an earlier project of mine called "A Night in January." I figured it was okay to reuse an idea if only about three people had seen the original usage.

I shot this entire dream sequence (anything you see in black and white) in reverse so that things wouldn't look quite natural:

The Equestria Girl doll is important. Did I trip over it and drop the coffee grinder? Was that the straw that broke this father camel's back? Since it's a doll for older girls, did I see it and realize my daughter is growing up? That can be sad, especially when you're missing out on it.

This may be a little corny, but to get myself to cry, I listened to U2's song called "Kite" which was written by Bono about his daughters growing up. There's a line where he sings "You don't need me anymore." I was singing along to that and I almost left the part in where I'm mouthing those words, but it made the shot too long.

This is critical to understanding the film. We have this dream sequence of me leaving the house and heading for this pile of leaves. The end here could be looped back to the opening shot in which I disappear into the leaves...

... but instead we cut to this shot of me walking in the other direction (a crossroads of sort) and sitting down at my desk. I've been leaving my daughter's door open every morning so that if she calls for me, I can be there for her...

That's what finally happens, and she tells me she had a good dream, a contrast to my wife tell me she had a bad dream before our daughter was born. This ends on a hopeful note. This dad's life is more positive by having a child.

Veronica was originally supposed to say "Daddy, I had a BAD dream." It was meant to match what R says near the beginning and it would have been used at a different point in the film. But Veronica refused to say it that way. She doesn't like anything too dramatic, so it was her idea to change it to "good dream." Great call on her part. It completely changed the ending of the film, and I like it a lot better this way.

The film may seem self-indulgent, but I will argue that it took incredible restraint and patience to make over the course of two years. Working on it became a part of my daily grind. I spent weeks obsessing over when to make a single cut. There are scenes where I open a door and walk through it a year later. My computer broke down on two separate occasions, delaying progress and almost driving me mad.

Is all of that worth it? Definitely, even if nothing else comes out of it.. I've made films like this before, at different points of my life, and I love having them. I still have dreams sometimes about the ones I didn't make, and there's no way to make them now. Time is a one way path.

What am I going to work on next? Something lighter, something quicker. Perhaps something that I'm not in. The possibilities are exciting. Bringing something into existence is even more exciting.

Thanks for reading. Hopefully this encourages you to give "Grind" another watch.

2015 recap

© Emily John

I like this photo. It places me at the center of the family. I'm being clung to despite being somebody who does not exactly appreciate clinginess, and it's okay because I love my family enough to allow it. I love how crazy parenting can be and the mess it creates because that's what makes me feel like I'm living. There also are times I want to scream because it's all too much. That's the paradox of it, I guess. Nothing can be both easy and rewarding.

Here we are in March and I'm finally posting my end of 2015 recap. It's going to be short and poorly written because, frankly, I just need to get this done.

The kids are ages 5 and 1. They are the most fun people to be around. And their challenges are different enough so that... we face a wide array of challenges. We don't get out nearly as much as we used to, but I'm such a homebody that it suits me.

Trips-wise, we went to Santa Barbara, Colorado, and Winnipeg. Maybe it's the constant stream of reminders via social media, but we're still having trouble leaving California behind. Living there for five years simply spoiled us for the rest of the country. We appreciated it while we were there, but we appreciate it even more now. Minnesota has its pluses, although there are extra complications that arise from them. We're still adapting.

It was a satisfying year creatively for me. I won first prize in the People and Families category of the Shoreview photo contest in the spring and the grand prize in the fall. I also spent a lot of time on my short film, even prioritizing it over my regular photography habits. It wasn't finished until 2016, so I won't include a link here in my 2015 recap. I will post it once I figure out what I want to say about it.

That's it for now. My Peas blog has a better memory than me, so I encourage to click around over there if you want to see more about our year. 2016 is off to a good start and may include some changes for us. Let's stay in touch.

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).

Harter family portraits 2015

I shot the Harter family's photos again this fall. We did it a little later in the season so a lot of the color was gone, but I think it was actually good to distinguish the look from last year's. The other distinction is that they are expecting a new baby!

It still feels weird to share another family's photos, but I want to document my photography work on this blog. Here are a few favorites from the session:

Portrait of a piano teacher

The longer I practice photography, the more I appreciate good lighting. I don't even bother to take my camera out of the bag in certain conditions. A talented photographer, however, can adapt to whatever the conditions are and make something interesting out of them. It's good to have goals.

My wife's dear friend Emily is a piano teacher and she asked me to take some head shots to help promote her business. The lighting conditions for this shoot were tricky -- overcast skies are great when you are outdoors, but they can be too dim inside, especially when evening is coming on. There were also windows on three sides of the room, making it difficult to avoid heavy back light from most angles. I've shot in more challenging environments, but something about this set-up was just draining my inspiration. I didn't have a good feeling about what I captured at the end of the night.

Do you know what saved the project? Shooting in RAW format and putting in a lot of work in Photoshop. The results still look a little stretched and strained to me, but that may only because I saw behind the curtain.

Here are my favorites from the set:

2014 recap

© K. Holly Photography

Okay, I'm going to sit down and finally knock this out...

There are four of us now.  Our son, Omri, was born in September and we sure like having him around!  He's just the sweetest little guy you'll ever meet.  The way he'll flash a smile or let out a loud "Ah-goo-goo!" in quiet room just melts my heart with cuteness.  It really does feel like he completes our family.

Veronica is now four years old and has taken her position as head of the household.  She's incredibly precocious and wants to play, play, play (or watch videos or read books) all the time.  She has developed a sense of humor that would fit right into a Cottage Cheese movie.  She's helping me think up sketches for the sequel!

R was pregnant for the first three-quarters of the year and then we were busy taking care of an infant for the remainder, so we didn't get out much and spent a lot of time settling into our new house.  Our bigger projects involved replacing the deck and finishing the basement (with help, of course).  I don't know if the place will ever truly be "done," but it's getting closer to the way we want it.

2014 wasn't a big year for travel.  We did manage to spend our spring break visiting our old home of Santa Barbara. We also camped a few nights up at the Winnipeg Folk Festival and made a few weekend trips, mostly to visit our parents in northern Minnesota.

It was our first full year in this state since 2003.  It's been an adjustment, especially the parts about being away at work for 10 hours a day and caring for a second child.  I will find a good balance between family, hobbies, and work and then something will change and knock it out of whack again.  But there is this calmness that has settled in me or a patience in knowing that I have all the free time I need -- it's just spread out over the rest of my life.  I think that comes from being in a place that feels more permanent.

Speaking of patience, 2015 may or may not see the release of a short film I've been working on for almost a year already.  There's a little more information about it in the 1000th post on my Four Peas blog. Lastly, let me promise you this: I will publish the next part in my "Early works revisited" series this year.

Take care, everyone.