I produced and edited this project. Also composed music. It played all over the country. We are proud of it.

It’s in the P-I from The Common Language Project on Vimeo.

I scored a movie that will appearing at the Georgetown Super 8 film festival (I also directed this movie). The deal is you have to shoot one roll of super 8 with no editing and they show it just like that.  You can make a soundtrack, but they push play on the CD player at the same time they push play on the projector, so you are guaranteed to have your soundtrack be synced wrong.  I took that to heart, but I really don’t know if it’s going to work.

We decided that it would be hard to create a narrative with only in camera editing so we wrote a little story about the death of the Greek philosopher Diogenes.  It stars Bradley Hutchinson as Diogenes (also starring in the Hot Dog Cycle and soon to be directing a movie that I adapted for the screen).  Please come out and see it on May 2nd (although the location is still TBA). 

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Here is my longest Landscape film.  I would like to say it’s the best, but I guess you can decide that.  It’s about 10 minutes so please give it time to load.

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I’d like to talk a little bit about how this was made but first I would like to define a couple of things for people who are reading this that are not video geeks.  A codec (code / decode) is a language that video is written in.  In order for the video to work, there must be a coder and a decoder on their respective ends (one on the camera, one on the computer).  This works much the same way that written and verbal language works.  In order to be understood, the person speaking (coder) and the person listening (decoder) must both speak the same language.  That said, each codec treats video in it’s own ways.  Some make blocky square shapes in the image, some restrict the dimensions, some are designed for the web and make tiny files, some are made for film post processing and take up banks of hard drives for a movie.

A format is similar to a codec in that it is a technology that deal with a video.  VHS is a format as is Analog 8mm.  For our purposes I will call different gauges of film formats.

Why do we care about this?  Because as a beginning video student I was fascinated with how these different technologies seemed to have political and emotional qualities inherent in them.  Part of the question I was trying to answer with this film was what are these qualities?  How do they interact with each other?  How can I harness their expressive potential to make the audience see things how I see them? 

(As an aside, if you want to know what I mean by political and emotional qualities, watch a video on youtube and then watch a video on an HDTV.  Both of these are video, but even watching the same content is not the same.  The image “quality” changes the image and it’s meaning itself).

another name for fate… was shot on 16mm, Super 8, Analog 8mm video, SVHS, DV and various other video cameras with different codecs (some MJPEG, others proprietary).  I was excited by each camera.  I wanted to live inside of each one.  The camera itself became the point in some of my shooting, the experience of capturing the world behind a lens.  The way that felt more like life than life really did.  Here is an example of rambling in my notebook from that time:

The codec then becomes a subtle signifier.  Evoking the minutiae of emotion, shape, form, context and framing the content within a context of class, intent, politics.  When used together they make an opera in a kind of explicitly direct Esperanto that is both organic and easily understood by a general audience and fully contemporary.

I found this to be one of the most exciting things about video and films in general.  Here the tool told you things about the work that weren’t already in the work.  I think I knew this before, being being able to articulate it was really the breakthrough.

I began with the discussion of this movie in technical terms, because that is what differentiates this movie from most, the attention to the technical details, and the inclusion of the technical details in the meaning of the film.  Hopefully this attention added to what the movie was actual about.  The content.  The actual images and what they represent.

Like most Landscape Cinema I took an anthropological, “documentary” approach.  This movie is about infrastructure.  The premise of the movie is that the landscape is related to the collective conscious / unconscious.  Or rather that our landscape is an exact replica of the place where our consciousness meet.

In real terms this means that we could make our landscape any way we choose.  But we have chosen this particular way.  This applies for all the structures we have created, our economies, our religions, all of the ways we connect with each other.  

The misquotes from the bible are reinterpretations of our collective (Western) knowledge and a symbol of my concept of destiny.  Just as these quotes are prophecies of a future, this is what those represent.  Our buildings, our bridges, our structures are all representations of structures that were laid out for us both from the structure of our brains and in the structure of our history.

Here is another quote from my notebook that sums this idea up nicely:

The world is in a constant state of autobiography.

The two screen sequences represent the two conclusions at work against each other.  Namely that the world is simultaneously an extension of a destiny, and that randomness is a part of that destiny.  Some times the two screens show us the same image (that both destiny and random free will are the same thing) and sometimes two different and opposing things (that destiny and randomness are opposing forces). 

I was inspired to use this strategy by Matt McCormick’s the Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal.  Hopefully I did more then just ape this technique.  My aim was to add some visual and conceptual confines to the conceit and the enhance the expressive potential of parallel montage.

Here is a very rambly ramble from my notebook that touches on this topic:

Shared memory = culture = the blending (blurring) of individuality = media culture = ethnography -> science -> art -> autobiography -> postmodernism -> dialogic (parallel montage) (schizophrenia).  How can one work express dialogic systems?  How can one work become two?  Contradictory and in agreement at that same time!  
Scientific method through art. -approaching a hypothesis with multiple experiments and drawing multiple conclusions?
2 conflicting hypothesis, 2 conflicting conclusions within one experiment…

Lastly I would like to reflect briefly on the practicality of shooting this movie.  This movie was done, by myself, with no money, as the final project of my first year of film and video studies at Evergreen.  I have learned Final Cut Pro and how to actually operate the cameras on this movie and the whole thing took me about 12 60 hour weeks to complete.  Some of my film negative got scratched, I lost weight, lost sleep, treated my girlfriend poorly while I was making this movie.  That said, this movie made me evaluate whether or not making movies was actually a good way to live a life.  I have conflicting views about this now, but I will save discussion about those for a later time.

Here are some of the film logs from my notebook:

Shot 7 = Aurora bridge from troll, 35th.  Couldn’t find truly suitable shot.  25mm RX.  Light meter 1.25k ish. f = 16. focus 200 feet – infinity.  45 feet? exposed end.  Also try to make sure that i still have film.  I heard a sound around 25 feet that made me nervous.  Shot 8 = another one of aurora!  30 feet?

Thank you for watching.  I hope that you enjoyed the movie.

Morgan