Scandinavia - December 2004 from Jason Hardy on Vimeo.
In December of 2004 a friend of mine, Dan Schrieber, was living in Sweden in a small town a few hours North of Stockholm. Justin Kemerling and I decided that we wanted to visit Dan and what better time to see Scandinavia that in the dead of winter?
There is a constant, nagging little voice in the back of my head that is always saying the same thing:
“Make something.”
As often as I can, I oblige. It keeps me inspired, it helps me find new techniques and explore new ideas, it gets that voice out of my head for at least a short time. The results aren’t always great. In fact, rarely are they great, but I keep doing it for the simple reason that making is part of things. It just needs to be there.
In the spirit of unfiltered, random creation, I’ve put together the Unender Visual Stream, which is basically a place for me to post things that I’ve made, which have no other purpose than to simply exist. A lot of them are photos I’ve taken with different cameras, some are hand-made, some are techniques I’m exploring in Photoshop. I’ve been doing it for a month or so now, and here are some of my favorite bits of creative ephemera.
Back in April I started working on another packaging project for The Criterion Collection. This time it was for the Guy Maddin film “Brand Upon The Brain!” It was a lot of fun and, as usual, everyone at The Criterion Collection was great to work with.
Jason Hardy and Justin Kemerling. Photo by Ian Whitmore.
Looking back on The Sprinter today, I still feel very proud. It was a pure expression and born from the DIY music culture that we loved so dearly. It was something that we didn’t understand but that we felt compelled to do, and I love that feeling. We did it for us, for the love of expression, for our very own amusement with no regard for the conclusion. And my life has been better because of it.
After completing The Sprinter I felt inspired and empowered to learn about and experiment with many forms of artful expression. I also found greater delight in experimenting with old formats and processes. As a whole, It reinforced my love of creating and communicating, regardless of the medium, and inspired me to progress as a creative generalist.
Once we finished The Sprinter Justin and I saw no reason to stop there and we have collaborated on projects together ever since. The only question that remains is when Justin and I will do another film together. I don’t have an answer to that, but I feel pretty confident that it will happen.
After finishing The Sprinter Justin and I split the duties for the DVD production. Justin conceptualized the packaging design and I designed and programmed the DVD menus and functionality. We collaborated back and forth and eventually produced a bunch of copies which we sold on The Match Factory and at the various film festivals and art shows where The Sprinter was shown.
So we developed the story, filmed all of our footage, recorded and produced the soundtrack and were ready to start editing the film.
The first step was digitizing all of the 8mm footage, which was an expensive and time-consuming process. Basically, as far as we knew, there was only one place in America that would process the film and it was in Kansas City, so we sent it there to be processed. They sent us the processed reels and we mailed some of them to a place in Minneapolis to have them digitized. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the names of those places. All told, I think it cost us around $300 to process and digitize all the footage.
Once we had all of the footage digitized we burned a rough arrangement of clips to DVD to watch and contemplate. We got a copy of Final Cut Pro and sat in my downtown Lincoln apartment putting it all together.
Joe Heider - Drummer.
As I mentioned in earlier posts, the format that we decided on for the film was basically a linear narrative divided up by bursts of quickly edited, noisy imagery. The linear narrative would have musical accompaniment while the short bursts would be put together with layers of noise recorded with our dictation recorders. The noise part was pretty easy, but the music was still up in the air.
Around this time I had started playing in a band named Call In Call Out. Our drummer Joe Heider was very good and was a natural when it came to free form playing. I knew that Justin and I could riff off of one another and I thought that he and Joe would work well together. So on November 30th, 2003, we took the computer to the Call In/Out practice space and set up our gear to record. We had two separate tracks to work with, so we put the drums and bass on one track and separated the guitar on the other track. We pressed record and Justin, Joe and I played music for 2 hours.
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Driving 07 - Excerpt from our 2 hour session.
As I mentioned in the previous post, “The Sprinter” is divided into two basic shot types. There is the mad bursts of erratic imagery and noise and there is the linear narrative of the man acting out his ritual. In this post I’ll talk about filming the linear narrative of “The Sprinter.”
The day of the shoot was beautiful. Justin and I went to Ringo’s house to pick him up and to give him his wardrobe, which consisted solely of a white button up shirt. His own, high-water pants and worn in shoes would work fine. We asked him to shave. He obliged. Then we started filming.
Justin Kemerling and Jason Hardy back in the day. Photo by Ian Whitmore.
Prior to creating “The Sprinter”, Justin and I had been in bands together since high school. We spent years writing, playing and recording music with our friend and drummer Mike Semrad. Being an active musician is a way of life. At the time we were writing songs, practicing two or three times a week, performing and recording, so I was constantly thinking about and working on music. Creatively it was an inspired and fulfilling time.
We played our final show as RKT FM in B-Rad’s basement at the Viapunx house and shortly thereafter Mike moved to Chicago to continue his personal musical endeavors.
It was at this time that Justin and I first started talking about “The Sprinter.” We both wanted to continue our creative partnership but we were ready to try something new. Justin was doing a lot of writing and, thanks to our friend Craig Turnwall, we had been experimenting with 8mm footage and were thinking about stories and moving visuals together. A short film seemed like a natural progression.
“The Sprinter” by Justin Kemerling and Jason Hardy.
A number of years ago (circa 2002-ish) my friend Justin Kemerling and I set out to create something together. What we settled on was the creating of a short film. It was (and still is) called “The Sprinter” and it had a profound effect on me.This is the first in a series of posts about “The Sprinter.” The idea here being to remember and share this project with everyone. The how and what and why of it all. For me, personally, to relive those days and revel in the messes we made. But ultimately, my hope is that this story inspires you. Either way, this is “The Sprinter”, take from it what you will.
“The Sprinter” is 15 minutes long and intentionally challenges attention spans. There is repetition with subtle change until a final burst of action breaks the cycle. Without the storm there can be no calm (and vice-versa).
“The Sprinter” best seen in the dark basement of an art supply store in Lincoln Nebraska, while standing on the dirt floor viewing the film being projected onto a white sheet with an old grade school overhead projector that is somehow hooked up to a VCR with sound coming out of an old boombox. But, since we don’t have access to that setup anymore, the internet will have to suffice. Clicking on Vimeo’s little expand icon and watching it surrounded by a dark screen might help achieve that projected basement feeling.
Over the next series of posts I’ll talk about how the idea came about, how we filmed and edited “The Sprinter”, where the music came from and how we put together the DVD.