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?
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.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
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.
Back in February I had the opportunity to contribute designs to one of my all-time favorite companies, The Criterion Collection. I’ve always been a film buff and if it wasn’t for The Criterion Collection my knowledge of film would be much, much smaller. So when Sarah Habibi contacted me about doing some design work for them, I jumped at the opportunity. This first project, for Jacques Tati’s “Trafic” came right as I was set to move from Chicago to San Francisco, so it was a little challenging working it into my schedule, but totally worth it.