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?

For me, it was a time of introspection and what made the trip so memorable was not the museums and landmarks, it was the slow, cold stillness and spirit of a world so close to the arctic circle. It was the warmth of loyalty and friendship from Dan and Justin. It was the brightness of the countryside during the day, and the early dark of night when the streets would reflect the Christmas lights. It was stumbling around the deck of a cruise ship, drunk on duty-free Baileys, wearing a winter parka but no shirt, and being convinced than an angry Russian had thrown one of my friends into the cold, dark Baltic Sea.

Its hard to put into words, but there was something about that trip that changed me, and I am grateful for it. When we got back I tried to capture the heart of the experience in a short video that I made and gave to Justin and Dan. It is comprised of short video clips that I shot with my Canon PowerShot G3 digital camera. Needless to say, its not very good at shooting video, it is meant for still photography, but I liked the simplicity of shooting small, impromptu clips.  My only regret is that I had forgotten that it could even capture video until halfway through the trip.

Below are some of my favorite photos from the trip and the packaging that I made for the video.

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.

If you’re not familiar with Guy Maddin’s work, do check it out. He’s an amazing film-maker. His work is often sad and funny and twisted and beautiful all at once. “Brand Upon The Brain” is definitely all of those things. The film is based, in part, on Guy’s imagined childhood. In the film, young Guy Maddin grows up in a lighthouse that is also an orphanage which is ran by his overly strict and verbally abusive mother. She sits at the top of the lighthouse and watches everything the children do. I won’t spoil it for you, but I will say that things get strange and complicated. Needless to say, innocence is lost!

Here’s the trailer:

The story begins with grown-up Guy putting a fresh coat of white paint on the lighthouse, so we took that as inspiration for the type treatment, which I hand painted with India Ink. From there we represented the lighthouse by cutting out pieces of construction paper and creating a lighthouse-like composition. We wanted to make it personal and reference the children in the story, so the hand-made approach seemed right.

We added in images of 3 of the main characters and represented the mother as the all-knowing eye perched atop the lighthouse. Around the radiating beams we hand wrote phrases which appear in the film. The hand-written technique references the letter that grown-up Guy Maddin reads at the offset of the film.

For the inside booklet I used the same hand-painted type style but did it over some Polaroids that I took of the film while watching it on my TV. This gave me some new images to work with that had that nice, blurry, film-like quality, which seemed consistent with Guy’s technique.

Booklet Cover – Open and Flat

Inside Back Cover Spread

For the DVD Menus we basically took the cover concept a little further and built menu pages out of some of the cover elements, creating new illustrations when needed. When Guy first released the film, many of the screenings were accompanied by live narration. We referenced that performance aspect by making the menus somewhat reminiscent of theatrical productions.

All in all it was a great project to work on and everyone, including Guy Maddin, was happy with the results. If you’re interested in obtaining a copy, you can purchase the film here. Onward!

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.

Justin’s approach for the DVD packaging was creative and fitting. The piece comes as separate parts assembled in a plastic sleeve.  The base was a piece of particle board, cut to size and wrapped with newsprint. On it was glued a raised, foam cylinder, which held the DVD in place. Collected on top of the wood piece are a series of square prints. Our visual interpretations of the film’s themes.

For the DVD menus I re-executed the films basic form-factor of juxtaposing simple footage with chaotic bursts. There are three menu items, behind which plays a simple, slowed down piece of abstract footage which occasionally abruptly cuts to one of the films chaotic, short bursts of footage. One of the menu links allows you to play the music from the film. By clicking it you are presented with a small window of footage from the film which is accompanied by one of the songs used in the film. You can just let them all play or skip around. Justin’s younger brother Zach thought this was sweet.

As a whole I think the DVD menus and packaging are very complimentary and supportive of the film itself. They have the same the same hand-touched feel and personal soul of the film. The DVD has surprises and a voice of its own, but doesn’t over-shadow the film.  There are probably a few things that we could’ve done better, but learning is part of the process. If you are lucky enough to work on projects that challenge your abilities you are bound to make mistakes. If you’re smart you learn from them.

Read Part Seven: Lessons Learned.

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.

Sketchy Editing Setup

We worked on it every Thursday night, and whenever else we could find time. It was tedious and tiring, but exciting as well. Justin’s attention to detail has always impressed me and he really took the lead on the editing. I was easily distracted but Justin was focused and hell-bent on making this film. It was a privilege to work with him.

Justin Kemerling, October 20th, 2003 at 9:23 PM. Steady editing all the live-long day.

Because we were new to editing film and we were learning Final Cut Pro as we went, we decided to keep things really simple. We used simple, quick cuts and experimented with multiplying layers of video on top of each other. We also flipped some of the footage, ran some of it in reverse as well as repeating some clips a number of times. As a designer, I think that sometimes knowing a lot of techniques can cloud your focus with too many options. So in a way, it was nice for us to come at this process unencumbered by too much experience. It kept the focus on the story itself and not the techniques we were using to tell it.

We got pretty far along and decided that we just needed one solid day to work it all out. So we both called in sick on the same day and hunkered down in my apartment to put the finishing touches on the film. It was winter and the day was cold and grey. We ate soup, drank coffee, laughed and hoped all the live-long day. It was great and by that night we had finished “The Sprinter.”

Justin Kemerling, November 6th, 2003, 11:49 PM after just completing “The Sprinter.”

We celebrated over a couple beers and the next day we went back to work.

Read Part Six: The DVD.

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.

Driving 07 – Excerpt from our 2 hour session.

Sketchy Pro Tools Setup

Prior to our session with Joe we hadn’t really discussed any particular style or sound for the music, we just wanted to see what happened when we got together. We gave Joe a VHS with a rough compilation of the shots to give him something visual to reference, but other than that we just played what we wanted to hear. For lack of a better word, we just jammed. What we came up with turned out to be surprisingly fitting, even with the mistakes inherent in unrehearsed music.

Driving 01 – Excerpt from our 2 hour session.

Driving 05 – Excerpt from our 2 hour session.

Justin Kemerling – Bass Player

After that Justin and I went through the audio and trimmed it down to a set of small moments that seemed to fit the pace and feel of the film. We added second guitar to some parts and ambient noise to other parts. We also created a few pieces of sound separately with a drum machine and some instruments in my apartment.

Driving 03 – Excerpt from our 2 hour session.

There was only one piece that wasn’t part of that two hour session with Joe. It came about a little differently. Around this time my fiance and I got married and took a honeymoon. While we were gone we gave Justin the keys to our apartment and he lived there, working on The Sprinter. When I came home there was a note on the computer directing me to some music that he’d worked on. One track specifically really knocked me out. It was a simple drum cadence with a somber, beautiful bass-line. I listened to it once and immediately picked up my guitar and started playing along with it. After a couple minutes I had a part that seemed to match. I’m definitely a believer in creative synchronicity, so when the inspiration hits, I stop what I’m doing and take full advantage of it. So I recorded my part and we ended up using that piece in the final climax of the film.

The Release – “The Sprinter’s” final song.

Once we had all of the tracks assembled we gave them to our friend Brendan McGinn to master the audio. After that we had all the music and noise for the film, save for one late addition. We went back to the practice space and recorded our friend Ian Whitmore yelling. We wanted the only voice in the film to be subtle and almost imperceptible, but we also wanted it to be hugely expressive, so we asked Ian, who was the singer in Call In/Out, to give us one good yell to layer deep into our film.

He yelled for a long time and almost threw up. It ended up working perfectly.

To hear the finished product use the link below to download a zipped file containing 14 refined tracks from “The Sprinter” soundtrack.

DOWNLOAD “THE SPRINTER” SOUNDTRACK – 38MB

Read Part Five: Editing.

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.

We kept the day long shoot as organic as possible. There was no shot list or storyboards, just what felt right at that moment and in those places. Our only guide was a preconceived route that Justin had established and which we completed a number of times.

We filmed everything with a trusty Minolta XL-Sound42 that Mike Semrad loaned us which I have yet to return.

As I mentioned before, we shot everything on 8mm. I did almost all of the filming that day. Ringo is very photogenic and was a natural in front of the camera. The majority of the footage was shot in the car as we drove around, so I tried to find unexpected compositions incorporating the landscape through the windows of the car, while catching Ringo as often as possible. For some of the shots I rode with Justin in a separate car, filming Ringo as he drove the route. For others I was out on the road filming and for one shot I rode on the hood of the car, filming Ringo as he drove.

Stills of Ringo driving.

As a collaborator, Ringo was perfect. He’s not an actor by trade, but he dove headlong into the role. This would’ve been a challenge for some people – there was no dialogue, no other actors, just Ringo, driving, thinking, sprinting. He would ask us what this guy would think about, questions about his past, what kind of job did he have. Some of it we had answers for, but some of it we just left open to Ringo’s interpretation. More than an actor we thought of him as a partner.

For the final shot of the film we went to a long gravel road outside Lincoln. As I touched on before, the scene consists of the man parking the car, leaving the door open, walking between two points in the road and sprinting back to the car. Its his moment of release, its clarity in the midst of his clusterfuck world. It represents everything that is human and primal about this man, it is the tears of his grandfather manifest in every step.

We shot it a number of times, Ringo was a trooper. He almost threw up.

We filmed the final scene of the car driving away and we went and drank beers on B-Rad’s porch.

Inspiration: One of the most direct cinematic influences on us during the making of “The Sprinter” was Dziga Vertov’s “Man With a Movie Camera.” Its a silent film which follows a filmmaker as he documents life in a number of Russian cities. The film didn’t have a script or employ the use of professional actors and although it was a silent film (with no titles) it was accompanied by live music when it was released in 1929. It is a beautfiully crafted film and we felt a real kinship with Vertov’s techniques and intentions as we created “The Sprinter.”

Some of my favorite images from the film:

Read Part Four: The Music.

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.

It was exciting to embark on a new type of project. We would get together in my apartment, sitting at the circle table in the kitchen and sketch and talk and plan and scheme and laugh and hope. It all felt new and familiar at the same time.

Over the next two years Justin and I worked on “The Sprinter.” Justin came up with the story’s premise and I focused more on the visual approach. We decided on using 8mm and having no dialogue. This being our first film, it just felt more true to start with a simple format and to set some limitations in order to focus our idea.

Still From”The Sprinter” – Part of the final scene.

The story is about a man who feels alone and out of place in this modern world. He is distracted by his thoughts and feels adrift with no history. To remedy this the man routinely embarks on a pilgrimage, driving a specific route through the streets of his city, stopping on a gravel road on the outskirts of town. There he parks his car, walks a quarter of a mile, between two markers, and sprints the distance back to his car. He feels a moments rest. A tiny peace. It is him chipping away at his discontent.

To execute the story we decided to divide the film into two different shot types. The main element would be a linear progression showing the man driving to the gravel road and climaxing with his sprint. We would break up the linear story with short bursts of hectic imagery and noisy ambient sounds, a reference to the data smog that the man wades through every day.

Still From”The Sprinter” – Part of one of the short, spurratic bursts of footage.

With the story established and the format decided upon we spent the next a year and a half shooting footage to use as the chaotic bursts. We also each carried dictation recorders with us and recorded ambient sounds to use as the audio for those sections of the film.

We had known all along that we wanted our friend Ringo to play the role of the man in our film, but we didn’t know if he would do it. When Justin first asked Ringo he didn’t hesitate. HIs response – no way. Justin assured him that he wouldn’t have to talk in the film, and that he would be the only actor, so he wouldn’t have to interact with anyone. After that, Ringo was on board.

Still from “The Sprinter” – Ringo, sprinting.

The next step was to find a car to use in the film. Neither of our cars really fit the part, so we started looking around for a car that would be a match for Ringo’s character. We remembered that a co-worker named Dan Henderson had fixed my girlfriends car once and had laoned her a car to drive in the meantime. That loaner turned out to be the perfect fit and Dan was totally game to contribute.

He later offered to sell it to us for $600, but we declined.

Read Part Three: Filming.

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.

Read Part Two: The Setup.