BACK TO PROJECTS
I came across by chance online, a project called "Road Movie", by Frieze Film 2008, which involved YouTube users putting together short, experimental films that related to the book "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy, mainly in terms of themes - the central one being a journey through a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Obviously, this sounded right up my street, but as I discovered the project so late in the day, so-to-speak, I only had a day or two to put something together - but the good thing about experimental film is that it's forgiving, and open to quick flurries of inspiration.
I certainly had a great time putting my short piece together, I used to do many such shorts years ago but haven't really done so for a good long while now. So it was nice for a quick change of pace.
Reading a bit of background about the book, upon which the project was based/inspired by, I was drawn to a sentence that described the landscape within the book was covered in ash. Combining that image with the road movie aesthetic central to the project, I dug through my back catalogue of previously shot, but unused footage.
Colouring the chosen footage (shots of driving along an empty road on a wet, overcast day, and when we last had snow where I live) in high contrast black & white, successfully re-contextualised the images - no longer was it snow, but now falling ash. No longer was the road just a low-trafficked rural route, but now was a path through a land almost entirely devoid of other people (save for the tractor and trailer at one point).
Indeed - what is this tractor and trailer combo? Well, it was part-inspired by the videogame "STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl", in which there are "death trucks", which bring dead men back from the centre of "The Zone". One night when I was driving home from a filming session, I was listening to a mix CD, and on came the theme tune to "STALKER: SoC" just as I came up behind a battered old van with a rusted steel cage on the back, which reminded me of the "death truck" idea - so I wanted to include this idea. In reality of course, it was just a tractor trundling along, but within this new context it's a neat little image.
I edited the film together quite quickly, like I said I was having a lot of fun putting it together and enjoying the chance to indulge in high contrast black & white footage, and then uploaded it to my YouTube channel before attaching it to the Frieze Film 2008 Group. All this on the penultimate day of the project before it closed so that those involved could take the chosen films and re-edit the footage into four, 3 minute shorts for the 3 Minute Wonder slot on Channel 4 during mid-October 2008.
At the time of writing I don't know what will become of my footage in the project, but out of the 160 videos attached to the Frieze Film 2008 Group, only 30-odd have been uploaded specifically to their page - mine being one of the chosen 30-odd.
As for what my film is about - essentially it's all from the viewpoint of a passenger in a scavenged vehicle, who is travelling through an empty land. During this journey they blink in-and-out of memories of the ash falling on the landscape (the blinks denoted by quick fades). Finally, I added music by Brian Wright, and that was that.
