Maybe Film Dreams

Did you know: an increasing number of underprivileged film reels sit perpetually dormant? So mightn't they spend this time dreaming? Part lighthearted musings and part Linklater-dubbed montage, this aesthetically chaotic short focuses on the medium of film—as seen on celluloid—and toys with the notion of an industry-wide digital takeover.

A curious narrator ponders what it means to be a 'good' film, presupposing that movies on film aren't anywhere near as valuable as their digital equivalents. His shortsightedness, however, is revealed through the very film he narrates.

• My first film shot on actual film (B&W Kodak Tri-X Super 8mm)
• I shot all the footage for a Spring 2009 CSIF workshop entitled Playing with Film: A Hands-on Introduction to Experimental Filmmaking Techniques. In it, we went over various different methods of personalizing your footage such as hand-processing, optical printing, photograms, and more.
• Originally, I edited the footage on Super8, then used the optical printer to blow it up to 16mm and add a few effects. Unfortunately, the 16mm print came out really faded and was pretty much unusable... so I telecined the original Super8 negative to DV and recreated the project on FCP. I never did much else with that version since I decided it didn't properly communicate what I wanted to say. Months later, when I was looking back at the footage, I decided to make up a new, entirely different 'story' using the same footage. Luckily, I managed to keep most of the originally intended themes and ideas intact.
• The segment of 'archival' footage used is from Jacques Tati's awe-inspiring masterwork Play Time from 1967.
• The audio samples used come from several films by Richard Linklater: Slacker (1991), Waking Life (2001), Before Sunset (2004), and A Scanner Darkly (2006).