Colin Marshall

Observer's festival debut

My experimental short Observer just locked in to premiere on the evening of Sunday, July 10 at the Ventura Film Festival. According to the schedule, it screens during the 8-10 p.m. block at the Marriott. (You know, the hotel Little Miss Sunshine shot in.) I’m told a filmmaker Q&A will happen afterward, so feel free to turn up and ask me something. Make sure you concentrate on formless questions about what things “mean.”

Here’s Observer’s trailer, to refresh your memory (and you might even watch the full movie somewhere, if’n you’re nice to me):

I needed my memory refreshed, I can assure. Let me tell you something interesting I’ve found out about the filmmaking life, to the extent that I’ve experienced it: about a year separates shooting a project and hearing back from festivals about it, and by that point, if you’re like me, you’ve waded knee-deep into another project. I’ve already started shooting my next short, the all-Super 8, all-Borges-influenced, equally Polaroid-filled א. More on that soon.

Two girls, one Polaroid

My workload on other projects dropped just enough to let me cut together a trailer for Observer, the short film I shot this summer. (Seems kind of preposterous to make a trailer for a ten-minute movie, I know, but it helps in certain festivals. I think.) Here it is:



The full movie’s actually been done for months, though it’s not publicly viewable. (Again, that’s festival-driven.) If you want to watch it, hit me up for the password.

500 words

Brevity, Polonius said, is the soul of wit. I think that's true, yet I am, by nature, an enthusiast of the long form. In fact, longform.org, an aggregator of long-form articles new and old, may well be my favorite newish site on Internet. Clearly, brevity isn't the soul of good journalism, nor would I call it the soul of rich sonic experience, nor would I call it the soul of great literature, nor would I call it the soul of fine cinema. Because I make things I myself would enjoy — as anyone making anything should — I'm thus more of a natural long-form worker, too. Certainly I don't think brevity is the soul of fascinating interviews.

But then again, wit's nothing to scoff at. Even beyond getting big laffs, brevity's useful as a creative constraint. I've spilled much digital ink before about the catalytic effects of constraint on creation. The documentarian Errol Morris put it best, describing his way of art: "I create an arbitrary set of rules, and then follow them slavishly." Where I to create an arbitrary set of rules for blog posts, then follow them slavishly, what would they be? Could one, in the name of brevity, wit, focus, challenge, etc. be keeping each post at or under 500 words?

I'm working on two different film projects right now, both in their very early stages. One, The Aleph (which I've now started writing as just א, as it'll appear in the titles), adapts the eponymous Jorge Luis Borges short story. Since I'm working with pre-written source material and shooting on the savagely limited Super 8 film format, a lot of the "rules" are established for me: faith to the events of the text, minimal divergence from the details of the text except to strip it of its most specific temporally and geographically locative elements, no sync sound, that sort of thing.

The other, my submission to the Vimeo Festival, is wider-open yet has thus been more difficult to get my mind around. Racking my brain for ideas about what to shoot, I eventually just began laying down rules. What if I set a ten-minute time limit, halving the contest's official 20-minute cutoff? What if I shoot in black and white, but with colored text? What if I don't move the camera? What if I set a ten-second minimum shot length? (This should get a more pleasing ASL, not that I'm an ASL geek or anything.) Why not have narration that comes through the phone, and disallow that narration from referring directly to the onscreen action? Why not score it with tones that gradually dissolve into noise?

The dam broke. Ideas, so insistently un-forthcoming, flooded my mind. I went from despairing about having nothing to shoot to barely typing at pace with the movie itself as it screened in my head. Each idea I get down on the screen generates unexpected offspring. I'll tell you now that the film is about two girls and a creeping sense of exciting dread. But I could tell you so much more.