100 Feet of Awkward: Part One

on may 4, 2007, a particularly hot day, i set out to shoot my first black and white sixteen millimeter film. or short film-- 100 feet of it, actually.


the first day we went out happened after a lengthy debate with jim namba, of the caltrain's marketing team. his initial goal was to have me informed that all caltrain stations require $500/hr payment for any form of filming. and my goal was to be sure he was aware i had spent over $1,500 on caltrain rides and swore my life by the locomotive beast.

and that my crew would only consist of four people.

ultimately, he let me film for free on the grounds that i was in an out in an hour and really did come with no more than three others.

we all did manage to wake up and arrive on time, and i did manage to construct a pretty realistic booger out of some dried elmer's glue, but the camera refused to work.

there are some wonderfully magic moments in an amateur director's life and explaining to your favorite actress that she woke up at 7am to watch you make fake boogers and stare angrily at a camera is definitely not one of them.


the next day we shot with a different camera-- one that was made by russians and looked quite a bit more like a gun-- we did it without permission and we did it fast.

but because of some form of confusion, i never did receive the footage. my professor promised it never came before throwing threats at me in his tiny joe pesci voice. and i debated how i would explain to travis and kate that they'd acted in a disappearing film-- that they'd been awake in the rigid a.m.s for nothing more than artificial boogers and lies.

the following year, i took a class on color 16mm and shot a semi-decent short about relationships amongst mimes and when i went to grab the processed footage, i came across a brilliant truth: my black and white 16mm had shown up and had been waiting for me for over a year. and, more importantly, my joe pesci professor had been lying to me.

grades changed and shots were drank.

but i was never able to digitize that black and white 16mm film, never able to edit it, and never able to put it online.

till now. sort of.

i'm trying to teach myself animation-- and perhaps with the wrong tools-- so i figured it may be nice to finish that 16mm film one way or another. and, actually, in a lot of ways i think it plays better animated than it would've filmed.

so here it is: part one of five studies of awkward moments.

and you will notice that travis, kate, and my friend ben still received credit for this. because, god dammit, it was 94645767534524 degrees the morning we shot.