Monday, February 6, 2023

25th Anniversary of the film: Who Makes Your Reality?


Roughly 25 years ago I produced a claymation film called “Who Makes Your Reality?” This film was never properly released and I later went on to re-edit this film into a different film by the same name. I have “restored” the original film with the original soundtrack and I am sharing it now along with the second version which I "officially" released some years later.


Why two films were made from this production involves some technical backstory, as well as different aspects of my insecurity and arrogance. I’ll try to keep it brief.


I went to UNLV Film school in the late 90’s. This film would not exist if not for this fact. At the time Film Production was on the cusp of a massive overhaul involving computer editing. Looking back from todays perspective it's easy to see that time was the stone age long before making videos became something virtually everyone can now access. The year I made this film was the first year the film department had installed a nonlinear computer editing lab. Everyone in the class was psyched about getting our hands on computer editing. I was too but I was also intrigued by the ability to cut my film the traditional way using a flatbed editor. It felt like the last opportunity to take advantage of that archaic technology, as a luddite, and a contrarian, I opted to use the flatbed editor instead. This proved to be a good idea as I didn’t have to share the editor with any other students allowing me to work for hours and eventually days uninterrupted.


In my first film production class I attempted to experiment with film in every way I could. I animated, I did stop motion, I got as pretentious as I could in every direction. My first attempt at this pretention was Progress.


In my second year I wanted to create a world from the ground up and I didn’t want to deal with actors. So I ran with the idea of a claymation short.

I didn’t write a script for “Who Makes Your Reality?” so much as jot down the concept and begin by heavily storyboarding. I expected that I would add audio later not realizing most animators begin with audio and create images to match the sound. My attempting to do this with images first would prove to be fortuitous.


I realized near the end of the semester that my professor required sound and image in order to receive a passing grade for the class. This was crazy. Adding sound would take a whole other semester. So I came up with a plan. At the time I had a Hi8 video camera which I used it to shoot punk shows. I decided to cut the film on the flatbed, videotape the playback, and mouth the soundtrack myself for the purposes of this class. It would add a spontaneous element to the film and get the idea for the story across in a way that was akin to performance. This was how the first version of the film came to be.


I wrote the story out as a rough script, I had the film cut on the flatbed to match my concept, and then I let it run while I videotaped the film off the screen and added the audio using just my voice in one take. It proved to be a great way of conveying the story.


This was the version I turned in for the class. While I was proud of how it turned out but I didn’t expect this would be the final version of the film. I expected to add a real soundtrack to come later.


At the time I was in a pseudo post hardcore rock band and I had recently written a grant to press a vinyl record through the Nevada Arts Council. As a result of getting this grant I discovered the Fellowship Award the Arts Council gave out each year. I wanted to submit this claymation film, even if didn’t have enough time to complete the real audio I was hoping to add. The reactions I'd seen from people viewing this rough cut gave me enough confidence to submit this version, the nly version I had at the time to the arts council. It won over the judges in the Fellowship competition beating out over 70 other artists allowing me to win the Fellowship Award for visual arts for 1999-2000!


This is where the story gets weird.


The original soundtrack ruled. In retrospect I should have transferred the film from 16mm to digital and then married that original soundtrack to slick digital images. That’s not what happened. Instead I decided to produce an entirely new soundtrack using actors. This involved writing a more solid script from which to follow the images. So I spent a good deal of time recording new audio. The film went through numerous edits eventually becoming a different film from the original soundtrack.


In the original soundtrack, the central vision is easy to digest. Don’t take what you see on TV (or the internet) as the gospel. The real world is full of nuance and different perspectives. While it may be ugly it is a reality that needs to be reckoned with and discovered on it's own, with no filter. THINK FOR YOURSELF. QUESTION AUTHORITY.


Altough I would mention it’s pretty clear I was also taking a swipe at journalism in this film. Part of that was because I briefly thought about pursuing journalism at the time. The irony is I was distrustful of the field of journalism because I didn’t think it empirically possible to tell the news 100% truthfully which seemed to me a sham. More importantly how often does the ‘news media” go about uncovering the real bullshit? Not nearly enough of the time it seemed. I didn’t know shit. I was looking at the surface of journalism as reflected through television. The truth is journalism is incredibly important to democracy despite it’s shortcomings.

Today I would say no one deserves more respect than journalists trying to uncover any truths in whatever capacity. There are some out there doing an outstanding job. Someone must bear witness and maybe the shit will not be 100% accurate but that is because we’re human, not robots. There are fewer jobs more dangerous today than those journalists pursue if they’re looking in the right place. I hope more students today consider it because I can guarantee this may not be a good paying profession but it will go a long way in to making a change in society. Look how threatened the authoritarians are by journalists.

I spent a long time editing the second version of this film. Was it time wasted? I’m still not entirely sure. The second film is entertaining but I think the original version is the definitive version. The second film finds me trying to be lyrical and poetic. But thematically, in this new version, the original vision is lost. It loses the critique of the media and it’s message, instead becoming more of a philosophical rant that does’t entirely hold. It questions the concept of truth over the concept of personal reality. It’s may be slightly funnier, largely because of the other actors involved, but it loses the real message of the film: THINK FOR YOURSELF. In fact I think it plays into the bullshit media (internet) landscape in which we find ourselves where people are content to create their own reality and seek out reassurance of their own perspective instead of facing reality and gaining a true sense of the world as it exists.


For many this is the state of the world today; some are happy to deny reality, willing to listen to lies that reinforce a world view not based in fact. The concept of Truth is slippery meaning different things to different people. But some truths are self evident and to deny these truths is a slippery slope that will eventually lead to authoritarianism.


Voltaire once said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

I live for the truth. To live in this Post-Truth world is disgusting and makes me weep for the future.


Now some technical mumbo jumbo.


I digitized the 16mm negatives in 2000 and promptly began editing the footage into the new "second cut." Until now the original version was only available with the poorly rendered Hi8 video which I shot off the flatbed editor at UNLV. Despite the stellar performance (sarcasm), the soundtrack leaves a lot to be desired. The constant clicking of the flatbed editor was the main reason I never wanted to consider this as the soundtrack. But it’s not terrible, and it can’t be fixed, so it is what it is.


Certainly it occurred to me years ago to try and cut this original soundtrack to the newly digitized images but I never got around to it. Eventually I somehow misplaced the unedited digitized files and later lost the actual 16mm color negatives and the cut and taped color print as well!


As the 25th anniversary approached I wanted to cut the original with remastered good images. Since the raw footage was lost I came to realize the only way I could cut the film with good images was to use the final edit of the "second cut" and edit it to fit the original. (Confused yet?) This took some time because during the process of cutting the "second cut" I must have made a half dozen shitty versions of which I had multiple copies. Many of which I deleted or threw out over the years. Eventually I found a file that reads “Reality 3/5/05.” These were the only clean digitized images I could find of this film, so I cut the original version found here using images from this "second cut", which I am now calling the definitive version of the "second cut." Make sense?


I’m so happy to finally have a clean version of this film to share and it only took 25 years. My antipathy towards the second version of the film came from my insecurity as well as knowing in my heart that the second cut did not measure up to the original vision. I’m glad to share them both with you now. Maybe there’s something to be learned from both films? You tell me.


I’m less proud to know that this film has become more relevant with the passing of time. I leave this work here and I hope it imparts some wisdom which should be self evident. THINK FOR YOURSELF and QUESTION AUTHORITY.


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