At the premiere of eRATicate my friend Ian, who plays drums for the Seatle band Monostereo, asked if I interested in making a video for them. "Sure," I said. I didn't have much of concept built for it, except the slight story of the band on its way to a show, but I grabbed my super-8 camera anyways and we began shooting. I roamed around Seattle with each band member individually looking for fun stuff to shoot. With Ian, I shot hand-held frame-by-frame to make his stuff look jumpy, like "drums". Damon, the bass player, got the frame-by-frame treatment also, but I put the camera on a tripod and asked him to scoot around to make it look smooth. For Lea, the singer and lead guitarist, I rolled the camera at 12 frames a second to give it a slight "off" look, but to make her section the most consistant. I didn't want to use these techniques all the way through the video, so I employed my talented photographer wife, Kristan, to shoot stills of their show. It was a lot of fun to put together.

I got a postcard in the mail from Addidas and the Northwest Filmmaker Forum for a short film contest. I put it to the side, not really giving it any notice. But the $10,000 prize kept tugging at my greedy side. I couldn't think of any ideas for it, but two images kept coming to mind... a guy finding a pair of shoes floating up on the beach and then the shoes breaking and the guy desperately trying to put them back together. A day of emails with a creative friend of mine lead to the storyline that it turned into.

The deadline was about three weeks away. We shot the 2nd weekend after the idea came to fruition. I couldn't think of anybody for the lead and didn't have the time to search, so I played the part. Jim, my DP for eRATicate, and I ended up shooting 90 min of footage for the short that had to be three min or less. Editing it was quite the experience, having that time limit made it a challenge, but I think it made the whole thing better, as I really trimmed it down to its necessities. My friend Brandon put together the score in less than a week. It was great to see the whole thing come together so quickly.

This is a project I've been trying to put together for a long time. Ever since the Monostereo video I've been wanting to make a video for one of my favorite Seattle bands, Blessed Light, who my friend German plays bass for. Three weeks before my family and I planned on moving out of Seattle, it finally came together. I met with the band's lead singer and founder Toby Gordon and we talked about some ideas. He wanted to make a video for a song German had wrote. I came up with a couple ideas for it, but nothing that begged to be made. German came to me with his own idea, which I liked much more than my own. We were shooting a few days later. It was interesting working on an idea that wasn't totally mine. It was more of a challenge as I didn't know exactly where I was going with it.