Please tell us about the projects you worked on before making ‘For The Billionth Time
Today’. How did you start, and how did you learn to make films?
I drew a lot when I was a kid- creating characters inspired by a lot of evocative imagery coming from books, movies, music and video games. I always wanted to have backstories for my monster creations and it was in the back of my head that maybe one day I could write books, or make movies or create video games, but I never took it seriously. My sophomore year in high school; for a History project we had the opportunity to present our topic in any medium we wanted. At that moment I got the idea to make a fake movie trailer. I felt this almost divine kind of instinctual urge to go for it, so I grabbed the two friends I had and with my scrappy iPhone 7 and some Photoshop video editing, we embarked on this huge ambitious production. By the end of it, we had a solid, humble piece of art that I was incredibly moved by despite it being the first thing I’ve ever done with video. From there I tried to throw myself in as many video-related positions as possible at school, recording sporting events and theatre productions. I got really into it and bought a cheap DSLR camera, which led me into freelancing around my community and making more “cinematic” projects. After graduating, I went to art school and studied film and animation. I spent all of college making catalogues of shorts with the limited and affordable resources I had. One project I made a stop motion animation using shaved off hair and broken computer parts I found from the trash, another I used all my childhood objects to build this shrine I projected baby videos of myself onto. I kept on experimenting and challenging myself to do something I’d have never done before, and by the end of my second to last year, I had a whole pool of different kinds of magic I found.
That brings it to For The Billionth Time Today, which was my finale thesis project. And I wanted to try and capture everything I’ve figured out in one singular piece, technically and thematically.
Tell us about ‘For The Billionth Time Today’. How do you describe it?
I always see it as a nightmare- a personal nightmare flowing like ones I’ve felt before and featuring the same exact locations and demons I’d come across in those darker moments. But going even further, I believe it’s a nightmare you encounter along with these characters, that also delivers this extreme form of healing. It allows me to grieve so much and hear things I need to hear even now to this day, but through these means that are horrifyingly surreal. Looking back in my own life, I have received the most pivotal catharsis from the most inadvertent and terrifying places, and this film is a crazy multimedia and thematic clusterfuck of that, I think.
Please tell us about your favorite filmmakers.
Scott Northrup, Oksana Mirzoyan, Josh Harrell and Danielle Lyle-Moore are active Michigan/Detroit filmmakers I had the pleasure to learn from while I attended the College for Creative Studies. Their influence and wisdom directly shaped me to be the filmmaker I am today and it happens to be that I am so captivated by their work as well. I’m also incredibly inspired by contemporary voices in Horror right now, and I think some of the most heart and passion I’ve felt in the current cinematic world has come from that
“genre”, if it’s even fair to sum it up to just that. Jane Schoenbrun, Ari Aster, Julia Ducournau, Coralie Fargeat, and Jordan Peele have all personalized their unique perspective on Horror and have used that energy to convey something deeply abstract yet individualistic. They are true inventors at heart and are making work that’s so clearly for them, and I love that. And this goes outside of the medium but music has just as a significant role in my process of inspiration as films do. At times, music can be even more vivid and visual than films themselves and honestly conjure up ideas for my projects more than movies do. Accessible and free streaming platforms like Spotify, Soundcloud and YouTube have sparked this new wave of independent “sound” bringing all kinds of strong experimentation and intimacy. Current heads of that movement that inspire me are Ethel Cain, Portraits of Tracy, Cameron Winter, Xiu Xiu (especially), JPEGMAFIA, Perfume Genius, etc.
If you were given a good budget, what would be your ideal project?
If I were given a higher budget for the next project, I would like to experiment more with expanded cinema, in which I make films dedicated to a site-specific space to view them in. I’ve undergone two projects like this before and each of them were built from everyday objects in my surroundings and relied a lot on the pre-exisiting location the project lived in. I’ve learned that film grants so much free ability to lie and create illusions whereas sculpture is a much more physical and demanding medium that’s almost unshakable. Construction costs can rise quickly, but more funds for the project can help cover that and maybe hire more people who have expertise in fabrication and sculpture.
Describe how you would ensure that production is on schedule. What steps would you take?
Undiagnosed OCD probably got me to the finish line if I took a stab in the dark. I had journals and google docs going throughout the whole life span of the project, marking my progress on very minute yet explicit goals I had for an overarching plan. I knew that if I kept my plans too vague and abstract, then I would notice too late that I don’t have something tangible to realize. Tangibility is the key to progress, in my opinion. When it comes to moments I knew I wanted to be spontaneous in, I would plan for them ahead of time like I’m scheduling blocks for recess. I made sure my producer kept me on a leash too when we were filming, and to reel me in when we reached a certain time. Communication is so critical for the entire process of making art, and making sure everyone else is on the same page as the plan. Of course, there will be problems that arise and surprise you. On the set of For The Billionth Time Today, the metal wings Jaylen’s character wore snapped mid scene. There was no way to fix them to Jaylen’s back, therefore we couldn’t shoot any shot in which Jaylen was standing let alone walking. But in that moment, I rerouted any frustration I had with laughter and treated it like a pop-quiz puzzle. If he can’t stand with the wings, could he sit down and sandwich the wings between his back and the couch? Are there angles to shoot at that we don’t see the wings? Can we film specific close up shots of him that only show his face? On the spot, I embraced the challenge of finding different directions to go in while filming. As a result, we immediately jumped back into it and shot the scene as it was destined to be, and treated its weaknesses as advantages.
What was the hardest part of making ‘For The Billionth Time Today’.
Honestly, everything in the car, but I also think those moments in the car are the strongest in the whole film. Originally I had scripted out dialogue for that scene but I hated it. For such vulnerable and delicate moments, I feel like I was imposing too much on it with my own naive words. And on top of that, I wanted the performances to be strong and not artificial-feeling. So instead of writing and enforcing the words I already knew, I wanted to discover them through my actors. I sat down with Jaylen and Cole a month and a half before our car shoot and told them that instead of rehearsing a script, I want to base their performances entirely on improv and organic conversations between themselves. I had them get to know each other quite well and perform exercises that challenged each other's personalities. After getting them to experience that, I recorded them improvising a scene with similar character dynamics but completely unrelated subject matter. We’d do this for a few hours on the weekends, and I would come home and watch the hours worth of footage back, picking up where their chemistry revealed itself, what patterns arose in their word choice, how they used body language to emphasize their beliefs. And after taking notes on these recordings, I would write a new simulation for them to enter, challenging how they interact with one another and encouraging their recurring word choice that’s accurate to their real selves. I slowly revealed my intentions with these car scenes as a whole as we rehearsed more and more.
By a week or two before the shoot, I had made a full “script” of dialogue that captures the pure cross section between the characters I had written and the people that embodied them. I provided them with libraries of their own methods of communication and showed them when it would be best to time it in this weird meta plan. There were checkpoints to hit in their conversation, but I never wanted there to be explicit dialogue that they would have to recite in order to progress. Mood was what I wanted to emulate, not word for word memorizations of lines in a script.
The result was something that felt so naturalistic and candid, like they were experiencing
those conversations for the first time each take. And in a way they were, no take sounded the exact same. By doing this, it would be impossible to re-do the scene word for word, so we had a three camera set up capturing the absolute necessary angles at all times to get the coverage we needed. In post, I managed to find the pin-point-perfectly-timed matches to switch between takes, and those had to be really really hidden in order to work. The compositing of the attic background was also so hard to work with. I hadn’t worked with lighting green screen a lot, especially in tight spaces like the car, so on set I wasn’t thinking ahead to how much the light would bounce onto the subjects. Cleaning it up and working with the colors was so difficult too. Still the biggest flaw of the film in my opinion. But with those challenges came a whole semester’s worth of lessons about what to do and not do with green screen and made me a stronger compositor.
If possible, tell us about your next work. What plans do you have for your future work?
Well first of all, For The Billionth Time Today was really an accumulation of my entire life at that point so I think I need to live some more life first before the next big thing you know. But with that being said, I am very fascinated with internet culture especially through YouTube personalities and video essays, propaganda and impressionability online, etc. Watching Billionth Time back and seeing that iPad kid play as Death and watch all those crazy videos feels like subtle foreshadowing to me. It’s like I knew that’s where I’d be going next while bringing it to life. There’s something actively in the works right now along with a visual album I’m finally coming around to. Believe it or not, For The Billionth Time Today was going to be a series of music videos with no dialogue at all before it naturally evolved into a singular narrative piece. That’s a story for another time but point being… I’m finally getting the chance to make that type of project happen.
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