quadresson

in the early weeks of october, i had a lot on my mind. my brain never seems to shut off in the first place (a trait that drives me crazy at times yet i wouldn't have it any other way) and with all that was happening in my life, i was getting good at holding roundtable discussions with myself.

in my "experimental film" class, we looked at the work of artists like david hockney, examining the concept of looking at scenes in life from different perspectives and viewpoints. hockney worked mostly in still photographs and an option for our assignment was to apply those principles in a video format.

sitting in a couch outside the department offices, i started jotting down some ideas that were lame and aimless but would fulfill the parameters of the assignment. but mostly, i was thinking about utah. about all that i had left behind there. how long would it take me to build a new life here? would i always be feeling the gap that i had left behind? i certainly wasn't off to a good start here. most times, i really wasn't the movie night/rock bander that me and my friends loved in the red door. i was still me, but not the awesome me. hmmm. there's different sides of me, too. i wished i could be awesomejeff all the time, or, rather, i felt like i should be, but i was ok being whatever jeff i felt like being and i hoped that was ok, too. i mean, it's still me. i started writing down ideas in my notebook, quickly scribbling, sometimes with real intensity, sometimes in different directions on the page, partly because i didn't want to lose any ideas, partly because i was in a mad artistic fervor, and partly because i thought i would be cool if it looked like i wrote this in a mad artistic fervor.

at any rate, i had my idea: i would interview myself, four times, each time as a different facet of myself. the interviews would be played simultaneously, with identical questions being asked, and all four answers would be honest and accurate, even if they seemed to contradict. if we can look at an object or a person from different angles, why not do the same thing on an internal and emotional level?

i shot a test of it and generally liked it. i saw some things to change and fix (we all know i saw "um" a lot, but when there's four of me thinking aloud at the same time, that became something to fix for the actual shoot). the emotional honesty of this kind left me feeling self-indulgent and self-conscious when i showed it in front of my class, but once i got over that, i'm actually really happy with how it turned out (even though there are four or five things i would love to fix in this, including the low audio levels....)

a few closing remarks:

1) the final question (as well as the project's working title) come from transformers: the movie.

2) if you've been a regular reader of this blog and don't think i'm a nutter already, this video isn't going to phase you.