July, 2013 - Older Now

Made on 35mm film using a Lomokino.

Click on movie to play.  For best effect , play on full screen with good sound.

The song is Older Now by Grant Lee Philips off of the Little Moon Album. I do not own the rights and only for personal use.

On July 2nd of 2013 my nephew turned 7. Later that week that month, my father brought him to the East Coast from Seattle to spend his first summer vacation without his parents. My parents and I stuffed his schedule with several mini-trips and experiences. We traveled to Philadelphia, New York City, Pittsburgh, and the Jersey Shore. Along the way we made sure he connected with our extended family and friends and did our best to document his adventures.

Knowing that the next visit from my nephew might not be for another year, we wanted to make sure he had several images that would strengthen and reinforce his memories of his brief stay.

About a year ago I was talking to a friend about a family friend's art show, a visual artist who specializes in analog film. As the world becomes increasingly digital and in a way, more democratized with it's ability to gain and share information, qualities of information and the skills to process that information are lost. The traditional idea of film has become more of a craftsman work.

My career as a filmmaker and actor have been dominated by the dawn of the digital age of film. The first shorts I worked on were first shot on film and then converted to large digital files. As the quality of cameras and computers increased and their costs decreased, more filmmakers were able to produce more work, including me.

Yet, I've still held onto a fascination of the quality and texture of film. I picked up a Lomokino, a plastic hand crank camera that uses standard 35mm film. A roll of 35 shots ends up equaling about a minute or so of footage.

Uncertain of what to shoot, the lomokino sat on my shelf for months. I had no practice at trying to be perfect on way take, on one go through. Nor did I have the money for the cost of developing and converting to digital so I could edit.

When we began traveling across Pennsylvania to visit family, I brought the camera with me, hoping at least for nice home movies. I filmed a few roles at my aunt's place, and then again on the Turnpike on the way home.

The last roll was from a day trip to the beach, the day before Maddox had to return West.

I had the film developed almost immediately, but ran into problems with my scanner. Although capable of importing negatives, the scanner was unable to differentiate the smaller frames within the film. I was scanning in blobs.

Eventually, I brought my footage to the Lomography store in the Village. They were able to produce scans of the film, but when they converted to the film to a video they only used perfect frames. I wasn't interested in perfection. I ended up going back and working on each frame from their scans.

What I ended up with surprised me. The images in the slow motion frantic frames seemed to float. The footage looked like old home movies, from distant generations, yet was just captured this past summer. I was reminded of family videos, snapshots, of summers past and the footage seemed to connect to a larger tradition.

Always a big fan of Grant-Lee Philips work, the song just seemed to add to the airy ethereal timeless sensation.