I tweeted this in December, four years ago, no plan, not even an idea, just the knowledge that I wanted to have something finished by the end of 2023.
For the majority of the year I waffled between having absolutely NO idea what I was gonna do and then playing with “nothing” ideas, that became boring SO quickly, and then went back to just having no fucking clue.
It wasn’t until the last week of september that I finally had an idea, more solid of an idea that any I’d had to date. I decided that I still was actually going to attempt to finish a feature by the end of the year, and for it feel possible, I decided to approach it in the style of NaNoWriMo, though instead of doing everything over the course of a month, I’d attempt to do it in three: one for writing and dev, one for shooting, and one for editing. I haven’t been very strictly ticking to the “one month per phase” thing, it was just an arbitrary limitation I needed to jumpstart the whole deal.
Over the course of the developing month I came up with the idea of shooting an anthology film, I just wanted to explore a lot of different ideas, and I was also heavily inspired by a quote from an article talking about “Tropical Malady” by Ben Walters: It’s a work that defies straightforward understanding and suggests that understandability may be overrated.I really adore Weerasethakul’s films and this quote just really set me off.
I still didn’t know what the exact execution would be at the time, but I did know that the anthology format would allow me to revisit the original pride flag, specifically the themes associated with the original 8 colors.
I’ve used this as a starting place for a few different projects overs the years and it hasn’t steered me wrong yet so I figured why not give it another go.
The final piece of this whole puzzle fell into place when talking about all these ideas with Jess and Eric at WHAMMY! Analog Media who, immediately upon hearing the idea, gave me access to a VHS Camcorder, all the tapes I could ever need, and access to digitization services. The film didn’t become “real real” until this point. ALSO since I was now going to be shooting on a VHS camcorder it just felt natural that the film itself reference late 80s and early 90s television.
From then on I was just in pure Sherlock Holmes Brain Palace™ mode. I went hard trying to think about a lot of my formative television watching experiences as a child, along with stuff I thought would’ve been funny to see, and ended up with this.
As far as filming went, about half of the segments (Sex, Life, Sunlight, Spirit) had active collaborators. Some in front of the camera, some behind, and one who did make-up. Working with these people was interesting because I didn’t completely explain what I needed from them until the day of filming came. Before that was just a basic explanation of my ideas, then when we finally met to shoot I gave them absolutely everything in my head related to the current section and then asked them to build on that with whatever felt right. That went for everyhting from costume, to camera work.
On the whole, the process has taken much MUCH longer than expected. THis is mostly because I was working fulltime for the majority of the process which is why I’m not actually finishing this in the quarter-year that I originally set out to finish it in. I’m doing my best to be nice to myself about that though (I’d go crazy otherwise).