It's been a busy
two months. I sent out some screener copies of Saberfrog, and
have gotten a couple reviews – a very positive one from a German site called Search My Trash, and a rather more mixed review from Film
Threat.
Getting that kind
of public feedback for the movie has been a big shot in the arm. In
the years since I started this blog, I've sometimes filled the slower
months with blog posts about semi-related topics about filmmaking,
discussions of movies that had some indirect kinship with Saberfrog,
and the occasional flat-out rant about things that were bugging me
about my generation and/or modern culture in general.
In hindsight, it
seems like the plot of Saberfrog, and the writing, production
and release of the movie, has been part of a larger effort to make
sense of, adapt to, the world that's very different from the one I
knew in my 20s. Over these past few years I've witnessed the rise of
transmedia, the demise of Borders and classic Final Cut Pro, and a
general shift from a world of sensitive artsy loners who were
philosophical about art and filmmaking to a slicker, snarkier,
hyper-social, on-demand world where there's more competition for
attention and eyeballs.
I think the biggest
shift of all has been the shift from a culture of analog media to a
culture of digital media. People my age learned to embrace the
scratchiness of a 16mm film screening, the grubbiness of a VHS
bootleg, the mustiness of a used paperback. I remember “watching”
scrambled pay channels that still let you listen to the sound even if
the picture was garbled. I even remember fiddling with a TV aerial to
try to pick up snowy, distant transmissions from stations in faraway
cities.
It's not that those
days were better, necessarily. It's just that we folks of a certain
age learned to associate those kinds of analog artifacts with
authenticity. Knowing that a work of art had some miles on it, or
survived in only compromised quality, made it seem more rare and
valuable somehow. Every counterculture aesthetic – from the hippies
to the punks to the grunge slackers – embraced the idea that dirt
and distortion and rawness made things cool.
But that was an
analog attitude, and we're in a digital age now. There are no garbled
or snowy TV channels – either you get a channel or you don't get it
at all. People still like movies, but they're not held on a pedestal
anymore. Movie theaters aren't these sacred cathedrals where you go
to worship the art of cinema – they're just one of many possible
outlets where a piece of “content” will become available. You can
still make a low-budget movie, but you're no longer a one-of-a-kind
hero for doing so, and if you do it's not supposed to have the
bedraggled Clerks aesthetic – now it has to be shot on a
DSLR and look like an Oscar-winning Hollywood cinematographer shot it
in order to stand out as a professional production amid all the
kittens playing piano. As a fellow producer recently put it, when you
submit a movie to a festival nowadays, “you're competing against
high school kids with cell phones.”
Saberfrog
didn't seem like that weird a movie when I wrote it or shot it,
because my head was still in the analog era, when people reached into
their soul and pulled up something strange and raw and personal
because that's what they had to do and because that's what
independent film audiences were looking to see.
But
perhaps it's a good thing that I didn't know any better, or I might
not have made the movie. No matter how much the world changes, I
think there will always be a need for people who see things
differently, who have the guts/craziness/courage/foolishness to do
what other people aren't doing. At the very least, it shows other
people that such things are possible.
Sometimes,
like Josh in the movie, I have an internal debate raging in my head.
I wonder whether making low-to-no-budget movies is still worth the
trouble, what kind of movies I should be making in today's world,
whether there's a big enough audience for the kind of movies I
believe in, and whether I have enough of the huckster instinct that
it seems to take to promote yourself nowadays. But somehow I always
end up coming to the same conclusion: Just do what you believe in.
And
every effort opens doors. You end up going places you otherwise
wouldn't have gone, and meeting people you otherwise wouldn't have
met. And as easy as it is to get confused about where our online
culture is headed, with all that crowding and diversity, you have to
remember that no one is consuming all of it, that there are still
niches, and that if you're smart and persistent then you can find the
folks who get it.
I've
been doing a lot of writing in the past couple months, and I'm
plotting what my next project will be. It might be connected to
Saberfrog in some way,
or it might be something new with completely different characters.
There's life in Saberfrog
yet, but I'll probably be switching my energies to a new project in
the next couple months. And I hope that those of you who've followed
the Saberfrog journey
this far will join me on the next journey as well.
Stay tuned …
