Today, I’d like to recount a fun story about how the past is never really the past. It is only a prologue.
I had to go into the shed today. You’ll notice that I said that I “had” to go into the shed and not that I “wanted” to. Truth be told, I can’t say that I ever really want to enter the shed. Probably because the word “shed” is perhaps a bit of a misnomer. More appropriately it should be called the place where past beloved objects go to die.
One thing that I should explain is that I am a pack rat. I hold onto way too many things that have long passed their prime. So much so that I have a system to facilitate my own hoarding. New things naturally begin in the house. This is where all the active tools of my life reside so that I can get at them when needed. When objects become less everyday tools and more like every once-in-a-while luxuries, they then get moved out to the garage. Objects in the garage aren’t necessarily useless. It’s just that they aren’t the type of thing that I’m going to wake up in the middle of the night with a grand idea and need immediate access to. Objects pushed to the very back of the garage are further down on the totem pole. The more easily reached areas of storage in my garage are mostly occupied by oversized boxes whose movement requires both muscle and a great deal of willpower. They are put in the front because to put them in the back is oftentimes physically impossible. My back is way too old to put boxes that big that far back with any hope of ever being able to retrieve them without putting myself in traction. So they rest in the front for easier movement. But this does mean that the items put behind them in the garage storage virtually never see the light of day as that would require me moving the huge boxes first. Yet those items that take up residence in the way back of the garage still rank high enough to require being stored under a fully functioning rooftop to keep them from being destroyed.
The items in the shed? Well, let’s just say that their safety is decidedly more precarious. Had I the money or inclination, I would have long ago demolished the shed and replaced it with a more suitable form of storage. Built by the previous owners of my house, apparently by hand, it is more or less a few pieces of wood tacked onto the back of the garage. Over the years, it has, for all intents and purposes, much fallen apart. Literally. Only a small section of the roof remains. The door doesn’t ever fully shut, leaving it prone to wildlife passing through town looking for a cheap hotel. There are so many bugs in there that sometimes just looking at it from a distance will cause you to start scratching.
The objects relegated to the shed are a hodgepodge of assets. Most of them have been there since I first moved into the house 20 years ago. Back when the shed still had a functioning roof. Much of it is occupied by oversized boxes that I don’t really need but are potentially useful enough not to throw away. Almost nothing in this shed would be missed were it to fall victim to a storm or be stolen by a thief with really low standards. There’s only one fully covered and dry section of the shed remaining. And that’s where our story begins.
My deep plunge into the horrors of the shed was motivated by curiosity. I’m in the process of finishing my latest film, Runway. Doing so required me to up-res some older footage to fit onto a 4K timeline. While waiting for the resolution bump to process, my mind started drifting toward how else I could more efficiently be using my time. I started looking around for other things to up-res. That brought me to another film I had made called Room For Two.
Shot 20 years ago, back when the shed was still in functional form, I gambled big to try and make something big. A short film that, at the time, I was convinced would be my ticket to take my career to the next level. I believed in the project so much that I spent whatever was left of my savings just to get it in the can. I mean that literally. These were in the days before digital was a legitimate capture medium for narrative films and things like small mirrorless cameras were well into the future. So, making a movie meant investing in miles upon miles of motion picture film, processing, telecine, and a myriad of other things that young filmmakers today have the choice of encountering, but can go an entire career without spending a dime on. Room For Two was shot on Super 35mm which made it even more expensive than the traditional Super 16mm domain of independent projects at the time. But I wanted this film to be the film. The one that put me on the map and made my name on the festival circuit.
It did not. As a matter of fact, despite having spent the entirety of my meager fortune, the film did absolutely nothing for me professionally. It was shut out of the festival circuit and even my agent at the time preferred using other films of mine when submitting me for projects. There are a myriad of reasons for the film’s demise. The primary one, as I would come to understand over time, was that it was simply too long for a “short.” I took the Sundance Film Festival’s stated rule of films under 40 minutes being considered shorts too literally and made a film that came in just under that limit. Getting someone to watch a five-minute short in this town is a trial. Getting someone not related to you to watch something 40 minutes long is almost a fool’s errand.
But, at the time, I didn’t really realize how much of a stumbling block the run time would be. I also only submitted to a small number of festivals and, while I knew a lot about filmmaking, I knew nothing about marketing. So the film pretty much meandered into obscurity, taking my financial security along with it. In a way, it also took the next 15 years of my life. The film put me in such a financial hole that I was forced to take pretty much any job I could to get out of it. This led me to a series of dead-end day jobs that did repair me financially, but at the expense of some of the free time needed to build my creative career.
It was a long time before I was stable enough again to quit my day job and pursue filmmaking and photography full-time. So, over the years, that film has always been associated with failure in my mind. Sure, I was super proud of the film at the time. But its tepid reception just had to be evidence of my lack of talent, right? At least that’s what I thought.
So 20 years later when I spotted the DVD of Room For Two on my shelf in search of things to up-res, I had mixed feelings. But I also had a burning curiosity. On the cusp of finishing a new film that I consider to be my most ambitious film yet, I wanted to look back at one of my first big stabs at ambition. I popped the DVD into the player (yes, I still have physical DVDs and physical DVD players), and I sat back and rewatched a film that I hadn’t seen in years.
And, you know what? It actually wasn’t bad. Expecting to see confirmation of how poor my skill had been back then, I instead was surprised to see just how good it really had been. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking early Spielberg here. But, much to my surprise, I couldn’t help but admit that it was a darn good movie. It deserved to do better. Part of the reason why I hadn’t bothered to look at it in all these years was because I assumed it wouldn’t, in any way, represent my artistic voice. It must have been an anomaly. It must have been a blip on the radar on the path to becoming the artist I am today. But what I found was a film that still, 20 years later, feels very much in my voice. And despite the presence of a few landline telephones and original flip phones (younger people, ask your parents about those), the film feels every bit as modern as anything I’ve shot this year.
And this is what led me to risk life and limb to enter the shed. I started realizing that this ancient fossil of a film might actually still be of some use in my current director’s reel. Especially when paired with some of the films that I’ve made recently, this film would slot right in. It would even address a few holes in my current reel without me needing to invest any more money in making another short to prove my skills in specific areas. Simply put, this lost film, previously thought worthless, might actually be valuable.
There was only one problem. The film had been shot on Super 35mm film. Back then, I had transferred the film to Betacam and did my editing on an old PowerMac. I then pressed DVDs of the project to show or send out to festivals. But, over the last two decades, the original digital file of the film had been lost. The only digital version I still had was one I had a friend rip from the DVD and convert into a Quicktime file. It was perfectly watchable. But, as that was the limit of my tech at the time, the export was in 4:3, letterboxed, and in very low resolution. These were days before HD was even a thing. So, the Final Cut export that looked fine in 2003 was looking decidedly less so in 2023. Regardless of how good the film actually was, the pixelated file just wasn’t going to cut it alongside newer projects shot in 4K and above.
On top of that, knowing what I know now, the film, regardless of how good it was, would need some serious editing to bring the running time within a reasonable length. That would require me to access the original footage to make clean cuts. Believe it or not, I do still have the old PowerMac in storage. Actually, if you read about my hoarding habits earlier, you probably aren’t surprised at all that I still have a 20-year-old computer in storage. But that computer, and an external hard drive, should still contain the original footage and even the original Final Cut Pro session. I say “should” because, while I’ve kept everything, including the dust, I seem to be missing the strange proprietary power cord for the 20-year-old G-Raid drive. So my footage on the drive is currently trapped inside of it (assuming the drive will even turn on).
All of which led me to my next bright idea. Why not dig out the Betacam masters from the original telecine and have them made into digital files? Then, I can edit the film front scratch and fix everything I got wrong. Only one problem, having long since divorced me mentally from what I thought of as a creative failure, I had no idea where the old Betacam masters even resided. After an in-depth search of my house, the only remaining option was made clear. They had to be out in the shed. So I put on my hazmat suit, held my breath, and entered the shed.
I’m happy to say I survived my trip into the shed. I emerged with four original masters. I still have to find an appropriate local shop to make the transfers. But the process of digging up old memories, even those that might be painful, has taught me a few valuable lessons. Our past is never really past. Our “failures” are only failures if we don’t learn from them. Every step along the way in our journey can provide value, even if it might not seem like it at the time. Oh, and always be sure to keep the valuable stuff in the far right corner of the shed.
