The Past Inside the Present

What is it about the past which compels us to expend quintillions of bytes of data trying to preserve the minutia of our daily existences? Perhaps it’s the unknowable nature of the future, coupled with disappointments about our present, which causes us to reach for the rose tinted memories of what has gone before. This is a question addressed by James Siewert in his multi-year labour of love allegorical short The Past Inside the Present – in which a couple directly plug into recorded memories of happier times in an attempt to renew their dying relationship. Watch the film below and then check out our interview with James where we discuss The Past Inside the Present’s epic two and half year production journey and consider the narrative and craft casualties caused by the continuous hunt for ever efficient production practices.

The Past Inside the Present is far from typical in both its concept and execution, where did the idea come from for this labour intensive short?

The ideas for the film came together slowly and from many different sources. The very first idea, which I had at the end of high school was just to do something with these half-headed figures with analogue circuit boards on their heads. It was a much more aggressive idea in tone than what the final film became – the rhythm and vibe would have been more like Aphex Twin’s Come to Daddy video. I think it was born out of anger – feeling resentful of people that were able to have sex easily, and wanting their relationships to be shown to be superficial or at least purely chemical in nature.

Once I got to college I became much more nostalgic – because I was doing the thing where you would go home to your high school friends and play at repeating all the old jokes and routines with diminishing returns. Visiting home occasionally you get this crystallized view of how time breaks everything down because each time you go home it’s this little time capsule of what your relationships are like so you have these distinct intervals where you can clearly track how quickly feelings fade and things fall apart. So the the idea of the figures plugging into these tapes that would allow old rituals to be iteratively reenacted got incorporated into the original idea.

A second of animation feels more pregnant than a second of live action film.

The last piece was how to treat the visual effects – which ended up being done with rotoscoped animation. This came about because in college I took a lot of printmaking classes. I took a photogravure class where you learned how to etch a digital image onto a copper plate. I would experiment with etching illustration back into the photographic image. I began to want to use that style in animation – I liked how the drawing allowed me to editorialize on the image that was underneath it. And I also felt that the sort of labored look you get with animation – where images seem to ‘hang in the air’ for a second – time seems to have more weight in animation – a second of animation feels more pregnant than a second of live action film. The weight of time was so much part of the concept that it seemed like the right way to treat this story. Plus it allowed me to not have to be so fussy with the visual effects – since they were going to be rotoscoped over, strict photorealism wasn’t necessary.

Could you take us through your production process?

Really slowly. This was my thesis project in college I had hoped to be able to complete the film in a year – it took others and myself two and half years of more or less continuous work to finish. I had made some music videos with this company Glass Eye Pix, produced by Chris Skotchdopole. In the spring of 2013 I storyboarded the whole movie and Chris and I brought it to Glass Eye’s owner Larry Fessenden, who agreed to give us some money to film the live action part. I raised the rest of the money for production by selling an antique music box I had inherited to a collector. I built the set in a week and a half in a studio we had available at my school, Bard College. Principle photography was 4 days with one day of travel. Of course about half the movie is composed of little macro inserty shots which I gathered slowly over the course of the next two years.

Once I had done some editing and VFX work on the film, Chris and I used that footage to create a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to complete the VFX and rotoscoped animation. I used the money to hire my friend from high school Auden Lincoln Vogel and his friend Annelyse Gelman to get me over the hump of the VFX and rotoscoping. By the time of my graduation, the spring of 2014, we had completed almost all of the VFX but still had more than half of the rotoscoping left to do. So I moved back in with my mom in Richmond California and worked out of her garage for the next 10 months. I also asked Larry for a bit more money so I could hire my cousin Carter to help me for a few months. During this time my dad supported me for food and things like that – I tried not to take it for granted and work at least 50-60 hours a week on the animation. Finally by May of 2015 almost all the animation was completed. I moved back to New York and have been working off and on as a freelance cinematographer and visual effects artist. I met Geoff Saba, who did the music for the film, through a mutual friend. He worked off and on on the music from July 2015 to early January 2016. Arjun Sheth – who did the sound design started working in October. During Christmas and New Years of 2015 I did the remaining piece of animation: the credits. The last frame of the credits was finished only a few days before the premiere of the film at Slamdance in late January.

How did that process translate into the equipment and software you used?

The film was shot on a Canon 5D Mark III. We had a dolly and a few lights – a couple Rifas, a couple Kino Flos and a Lowell kit. A couple other camera rigs I built for the film: for when the camera spins around the couple during sex this was a bicycle petal bolted to the ceiling with a pipe coming out of it and the camera hanging off the pipe with c-stand arms. There was also a pulley rig for when the camera dives from the ceiling into the male figure’s open mouth. Everyone was terrified of these rigs. The actor, Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, wouldn’t let me lower the camera onto him so it had to be filmed in reverse – the camera started in his mouth and was raised to the ceiling.

Visual effects were done primarily in Adobe After Effects and Blender. Each frame was printed out on any number of basic monotone laser jet printers: basically the cheaper the better – I found that if you took the files to a Kinkos or a Staples the prints would end up coming out without any of the laser jet toner texture that was important to me. The film is about media being degraded through translation and time, so I felt the actual frames had to undergo that same analogue degradation process. For the rotoscoped frames (approximately 3/4s of the film’s 11000 frames were drawn over) that was done by tracing each frame with pen and charcoal. Both the print out and the drawing were scanned into the computer – at first using school scanners and then later my mom’s scanner – and then the drawing and the print were combined in After Effects to create the final image.

[click for larger view]

I”m going to put it on Vimeo in December so the choice never felt like an either or. Is honesty the best policy? I got a small advance for putting the film on BitTorrent and having it exclusively on there for a month. My income has been in a shitty place this whole year so it was really really welcome (if any of your readers want to hire me to do anything, believe me I’m probably game). Beyond that though IndieStreet has been really generous in supporting the film through Facebook and social media. There’s an illusion of a level playing field on the internet – that any one can make something that can “go viral”, but chances are anything that’s been seen by any large number of people has gotten a megaphone through a platform that already has a lot of traffic – so IndieStreet giving me a small megaphone is something I’m really grateful for. Finally – I do enjoy Bittorrent as a platform – it’s refreshingly free of editorial as a platform – they just put cool shit up without a ton of context which I think allows for a really pure experience – I like the idea of people downloading my movie without know very much about it and just thinking “What the fuck was that?”.

The making of archive (included in the premium download bundle) is so detailed, honestly reflective and gorgeous to boot, that I found myself inadvertently reading the entire 70 pages in one sitting. What was your process when it came to selecting and combining all the years of filmmaking ephemera into a cohesive collection? Were you ever concerned about being ‘too’ honest?

I think it started as just writing a short reflection on each stage of the process – I mostly wrote it for myself so I can remember what this period in my life was like in 20 years. I also thought – once someone has had this chance encounter with this short film, if they are interested in knowing my thought process behind it they deserve it. I’m very skeptical of the notion that art is this mysterious process and the artist needs to be kept behind a curtain like the Wizard of Oz. I vaguely feel like – artists shouldn’t have to be able to explain their art completely but if you can’t say anything meaningful about the thing you made there’s a seriously decent chance you’re full of shit. My girlfriend encouraged me to organize the whole book a little bit more explicitly chronologically to help keep readers oriented. In terms of my selection: there wasn’t a ton of stuff to choose from. Pretty much all the material I had ended up in the book.

If you can’t say anything meaningful about the thing you made there’s a seriously decent chance you’re full of shit.

I don’t think I was concerned about being too honest – again this a book that I expected to be read by 20 people max: it was a surprise to me that IndieStreet wanted to make it part of the bundle. I guess the most embarrassing part of writing the book is admitting how much privilege you need to make a film like this: you basically need the luxury of sitting in your mom’s garage working for a year and a half. And that’s something that few people have. But I think that’s an important thing to say as well: if you like this kind of filmmaking, and you care about it, you can’t expect it to get done on the ordinary mercenary production cycles that have become the norm. Part of the reason films can be feel homogeneous is because the process by which they are made are homogeneous – so many tropes in filmmaking come from what is expedient to the process that is taught in film school. So many decisions get made because “We have to make our day” – coverage gets simplified, and the structuring of a film shoot becomes increasingly military – every conversation becomes a conversation about efficiency. Giving yourself time is the only way to emancipate yourself from the homogeneity of these processes. But having time is a huge privilege – and it is a little uncomfortable to say “Hey look at what I was able to accomplish with my privilege!”

Years of man hours and determination to move towards your goal went into the creation of The Past Inside the Present, what effect do you think the extended period of time had on the project and on you as a filmmaker?

To contradict what I just said a little bit maybe, I think the effect hasn’t been totally great on my post-PITP work generally: once you become used to moving an a very glacial pace that easily can translate into complacency. I’m working on a couple music videos at the moment but I think my work has lost a little bit of urgency and structure because with PITP I blew through so many deadlines that the psychological effect of having a deadline just lost its power. Once you’ve worked on something for a year and half longer than you originally planned to it’s hard to give a shit about being behind. I’m trying to change this – trying to be a little harder on myself and demand more broader strokes and more progress out of my work. I also think – and it’s hard to tell if this is related to making the film or not – but I’ve become a little more numb as a person since beginning the film. Beginning the film I was working my way out of some depression, but the channels of feeling were definitely more open. Spending 2.5 years of all work and all play (since really tracing frames never felt like serious work) has made me a little bit of a dull boy.

Are there any new projects you’re productively procrastinating about at the moment?

Well like I said – there are the two music videos I’m working on right now. And I’d like to make more – if I can find some way to make it make any kind of financial sense, which right now it does not. Just like every other creative I have feature length script I’m working on: it’s a coming of age story set in an alternate 1979 Portland OR, where sex is physically very different, and where the friendship of two young women catalyze a series of radical bodily transformations. And there’s another vaguely Past Inside the Present-ish idea – more diaristic and explicitly personal but an extension of the rotoscoping techniques I played with in PITP. It’s another one that that is at its core about transformation of human anatomy.