August - September 2023
What's going on with Giant Void?
Giant Void Updates
After spending most of early 2023 making Zero to Sixty, I’m finally back to pushing forward on my first feature film, Giant Void. Catching Covid for the first time in early August forced me to slow down and do some soul-searching. I realized I didn’t know how to move forward with Giant Void. I was stuck in a trap that snags many filmmakers: I was thinking of this film in terms of traditional production practices. Film school drills these practices into you, and you follow them as best you can given limited resources. But they aren’t the only way to make a film.
Two external stimuli broke through this block during my bout with Covid: 1) Dogme 95, and 2) Road to Roma. (If you have an interest in the filmmaking process I recommend clicking these links.) Dogme 95 came on my radar in college: a small collective of Danish film students and their mentors agreed to follow stringent restrictions on their film productions. Two of them you may know: Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. Back in my early 20s these films were refreshingly straightforward. They stripped away most of the fancy gear, equipment trucks, and lengthy post-production in favor of capturing true moments with their actors. Though the formula didn’t always work, it produced some truly groundbreaking films.
I’d seen Road to Roma - the making of Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma - years ago, but I re-watched it during my Covid downtime. This close to actually producing Giant Void, this 1-hour documentary struck a nerve. Cuaron re-designed the entire production process from the ground up. He stripped away any preconceived notions of how a film should be constructed, started with his directorial intention, and allowed that to inform every aspect of production.
So what’s all this have to do with Giant Void? A lot. My recent re-look at these two concepts have unblocked my thinking. Now we’re in the process of stripping away all non-essentials and designing a production process that will give us the Giant Void I imagined when writing the script. We’re reconsidering every line item of the budget, applying discipline and restrictions on how we approach lighting and camerawork, all in service of one thing: allowing our cast time to fully inhabit their characters.
Every penny and ounce of energy devoted to this project will go towards capturing human truth through its performances. All other considerations are secondary. This is the way we move forward.
More to follow soon.
Colorado, 2021