Smelling the Dirt and the Coming Rain (Patreon)

Hi everyone! Super excited to finally share this.

I decided back in 2022 that I wanted to start making live action work, and instead of fantasizing about it forever I decided to just start doing it. I happened to visit Harrison and Parker in Chicago around this time and after a few conversations and revelations I decided I wanted to make my first one with them. I decided to move to Chicago and just start making the movie. I felt like mumblecore was the way to go with the first thing, so I could get my toes in the water, so I decided to just start working with my camera I already had on the default settings and never change them, and try to carve something out where the way we were making it was a part of the story.

I noticed early on that the camera would go out of focus at bizarre times and I decided to start using that as a motif rather than edit it out, which became my MO for the rest of the movie, trying to find ways to formally incorporate mistakes and glitches, and build a storytelling style in that context that tricks you. The movie's one big trick.

The story was inspired by real life stuff from Harrison and Parker and myself, but I mixed in some other stuff, like angel magick and channeling entities like Bashar. I had always wanted to make something with entity channeling and I was so excited to finally find a way to do that. Lol

It was a huge swing for me to make this and it's really a huge experiment for me, but I'm happy with how it came out. I'm screening it for my school on Tuesday, and I'm still figuring out what I'm gonna do with it. :)

Hope you like it!

Jonni