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The Chronicles began inauspiciously. It was late in 2004. George W. Bush had just been elected to a second term. The moon was in full eclipse, and the sickly green flash of a meteor blazed across the twilit sky over Vancouver. Strange spirits had gotten into the Greater Vancouver Zoo, causing the animals to escape their confines and run wild in the concrete jungles (Three children were kidnapped by bears). Ghostly wailing was said to be heard emanating from the sewer manholes beneath the city - some say an ancient evil had been awoken. At a ghetto slice pizza joint on Pender, it was said that a pepperoni-and-mushroom pizza had been given to stigmata, bleeding from holes thrice made in its sesame seed-laden crust. And at the corner of Homer and Hastings, a short film was being made. The filmmakers involved had no idea what in the hell they were doing. Indeed: The Library Chronicles began humbly, unremarkably, but it began real tasty.
Philip Abeyta, Marshall Langohr, Stephen Pickering, and Thom Stitt were all assigned a group project at Vancouver Film School. Each person was to direct, with the rest of the group as his cast and crew, a scene meeting certain criteria and which didn't "cross the line" – The "line" being an axis of action of supposed import to film language. Eh. The line's alright, I guess.
The exercise was a bit of fun, as each scene was improvised by the group. It was Phil's project that lingered however - his scene in the saddest library the world had ever seen was somehow worth revisiting. The group had vowed to tell the story in a proper fashion, making a short film on a day off at the film school.
That "day off" turned into a few hours of spare time in the upstairs studio with two small lights, a camera, and a microphone. Only Thom, Marshall, and Stephen were able to make it in, and Marshall spent the entirety of the shoot laying down on a table waiting for Thom and Stephen to do all the work. What a dick, right? I know.
There was no script, no story arc, no characters, no plan. They set out to make a fake David Lynch movie – a creepshow with an improvised sense of humor. The entire film was made on borrowed time. The boom mic was hastily propped up against a chair to record audio. The two lights were aimed and switched on almost randomly. The gear had to be returned, and the studio was not properly booked. In some scenes, someone would have to hit the record button and then run in front of the camera to play out the scene. There was no crew and no structure, and when time was up, time was up.
The following afternoon, Stephen and Thom scoured the school's stock music library for gems. They found them in old, long-abandoned production tracks. Upstairs in the Avid lab, they edited as hastily as they had shot - No fine-tuning, no details, and a serendipitous, lucky matching of music and picture. At the last second, they decided it would probably look better in black and white. It did.
The movie was weird. It no longer bore any resemblance to the scene from the assignment. In Phil's scene, Stephen Pickering used someone else's found library card (the ID photos clearly not matching) to get into a library where the shelves were pathetically empty save a cookbook, a bus schedule, and a roll of toilet paper. This new version never got past the front desk, ended on a cliffhanger, and sported ambiguous characters and setting.
It had turned out surprisingly good, actually. The group immediately began talking about getting together to do the next one. Perhaps they would get together once a week to shoot a new episode. Ambitious, but they proved that they could make a good movie in a matter of hours with no planning. Surely they could pull this off.
And they didn't.
IN THE NEXT INSTALLMENT: Shame, Defeat, and Cheese Cubes
Thousands of years pass, most in the world die horribly, and from the wasted ashes of the ancient times the fragments of a forgotten film are cobbled hastily in the dark. |
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