Beulah, Michigan
In December of last year I heard from Kai, captain of the 26′ Sloop Desire. He was planning to set her up for future adventures starting with a shakedown cruise in the Hawaiian Islands, and did I want to join him? He and I had discussed documenting his solo voyages, mounting cameras that he could trigger remotely. Here was something else entirely, an invitation to join his church. To taste the other he had discovered, to try my hand at being a shipmate. A high honor of course and the start of an answer to a shared question – what do we do for earth?
Kai is an inspiration to my aspirations of being a visionary and a troublemaker. He guided his brother Dirk and I on an expedition to climb the Manhattan bridge in the 80s. When visiting Dirk in DC, I was gored by Kai’s sublime sharpened pencil sculpture not a few times. Kai’s Metamorphosis design explored the mechanics of getting off planet sans military industrial complex. His later voyages on Desire seemed to me less of an acceptance to life in the gravity well and more like a proof of concept for citizen space travel.
Kai’s invitation reflects my own awakening – fun is amplified when shared with a team. Along with solo sailing Kai has crewed and consulted for other mariners and now he wonders about a crew of his own – what would that look like? I am perhaps the first recruit.
There’s more about our collaboration at http://ondesire.com, but in context of holy boners (sacred mistakes) I think this ranks right up there. Suddenly Desire blips onto the radar – a fantastic gift and opportunity. It certainly fits into Dan’s master plan, but how?
In the context of DOG, I was determined not to spend another summer staring at screens – a clear failure of prioritization. I can’t say I was burning out in January, but the amount of work needed to bring DOG up to an acceptable level of quality seemed endless. A true team was wanted. It’s not impossible to post a VFX short by yourself, but why go solo when there are so many allies?
Here’s how Faisal tricked me into collaborating… I showed him a couple cuts of DOG and he ripped me a new butthole, so to speak. His critique undermined my will to live. Now he can be a critical guy especially when it comes to his own work, but he’s not a total curmudgeon. Looking beyond all of DOG’s problems, Faisal said I had created a cockeyed world that was intriguing, a surreal universe that persisted. So it wasn’t all a steaming pile of shite! After a week or two of letting me writhe on the end of his spear, he offered to workshop the project. Paraphrase – “Give me all the raw footage and I’ll tease out that David Lynch thing you’ve almost got going.” Well, momma didn’t raise no fool. When a stellar editor like Faisal offers to save your movie, you pass him a brimming 2 TB hard drive, ahora mismo.
So the post team currently is Faisal, me and Jonathan. It’s gotta grow a little bigger, at the minimum we’ll have to bring on more After Effects geeks. How many times have I projected a finish date for DOG? Perhaps after all this blogging I have a realistic idea of what finishing actually means, what it’s going to require. Faisal will work his magic over the summer and then we’ll build a robust team in the fall.