We've been lucky enough to do some really exciting High Dynamic Range (also known EDR - Extended Dynamic Range) testing with Telescope at Dolby Labs over the past 6 months. Dolby has been developing a new display technology that is exceptionally brighter than what we see today. As a result, images have more contrast, color, and an overall realistic quality to them. Telescope, having been captured in the highest quality format available at the time, was a perfect candidate to test Dolby's new technology. For a bit more about what Dolby is up to check out this and this.
We were all excited to have the opportunity to share the results this past weekend at the National Association of Broadcasters Convention in Las Vegas. Collin, Matt, and Travis were invited to sit on a panel with Dolby Senior Colorist Rick Taylor as part of the Technology Summit on Cinema. The panel was moderated by Curtis Clark (ASC Technology Committee Chairman).
Matt introducing Telescope - moving right Curtis Clark, Collin Davis, Travis LaBella, and Rick Taylor
The panel was focused on what EDR meant to us as filmmakers and what we would do different given the chance to work with the technology again. For a good breakdown of the panel, check out this Hollywood Reporter Article that went up earlier this week.
Overall it was a fantastic experience. We even got to meet Chivo...
After the panel we had a chance to walk the enormous floor and check out the latest and greatest in digital cinema including Arri's new Amira camera, Blackmagic's Ursa camera, Canon's 4K monitor, and more. Here's a few more pictures from our visit.
When Matt and Collin first approached me about doing sound for Telescope, I immediately said yes. There is no genre sound designers like better than Sci-Fi, which is essentially a giant playground of lasers and spaceships. Space flicks have produced some of the best sound design of the past 50 years (see Star Wars and Wall-E for two great, Ben Burtt-filled examples), and unlike a period piece, there is always the chance that you can invent the next trademark sound by recording your dog food. However, thanks to the great history of the space genre, original sound design is no small challenge.
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The first hurdle was was confronting the Sound Designer's Space Conundrum- that, actually, there is no sound in space. While shooting Matt and Collin an email explaining that I was finished before I even started would have been nice, soundless space has also been done before. And the vocabulary of sound in movies has already set a precedent for sound that audiences identify with, so I chose to continue the cinematic illusion and open up my toolbox.
Throughout the production and post-production process, we were constantly refining how the spaceship flight and telescope mechanisms would sound. I was thrown a new challenge, however, when we got the soundtrack music back. Holy cow, the music! Zach and Doug really outdid themselves- the music is gorgeous and lush, setting the perfect tone for this film. My main concern became how to get out of the way of this wonderful music. The synthesizers in the soundtrack demanded a greater portion of the frequency spectrum than even an orchestra would need. So while in the early drafts of the sound design the cockpit was a steady whir of buzzes, hums, and other analog sounds, we later chose to let the music fill that ambient space and instead focus on immediate elements.
One such effect occurs very early in the film, an ambiguous sound emanating from the husk of the destroyed earth. We arrived at that sound after discussing the method of "time travel" depicted in the film. This is a very different type of time travel than we're used to seeing in movies, this idea of traveling faster than the speed of light in order to see images centuries old. I wanted to play with this idea of time.
One of the coolest time-shift tools I used is called "Paulstretch." This software is best known for making Justin Bieber sound awesome, but in this case, it helped me create some really interesting sound effects for Telescope. I stretched the recording of a blazing inferno to 50 times its length to create the sound effect you hear during the destroyed earth title sequence. Incredibly, the fire kept some of its inherent "fieriness" in spite of being so stretched out, inspiring the feeling of destruction "echoing back" through time. Further playing on the idea of reverberating sound through time, I used Paulstretch again during the lightspeed scenes. I used an alarm clock stretched to 30x or 40x its length as part of the high pitched tone of flying through the black hole. Paulstretch has a funny way of playing with a sound's harmonics, an effect I used to create this high end sound that is much more smeary and wonderful than your average analog alarm clock.
Made by shamantis.
Ultimately, the sound of Telescope is, indebted to the sound design vocabulary that emerged from movies like Star Wars, but I think it has also created its own niche within the increasingly crowded sci-fi genre. The time-shift effects played with in the design, and the referential nature of the music contributes to the film's meditation on nostalgia as a human condition.
Andrew Walker is a sound designer and musician living in New York City.
Music was a huge part of this project. That being the case, we thought we would toss Doug and Zach, our composers, some clean and honest questions about their process, their inspirations and all other goodness. Like the score, they hit some serious zones. See our next post for the FULL SOUNDTRACK. Enjoy!
How do you two know each other? How did you start working together? How do your styles compare/contrast and how does that influence your collaborations?
D: I met Zach online before he started school at NU in 2012. I saw a post he made about starting a math rock band in a Northwestern Facebook forum and friended him on the spot. We messaged and stuff, but didn't meet up the first few weeks of school. Later that Fall at a Co-Op party, a kid told me that I looked a lot like Jonah Hill. The lil' rascal was Newman - one of Z Rob's buddies visiting from LA. He introduced me to Zach and then it was instant bud zones 4 lyfe. I had recently started jamming with some buddies and we invited Zach to join our "band". We started playing as The Earth is a Man and had a lot of fun with our friends.
I think that our styles have a lot of overlap. Zach effortlessly churns epic melodies, whereas I tend to make more atmospheric music. We have a lot of fun working together!
Z: What Doug said.
What do you guys do every day?
D: I'm doing different stuff every day. I work at a record label helping out with distribution, publicity, and general office/warehouse management. I also run another record label with my roommate/bandmate Max called Hausu Mountain. We've been getting ourselves REAL busy with that and have several releases on the docket.
Z: I work for a film composer full time. We just finished up “Frozen” and “Muppets Most Wanted.” Pretty different from the “Telescope” music! You can also check out my personal work here.
How did Telescope come about for you?
D: Matt, Collin, and Tish [that's Matt's alter ego] are some of my best buds. I lived with Matt for all 4 years of school and have seen his belly A LOT. They approached me about doing the music for Telescope and I was stoked. I told them that we had to get Zach involved, and the Telescope peeps were mega down - and so was Zach. Dat's how it happened!
Z: I’ll never forget when Doug approached me about Telescope, mostly because he was wearing a zebra unitard. He told me that Matt and Collin were making a short film and were looking for some retro-ness in their soundtrack. I have a musical project called D/A/D which is heavily inspired by the sounds of the 1980s so the pairing seemed natural. After getting off the phone with Matt and Collin, I knew this project was special and couldn’t friggin’ wait to get started on it.
How do you approach the creative process? What was your angle for Telescope? What were you trying to say with the sound?
D: I like to approach things from an improvisatory angle in the studio.
Z: I work best with visuals and “Telescope” was pretty ripe with amazing and inspirational images to say the least. To sum it up in one sentence, our goal for the soundtrack was to create an emotional score with romantic melodies texturalized by ambient drones, experimental forms, and unfamiliar film score-like sounds, all while harping on the aesthetics of our retro fore fathers (takes a breath)!
Which artists do you draw upon for inspiration? Were there any others for Telescope, specifically?
D: Brian Eno, The Residents, Neu!, La Monte Young, Jerry Garcia, Robert Fripp, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Trey - I could do this forever!
For Telescope, we were trying to channel 70s Kosmische music, 80s new age, and canonical scifi/horror soundtrack synth zones. I found a playlist called *telescope* in ITunes and this is what I put in it : Klaus Schulze, Cluster, Tangerine Dream, Oneohtrix Point Never, Michael Stearns, John Serrie, John Carpenter, Popol Vuh, Golbin, and Vangelis.
Z: I worship Vangelis and Michael Stearns and I was so stoked to be able to pay homage to those homies. Also was listening to a lot of Jean-Michel Jarre during the writing process, and Wendy Carlos too. Retro-futurist art always inspires me with this stuff as well.
Were there any challenges that came with doing the score?
D: I had to ship my Moog Voyager to and from LA. That was kind of a nightmare, but I pack a pretty mean box, so everything was A-OK. Also Tish wouldn't rub my back.
Z: The distance was probably the biggest challenge. Doug is in Chicago and I’m in LA along with the rest of the Telescope crew.
How did you achieve the instrumentation/voicing?
D: We just follow our hearts to get to the tone zone. I wish I could answer this better, but there isn't any sort of method. Zach and I are pretty into synths so we know how to get the sounds we like.
Z: Early on in the process, Doug and I divvied up the different sounds we were going to develop. Doug excels in creating drones, ambiance, and just insane sounds so he focused a lot on that. I did a lot of exploring into more cinematic synth-material: analog string pads, choir textures, bell patches, etc.
What was your best memory of the process?
D: Writing and recording parts of the score at Collin's apartment. We were sitting there with Matt, Collin and Bodge and they were giving us guidance the whole time. We had a lot of fun!
Zach's step-dad walked in on me scoring music in Zach's bedroom with my headphones on and really startled me! I think I startled him too because he wasn't expecting a bearded goblin in his son's room. That was pretty funny...
Z: Setting up our workstations in Collin’s apartment and just hammering out the score while Collin, Matt, and Eric edited. It was such a cool way to write, being in the same room as the other dudes and feeding off their ideas and energy. It was actually the most productive I’ve ever been when writing a score. Good vibes, good friends, good pizza.
What gear did you use?
D: I used a Moog Voyager and a Critter & Guitarri Pocket Piano GL for synths. I'm a pedal junky and couldn't even tell you all of the stuff that I used for all of the cues. I definitely used my Electro Harmonix Mini Q-Tron (Envelope Filter), Small Stone (Phaser), and Small Clone (chorus), MoogerFooger Ring Modulator, Boss DD-3, and a looper. Zach and I both use Logic as our primary DAW and assembled everything in there.
Z: Tons of sounds came from Doug’s Moog Voyager, including the lead synth in “The Archaeologist” which is my personal favorite. Other synths include Roland JX3P, Korg Poly-800, and Korg Lambda. Also a ton of soft synths, FM8, Arturia’s Jupiter-8V emulator, and even Logic’s ES2.
Can you talk us through the workflow?
Z: A lot of our material came through improvisation, which is not normally how I work but after Telescope I really would like to do more of it. Doug would create a lot of the textural foundations, pads that I could then create melodies or chord patterns over. There were plenty of times where we had to play music editors too. We worked with about four significantly different cuts of the film which sometimes affected the music so much we would have to backtrack and re-write certain parts entirely.
Was it hard to work in different cities?
D: Not one bit. We had already done a score where we passed stuff back and forth through the internet all the time - and that was when we were living near each other. It's always early working with Zach.
Z: Not too bad when you use the net. The hardest stuff was when I needed to rerecord or fix audio from a synth that Doug had in Chicago.
Do you want to do more film/sound etc.?
D: Sound - yes. Film - only if I get to work with my buds. I never want to work on a film set again...
Z: Forever and always. Can’t wait to work with Dougie Doug again soon!
What's your favorite cue?
D: The Revelation. I think that it's probably the best example of how the two of us overlap. Zach made some wondrous things happen on the synth and I did a bunch of fuckery with choral samples. Fun times!
Z: “Revelation” for sure. It’s the kind of piece I’ve always wanted to make and I couldn’t be happier with it’s place in the film.
What's your favorite song or whatever?
D: Phish
Z: Whatever.
What tone did you read from the visuals of Telescope?
D: Deep zones
Favorite sci-fi movie?
D: That's tough -- horror and sci-fi are my favorite genres and there's a lot of ambiguity between the two. If a zombie outbreak is caused by scientific research, is it a sci-fi or does the presence of the zombie make it horror only? You see the conundrum -- I'll try to keep away from supernatural driven things for this little list! Some of my favorites are The Thing, Altered States, 2001, The Fly, Tron, Blade Runner, Escape from New York, Fantastic Planet, Speed Racer, Repo Man, La Jetée, Predator, Children of Men, and STAR WARS YO!
Z: If I honestly had to pick one, JUST ONE, it would be Blade Runner.
What's next?
D: I'm working on putting out about 15 releases on my label in the next year. One of the projects we're working on is D/A/D - The Construct (this guy named Zach Robinson). I'm also working on new material for The Big Ship and Good Willsmith. We're going on a little tour in a few weeks to Akron, Ohio to play with some buds. Hopefully lots of fun and some good chillin'. I've also been working on setting up a small experimental music festival in January.
Z: “Telescope” feature. Imagine this stuff with orchestra.
As promised, the Telescope Sound Track is now up on Bandcamp for your downloading pleasure. Enjoy and please pass around! We want everyone to enjoy the awesome work Doug, Zach and Ken did on this project.
It all started when I was in Guyana.
I had just wrapped up a reality show in South America when I heard via email
that Matt, Collin, and Eric were moving forward with “Telescope.” I was
familiar with the script, and after hearing their ideas and ambitions for the
project, I knew it was something I had to be a part of. In fact, I was first asked to shoot the
project years before in film school at Northwestern University, when it was
going to be produced for a class project. I think we’re all glad that it wasn’t
made then, because this time around we had much more production resources and
experience behind us.
The pre-production process started
Spring of 2012 and was very thorough. There were a lot of late nights shot-listing
the film and being economical about every decision we made, as we had all of 2 full
shooting days to shoot the movie. We assembled an incredibly capable crew that
was part of the conversation very early on, with Production Designer Molly
Burgess heading up the ship construction, and Gaffer Jonathan Mahoney heading
up the lighting team. From the
beginning, Matt and Collin had a clear vision for the interior look of the spaceship
– they wanted the lighting to feel practical, and although we were going to
build a lighting grid above the set, the goal was to make the light look as
naturalistic as possible. A big part of that look came from the set design, as
we only utilized functional set pieces that had unique lighting features and
buttons. We built the lighting around these set pieces, accenting then with
ellipsoidals from above, and overall keeping the light levels pretty low to maintain
the glow of the set pieces. The Sony F65 proved to be an ideal camera for many
reasons, but a big part of it was its low light capability and native 800 ASA. As for glass, we used almost exclusively zoom
lenses, partially because a bunch of the shots involved zooms, but also for
efficiency and speed on set. Our go-to lens was the Fujinon 18-80 Alura Zoom,
and we were often around a T2.8 inside the ship.
One of the most challenging yet
rewarding decisions we made was to practically project everything you see
outside the bubble of the ship on set, through a massive 16’ x 9’ rear
projection screen. We knew we’d already have a ton of VFX shots to tackle in
post, such as the horizontal green screen monitor in front of our main
character, so the practical rear projection saved us a ton of time on the back
end, but also added a visual element that I don’t think we would have been able
to achieve otherwise. For the wildly vibrant shots of our character going
through the extreme ‘light speed’ sequences, we ended up shining the projector
light right onto our main character (sans projection screen) through an array
of flags and nets, which ended up giving us the best look versus simulating
those colors through traditional lighting methods. We also ended up using this
projector screen for the some of the green screen work, where we needed to
simulate different nebulas and other space elements in the bubble’s reflection,
as well as the character.
Wes Ball, who was our lead VFX
artist for all the ship exteriors, also headed up designing the ‘warp speed’
and other looks you see in the rear projection. We further integrated these looks into the set
and story by having them change throughout the shot. For instance, when Bello
zooms in the telescope, we tilt up mid-shot and see the rear projection video
change accordingly.
Another element of the set that
ended up being an integral part of the look of the ship was the LED ring around
the ship’s bubble. Our big reveal of the front interior of the ship was the
dolly in from behind our character, and I was looking for some kind of
practical lighting element to bring focus to the window that our character had
to space. I decided on a daylight-balanced LED ring, and as a bonus, it had a
wireless remote so we could easily control it right next to the monitor on set.
At some point in the pre-production process, the LED ring also became part of
the ship’s functionality, as it turns on and off when the main character is
“recording” through the telescope.
The spaceship set becomes a very
dynamic environment throughout the short, and we needed to build out the
overhead lighting to match the rest of the ship going through ‘light speed,’ as
well as simulating the power going out completely, so we kept all the lights on
dimmers to be controllable as possible. We were shooting 4K RAW on the F65, but
I balanced the camera on-set to 4300K, to be somewhere in the middle of all the
daylight, tungsten, and mixed sources we had throughout the ship. A variety of
Kino Flo “Bar fly” lights and Chimera soft boxes rounded out the rest of the
ellipsoidal lighting in the ship.
We ended up wrapping our spaceship
set and striking it by Sunday evening of the shooting weekend, in a huge part
thanks to Producer Kris Eber and the Soapbox Films team, who set us up for
success. We shot additional footage of certain elements the following weekend,
such as the slow motion elements of the watch and our lead character, which
were shot around 1,000 frames per second on the Phantom Flex camera. Other plates and exterior pickups were shot
on the RED Epic, so in the end, the film is a fusion of many different camera
formats, but Al Arnold at Fotokem was instrumental in bringing it all together in
DI. This project was truly a team effort, from everything from the set build to
the extensive VFX work, and I think we’re all happy with the final result.
Well, more of a "feel" of music, if you can say that. A tone? A vibe. It's notoriously difficult to describe, this music. Loosely, my infatuation is "space funk" together with "new age psychedelic," but also contains elements of soul, electronic, ambient and other things in between. Immediately identifiable as "that sound" to an ear attuned to their particular elements, these tunes are dripping with cinematic potential, mystery, clarity. Above all, they are smooth. The category, as it exists my head, spans a wide breadth of real genres but taken all together, they hit a singular sweet spot.
Croms - Invisible Cities
Micahel Bundt - Neon
Airliner - Illuminism
I've shared the passion for the music with our writer/producer Eric since the beginning, and co-director Matt has brought his own twist to the musical vocabulary while joining us as appreciators. Using shared audio language we found ourselves empowered to access Telescope in a different way. Expressing the "feel" of moments was a principle goal for the short. Music, this music in particular, our inspirational means to that end.
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Brian Eno - Apollo (full album)
Really, it's just that this music that we love is super great. It was often easier to communicate a narrative moment or visual element through a particular track than to try and talk around a broader, more difficult concept. Communication through music enabled discussion and collaboration with composers Zach Robinson and Doug Kaplan that yielded a soundtrack for Telescope rivaling the best of what we were inspired by.
It's difficult to write about music, so I'll defer to Elvis Costello, who really nailed it when he said, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." Instead, I've linked some examples.
Have a listen on this page to some of my top picks and follow the playlist below for a massive selection of favorites from Eric, Matt, Travis and I. They range in style and age but all played an important role while making Telescope.
Production designer and great friend Molly Burgess worked with us for many months to perfect our physical look and style. She's written a great piece about that process, check it out below.
For production design, we wanted to go with a retro, 70's and 80's sci-fi feel rather than a shiny and polished modern one. With references such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Moon, and Solaris, the vision for the design was ambitious. However, one of my favorite parts was how serendipitously the largest challenges resolved themselves. For instance, our original sketches for how we envisioned the consoles, loosely inspired by the octagonal designs in 2001, looked like this:
Since the shape was so unique and the consoles so large, our initial impulse was to figure out how to construct them ourselves and fill them with salvaged electronics that (ideally) still worked. We had begun the search for the necessary pieces and were in the process of making blueprints for construction when a chance conversation on a flight (apparently Solaris is not your typical in-flight entertainment), led to a big turning point. My seat mate encouraged me to check out Modern Props, an LA prop house devoted to items in the retro/sci-fi/space age genre (though you wouldn't immediately discern that from their descriptive motto "where things are"). It was there we met these guys:
All the monitors and lights were functioning, the shape exactly matched our sketches, I had chills. Suddenly, the most stressful problem of that moment had been resolved with a tiny paper hold tag. Before that, I had been faced with the decision of whether or not to sacrifice the angles in our design for ease of construction which would have resulted in a much different interior. By using the angled consoles as planned, the entire interior space serves to direct the focus to the lens, the piece of the spaceship of primary importance. Here they are in the film, looking at home in the rest of the set we constructed, bracketing our main character and his mission:
While it would have been awesome to watch the final film and say that we multi-handedly built everything ourselves, there's been something really nice about physically borrowing from the visual language of what had been done before us, just as we were doing theoretically anyway. Plus, it's really fun to keep the Telescope email thread going as we continue to report prop sightings in other films. So far our favorite has been Terminator 3. Now, we get to add Telescope to that same visual history, in whatever small way linked to "HAL" and Kubrick, astronauts and Arnold.
These early concept boards became a guiding light for our visual direction. Many became shots in the finished film. Big thanks to artist Courtland Lomax for the help with these.
Ken is a good bud from our Chicago days. We asked if he would help us out with music to run under the credits. Fantastic collaborator that he is, Ken went to work on "Home I've Never Known," the full version of which you can listen to and download below.
"Home I've Never Known" is a track that was created in a goal to compliment the Telescope film both in terms of the song's content as well as the recording techniques used in its production. After seeing the initial cuts of the film, I was impressed with how well it accomplished a contemporary feel using a significant amount of retro, 1970's and 80's set design. I looked to incorporate this approach to creating music that would parallel the film.
I used the scores of preeminent British film and television composer Alan Hawkshaw as a sonic jumping point. His innovative compositions during the 1960's and 70's seamlessly blended analog synthesizers with traditional instrumentation to create ambient, yet soulful waves of sound, which I along with the rest of the Telescope film crew found to be exceptionally inspirational to the project. Blending my contemporary hip-hop and neo-soul tendencies along with Hawkshaw's concepts created a palette for the track which looked to span multiple genres and decades, similar to the goals of the film.
I was hearing female vocals working well over the instrumental, so I asked my friend Kate Quinby to collaborate. We spent a night watching and discussing the film, and selected some themes which we found to be ideal songwriting material. Our society constantly focuses on an individual's origins as a means to understand their identity. But really, we are critically shaped by the journeys each of us take from our "homes". We found this concept to be a prominent theme within the film and used it as a thesis to the song."
Big thanks to Ken for throwing down as hard as he does. If you're in Chicago, do yourself a favor and catch up with him live on the jazz guitar and don't miss him on his site.
Collin liked the song so much he couldn't resist doing a remix. It's included in the download link above and you can listen below. Look for more posts about musical inspirations, the original Telescope soundtrack with Zach Robinson and Doug Kaplan + lots more soon.
Collin Davis and I had synced up towards the end of college in Chicago and did a few small spec ads with our buddy Travis Labella. By chance we both ended up with jobs in LA (Travis headed to the jungle but he can write more about that). We decided to take an epic road trip through the northwest and down the coast with each of us splintering off at different points. We spent much of that trip driving through gorgeous mountain ranges and national parks, discussing what was next and how we could start doing work we believed in.
After getting our feet on the ground and into the flow of our new jobs, we circled the wagons. We wanted to do a project that was achievable, something we really believed in. Collin immediately brought in Eric Bodge, another college buddy of ours who Collin had collaborated with. I hadn't had the chance to work with Eric yet, but I couldn't be happier to have had the opportunity. Eric brought Telescope to the table (check out his blog post on where the idea came from).
I loved it. I knew right away it was a project I had to get involved in. They started listing off reference films and I got more and more excited as they named some of my favorite films. It had a crazy premise with a lot of built in metaphor and of course some really exciting visual elements. We called up Travis and told him he needed to move to LA immediately, that we had a project worth moving for (he was crazy enough to do it).
We got started on pre-production and it was fun times. We would meet two to three times a week talking about how we would build lights and who are character was and how we were going to do cloud tank stuff. But Collin and Eric still had this ability to speak to the tone in a vocabulary I didn't have. The reason... the music.
Collin and Eric had a strong shared taste in the music they had always paired with Telescope. We decided the way for me to get on their page was through that music. They sent me multiple playlists and dozens of artists. I was hesitant at first. I like a lot of stuff, metal, rap, indie, electronic, but new age psychedelia was uncharted territory for me. However, digging in and discussing what each of us liked and didn't like about each given artist is what really helped us discover what Telescope was all about.
Through sharing artists and long listening sessions I think we really were able to find the tone, the story, and even the look of Telescope. It helped us capture the feeling, the vibe. There were many many long nights of writing, shot listing, editing, vfx, all full of music.
Don't get me wrong, we watched a lot of movies. We had a lot of discussions about the visuals and the the films we wanted to reference, but looking back, I think it'll be the music that will always stick with me. Anytime I put Croms back on or Alan Hawkshaw, I link it not only to Telescope, but to the experience of leaving college and chasing dreams. Luckily I had friends and artists who I really believe in to do it with.
There's much more to the story of how Telescope came to be, the many many people who got involved and made it an amazing experience, and the risks that ended up really paying off. But we'll save that for later posts.
Footnote: Doug Kaplan and Zach Robinson put together a killer score which in a lot of ways was a realization of the music we had been consuming. Kudos to them for capture our crazy ideas in a bottle. The score might be my favorite part of the movie.
In the summer of 2010, I was at San Diego Old Town Train Station with my pal Danny waiting for a friend to arrive so we could take him to Comic Con. With time to spare until his train was due, we began discussing the kinds of sprawling, high-concept stories we had each been thinking about separately, the kinds of stories we would love to watch on the big screen but had never considered authoring for that purpose.
Looking up from my seat in the car, as the cloudless mid-day sky began to reveal the subtle twinkle of nighttime stars, I considered the classic elementary school logic regarding distant objects in space-- that many of the stars we see today may have burned out thousands of years ago, and the old light is only now reaching our atmosphere in the present day.
But what if that convention were flipped on its head, and someone a tremendous distance from Earth, in the future, were able to watch us in the train station parking lot? I considered that, merely from a technology standpoint, they would probably need a Telescope, albeit a fantastically supercharged one. And wouldn't it be interesting if it required a single occupant, a technician, to operate and maneuver it? This person would be inherently fascinated by Earth, his ancestors' home, especially if the old light were the only memory that remained of his prized subject. I began to picture this incredible contraption in which the technician would both live and work. The Telescope would serve as his vessel to traverse time as well as his toolkit. He would be like an artist up there, capturing pieces and elements of the planet's history.
But what would it even mean to gather this evidence, this proof of life? What would its value be? What struck me most was our own planet's ongoing obsession with uncovering the past. This too is, in the grand scheme of things, an impossible task. Most of our knowledge concerning ancient culture is largely based on the burial grounds and extant structures that we've been lucky enough to uncover. But the details surrounding 99% of their history-- from pieces of papyrus to clothing and traces of food-- have been lost to time. The past is gone, and even the scraps and remnants we can uncover are mere hints at what once was. At the risk of sounding mawkish, everything about the experience of our lives is fleeting, even the act of filmmaking itself.
This notion of "The Telescope" stuck with me for a while, but only existed as an idea. I brought it up to my frequent collaborator Collin Davis who immediately sparked to it and wanted to read an outline. The eerie, psychedelic tone of the world and story was quickly established. We were obsessed with the paradoxically retro-futuristic sounds of funk & soul music from the late 1970s and 80s and sought to incorporate this vibe into Telescope. To us, the technician wouldn't be unlike an underground musician. Alone in space, he would be free to employ his own unique workflow and style. Telescope also presented the opportunity to exhibit pure cinema as a tool to create a universal experience. The technician's lens was a perfect window into his life, and a way for the audience to be immersed in the narrative through his eyes without the need for excessive dialogue or exposition.
When it came time to make the film, we sought the talents of our friend and former classmate Matt Litwiller who shared our vision for creating a big film in a small package. Ironically, this film about one technicians' solitary struggle to record an essential piece of humankind's history took the efforts of many artists and collaborators to bring it to life. Future blog entries will look at the production process in further detail.
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