Are You Facing North?

Putting finishing touches on the short film made and shown at this year's San Diego Latino Film Festival. 

Here we are shooting at the 2014 SDLFF for Facing North.

We will be at this year's San Diego latino Film Festival interviewing festival goers and later showing a short film version of the project.

We will be at the Digiplex Mission Valley Theater at 7510 Hazard Center Drive San Diego, CA.

We will be filming:

Thursday March 13- 4:00-7:00 pm

Friday March 14- 6:00-9:00 pm

Saturday March 15- 6:00-9:00 pm

Sunday March 16- 1:00-3:00 pm

Saturday March 22 2:30 pm- Showing of short featuring interviews before the screening of "Who is Dayani Cristal?"

I am really excited to begin sharing more about the documentary project I have been working on as part of the Creative Catalyst Program with the San Diego Foundation.

My original concept was focusing on border issues in San Diego-Tijuana through the lens of a particular immigration raid, titled 18 Bakers. Well, as often happens in the making of a documentary, the project has shifted. (18 Bakers is still being developed, btw.) The new title is Facing North.

I have included this snippet of audio from an early interview I did with Ray Uzeta in San Diego. We were talking about border issues and he mentioned this concept of San Diego not acknowledging or recognizing itself as a border city, even though it is home to one of the largest border regions in the world. This really hit home for me.

Being a resident of San Diego, it amazes me how close I am to Mexico, yet how far away it really feels. It may as well be in another time zone in a lot of ways.

I have been doing some research on San Diego-Tijuana history, particularly relating to the formation of the present day border which happened at the end of the Mexican-American War with the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848. Particularly, I have been looking for photographs, maps, and other visuals to get a sense of how the San Diego-Tijuana border has changed over the years. 

Having a few spare hours on this New Year's eve, I decided to drive up to Riverside to visit the archives and check it out. The staff helped me out, which was good because I am not sure how long I would have lasted without it. 

I have a new respect for researchers, who hunt and peck through books that haven't been touched in a century it seems. Even though I was overwhelmed and didn't really know what to look for, I was blown away by how much information is available. It's pretty amazing to think of the interesting stories hidden in those ledgers, records, and letters.

For me, the trip was a first step in honing my research skills, and I did find some photographs from the border in the 1890s. 

Border monument at the Pacific Ocean:

Otay Mesa:

"If you’ve set your sights on a new world of ideas, you need to be okay with not knowing where you’ll end up before you start."

- Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO

Making art, just like a lot of things, is very difficult, and you often have no idea where you'll end up when you start. Tim Brown, CEO of the innovative design company IDEO, has written a lot about their approach to this often frightening proposition.

I have read the words above and, though I am inspired by them, and nod my head in affirmation, the fact is that I am terrified. I am terrified of everything blowing up in my face and having nothing to show for it. I am terrified of showing something that is spurned, or just as bad, ignored. 

The documentary film Lost in La Mancha is an interesting case study in artistic disaster. It chronicles Terry Gilliam, as well as legendary actors like  Jean Rochefort and Johnny Depp, as they try to make a film that Gilliam has dreamed of making. I found it gut-wrenching to watch, even hilariously so at times, to see his dream squelched by forces of nature he just cannot seem to control.

“I do more painting when I’m not painting.”

-Andrew Wyeth

A few years ago, I read that Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz’s morning routine involved going for an hour walk through the streets of Cairo, and how that impacted his work. It struck me because I had a similar routine going where I’d jump out of bed, grab my shepherd mix named  Fred, and hit the road. Aside from the obvious physical benefits of our daily hour-long walk, I also found it to be the most creatively productive part of my day.

Though not actively thinking or trying to solve a particular problem, I would have breakthroughs when I wasn’t even focusing on anything in particular. That said, these walks were no magic elixir, probably the majority of them don’t result in new ideas other than a breath of fresh air and some decent exercise, but still, their value to my productivity was striking to me.

This idea that I could be getting things done when I didn’t seem to be really interests me, and has made me re-think what it means to be productive, and how we perceive work. Leaving work to go take your dog for a walk doesn’t exactly sound like a useful thing to do at face value, but what if we are looking at it wrong? Maybe a little space would help make us more effective at doing our jobs and solving problems.

Since this is the very first post for this blog, I thought it'd make sense that I start out by explaining what this all will be about and what I am up to. A while back, I applied for the Creative Catalyst Fellowship, which is a grant program geared to San Diego based artists. Basically, they were looking for art projects connected to San Diego that could engage the community in interesting ways. It's a pretty cool program since it funds artists directly. (For any SD artists out there, I definitely would recommend applying next year!)  Artists work with a sponsoring arts organization. The sponsor for my project is the Media Arts Center of San Diego.

Enter my idea: 18 Bakers, an interactive documentary built primarily for the web to engage the issue of immigration. I'll talk more about the subject matter in future posts, but for this, I'd like to focus a bit more on talking more about documentary form, particularly this fairly newly fangled term "web documentary."

So, what is a web documentary? To be honest, I am not sure if web documentary is even the right term, but it depends on who you ask. I have seen similar projects described as idocs, webdocs, interactive films, and on and on.

Regardless of what you call them, over the last few years there have been some really engaging and innovative documentary projects that have been built for the web browser. Spurred by recent web features such as the html5 standard, these interactive pieces generally utilize video, photography, audio, and graphics to tell their stories.

What excites me about this web-based format is that it's still a new and evolving form of expression, one which provides few rules and many opportunities to innovate. The language of these projects often have one foot in a traditional film world, but are not limited to the same limitations of being linear in nature. That allows or more room exploring alternate ways to tell a story, and can also engage and empower the audience to have greater control over what they experience.

For me, the web documentary is a way for me to combine my passion for documentary art making, particularly film, and fuse it with my interactive experience. For the past 9 years, I have been working on video games and have been immersed in interactive entertainment on a daily basis for a while now. While there are many differences between film and video games, I think there is also a lot of room to fuse them into new engaging experiences. That is what I am hoping to do with my documentary project, 18 Bakers.

To close out, here are links to just a few of the web documentaries that I recommend checking out. (Please note that you may need an updated browser to run these.)

Hollow- About a rural county in West Virginia.

Clouds Over Cuba- Examines what might have been from the Cuban Missile Crisis.