I think my film, at its very heart, is an experiment in parallel narrative. The original draft was a scene-by-scene narration explaining what's happening in real time to the viewer. This was never what I had in mind.
     It's an idea I've been working on for almost two years. It started with a multimedia project I worked on in school where I shot a film to be screened as I read a story I'd written. The story I wrote was basically about a road trip as was the video, however, the video starts out in an entirely different place in the narrative. When they both begin, the audience is struck by the disparity and hopefully is immediately engaged in finding all the clues in both narratives that will somehow connect them.
     Once the narratives finally do connect, they dance around each other, intersecting at times, meandering, divulging, each informing the other. The idea is to give the audience a more complete picture . . . no . . . . a more complex picture, multi-dimensional narrative . . . . no . . . . a double narrative, possibly even from multiple perspectives.
     The project wasn't a total success. It also wasn't a total loss. I think in the end it was entertaining but I'm not sure if I really conveyed the complexity of character arc that I'd intended. Since then, however, I've explored the subject a little more and developed a more burning desire to pull it off.
     In the beginning the lack of dialogue in my film was more of that technological determinism. I didn't want to pay for sound equipment rental or a sound mixer or anything. This turned into an opportunity to explore this idea of parallel narrative. I wimped out on the first try but now, in the midst of the second draft, I'm really pushing the experiment.
     The idea is that, these two narratives are unfolding at separate times, so we watch something happening on one fateful night in this man's life as we listen to him talk about it independently of the images. So we get information we don't know what to do with quite yet until we see a clue in the imagery that helps us to connect all these elements. We find out things that happen before they actually happen and we see things take place and then find out later what it was all about. This is how stories get interesting . . . . and intensely frustrating to put together.