FToM ▸ blog

A Straight Line

All of this really started in December, Nathan Kane sent me a 25 minute-long video-letter. There was something specific that resulted from Nathan’s very personal and honest letter, and I admit, I’ve been struggling to find a word to best describe that something, but in any case, one word or not, that something is where the following started. 

On November 27th, I posted a production update that finally talked publicly about the roadmap that Amanda, Vu and myself had worked out during a lunch weeks before - yes, Nov 27th is before December which means all of this, whatever this turns out to be, started in November, but no, feelings don’t always play out linearly - it was another sixteen days before Nathan recorded his video-letter, but the conditions had been building. 

In short - and because the video-letter was sent in private - Nathan went into details about how he first came across FToM, how he related to the project and how recent decisions were influenced in part because of the film. 

I’ve struggled for as long as I can remember with this idea of inspiring a total stranger - maybe that’s not something normal and I should talk to someone about it more, maybe everyone at some point finds it hard to imagine another person giving two shits about your creative work, and maybe that wall I’ve put between FToM and other people’s reaction fell apart when watching Nathan speak - all the hard word that Amanda and I had put into our box of miniDV tapes and all the pages I’ve scribbled out and thrown away… that they actually moved another person’s life in a noticeable direction. Nathan is not the first person to say that the project has moved them or played a role in a decision they’ve made, and I keep those emails and comments in mind as often as possible because it pushes me forward and reminds me of everyone who moved me to start FToM when it was just barely an idea. Perhaps Nathan’s letter just said the right things at the right time and it knocked an idea loose that’s been, before now, easier to overlook. 

I felt responsible, for the lack of a better word, because I saw that what motivates me most about FToM moved another person a great deal - and that is something I am so, so grateful for, and it has come with this desperation not to let anyone down who has given me the benefit of the doubt as a first time filmmaker. I just kept thinking: “Don’t fuck this up. Don’t fuck this up. Don’t fuck this up.“ 

But, before I get too deep into that, I want to go back to Nov 27th above, I had been following the plan the three of us laid out, I was writing and re-writing and expanding on our outline, but I wasn’t moving fast enough; not fast enough just for the sake of being faster, but at a pace that dragged on in the way that only wrong-directions drag on, I was waiting for something or someone to confirm that I had taken a wrong turn. I should have noticed something was wrong sooner, but I didn’t. 

Every moment at my typewriter felt awkward, as if someone was leaning over my shoulder waiting for me to key the next letter. Later, I would realize that someone was the film - waiting impatiently for me to pick up where I had left off - I had edited quite a large chunk of the film after moving from LA to Ypsi, where Erica helped support the both of us while I finished the script over the next year, during which I spent less and less time looking at the film’s timeline in Final Cut. I had reached a point in editing where I needed more narrative structure before I could really make a decision to which clip went after the next, one foot before the other, so Amanda and I worked only on the script, but, by the time the script was written, I had grown somewhat terrified of these last steps. 

The Kickstarter launched last September was a product of this - true, raising the full $26,000 would have removed many of the hurdles still left - it would have been an amazing weight off, but to be honest, the film has almost never had that kind of pressure-free environment, and there’s no reason all the risk should go out the window in these last months of the project. It is important I continue to move forward whether I have the means to do so or not. 

Erica and I talked about the project two weeks ago for nearly three hours - she was worried that I was creating more problems than I was solving, those weren’t her exact words, I’m paraphrasing, but that’s what I took away from our conversation - that my worries about sound and grading and narration and etc, were, yes, legitimate concerns, but my being as caught up in them as I’ve been was holding me back unnecessarily. I was looking too far down the road. 

Last Friday I dropped by Blip HQs to catch up with Steve Woolf and Rick Rey - I was very, very curious about a project Steve had briefly mentioned several episodes ago on New Mediacracy, but ended up spending a great deal of time being pressed by Rick and Steve on the film: where was it at, where was it going, what was holding me back, what needed to happen still to move on? In the end, Steve’s main thread of advice was, “Mike, get out of your own way” - and Rick’s main advice was, “what is the straightest line for you finishing this film?”. This is not to say that 64 Days always was and will be a distraction, or a way for me to hide from the film, writing and releasing the first 4 of 8 parts, when Amanda and I did, was a vitally important part of this whole process - it allowed me to experiment with story structures that were later written into the FToM script, more importantly, it gave us confidence when we needed it most. 

And so, there was the video-letter from Nathan, the conversation about worry with Erica, and the talk with Steve and Rick about straight lines - all these things on their own could have lead to me this place eventually, but the three of them occurring so close together knocked apart any chance of procrastinating another day. At this moment, I need to be working towards a finished rough cut. That’s it. 

No more distractions, no more not moving forward until everything is perfectly in it’s place. Enough of it. I have a script in front of me that I am proud of, I have a timeline in front of me that is terribly in neglect. The rough edit of FToM is priority - it is my straight line. It is important I continue to move forward whether I have the means to do so or not.