A cross-country, time-traveling, visual contemplation on our place in time as a country & a people.

           ---ANY AMOUNT HELPS TO SHOW YOUR SUPPORT!---                        ~EVEN THE SMALLEST DONATIONS WILL HELP ME FINISH THIS FILM!~             

~Link to full selection of Production Still's for Print Reward Option ~

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The Backstory:  I left New York this past August with a 3 man crew consisting of myself, Matthew Levy, and David Huwiler to make a poetic film on the beauty and decay of America.  I picked our destination's as places in which I had ideas of what I hoped to shoot there, but nothing was concrete; I was essentially attempting to improvise a feature film on a few basic ideas.  The results were unimaginable.  Instance after instance not only were my basic ideas fulfilled, they were far surpassed; day after day I kept thinking there's no way we'd keep getting this lucky, but we did.

On our way to Texas from New Orleans, I thought the truck was low on coolant, and being a great mechanic, mistakenly poured coolant where the transmission fluid goes.  It turned out to be one of the best mistakes of the trip when I brought the car to a technician, and once we told him what we were doing way down south, offered us a ride through the swamps when his shift ended:

While on the road, there were times we'd drive over 8 hour's out of our way to get a single shot, seemingly crazy, but always worth it.  Here's a few examples:

We drove all the way to the Grand Canyon just to throw a camera off of it-

And other times I'd just be in the right place at the perfect time:

In New Mexico, we met an Indian named Tyler who showed us Dinosaur tracks that were imprinted in the rock on his reservation.  And yes, I said "Indian", which he informed us that despite what us American's think is politically proper, they don't like being called "Native American's" and actually consider that racist.

After about a month on the road, I ran out of money in Arizona, at which point we started pitching our tent in parking lots:

We drove 26 hours straight from Arizona to Iowa, slept on the grass at a rest area for a few hours, and then drove the remainder back to New York

Then after only being back in the city for about 2 weeks, the largest uprising & protests of my generation began; I couldn't have scripted it any better.

And that brings us to now.  I'm about 2/3's of the way to a finished film, but need help to finish it.

To speak briefly about the film, if you can try imagine everything above assembled together as a journey through America's past and present you might get a vague idea..

But to be slightly more specific, I consider the film as a meditation on the state of ourselves as a country and our place in time, and allow for the imagination to think about where we're heading.  There are no conventional interviews in the film, rather you're there in the moment with people when they're speaking.  It is sometimes dreamy, sometimes dramatic, sometimes sad, and sometimes funny.  

It's kind of hard to describe..  So anyway,

Why I Need Money

Pretty much I have 100+ hours of footage ranging from a New Orleans street musician, to a homeless vet in front of the Capital Building, to dinosaur tracks, to a guy in a swamp looking for alligators, to the Occupy protests in New York, and much more compiled into a single film (and yes, it makes sense!)  The footage amounts to somewhere around 10 terabytes (10,000 gigabytes), and it's currently stored across 12 hard drives including the backup, equaling one giant mess when it comes to editing.  We have literally come to a stand still in post-production; there is no drive space left, and if we just get another small drive, there wouldn't even be a place to plug it in.  I need to spend around $4,500 alone just to properly store it in a more feasible way in order to keep working.

This:

Needs to become this:

The rest of the money will go to other post-production needs, mainly a professional sound mix and color correction.  This will cost roughly another $5,000 at a facility, and that'll be cutting it close.

Anyway..

I've always been skeptical of doing this, mainly because if you don't make your set goal, you get none of it!  ..(and yes, then you'd get your money back!)

And who even donates to independent films anyway??  Maybe you? I don't really know.

I guess we'll see what happens though, Thanks for your interest!  

..and don't hesitate to email me if you want to know more about the film! I tried to keep it somewhat brief on here

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Also, here's a trailer to my previous film "Sound Underground", as listed in the reward's section.

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