This optimistic acoustic gem from Jakob Dylan serves as the perfect soundtrack to this meditative video about the underlying similarities in everyplace, everything and everyone. In this case, it's an unyielding and fixed horizon — be it natural, or artificial — forming a surprisingly straight horizontal line running through every shot captured in this ten day journey through America.
Josh & Xander, directors: "We think about still photography a lot in relation to our work, and we’ve always wanted to do a non-narrative road-trip project that was more like a book of photographic stills than anything else. The idea was to use a graphic constant, in this case the horizon, to bind the images together, but other than that, to basically go out into the world and approach the video in a completely experimental and free-form way, as if we were shooting stills for a book. We were interested in creating a filmic portrait of America that was by its nature fractured and idiosyncratic, and that would only be tied together by the fact that we found/chose to shoot certain shots, and that those shots were framed in a certain way to a certain song. The experiment of the concept was to go out and react to the world photographically, without much
preplanning, and have faith that in the edit, we would be able to find/create an internal logic for the video from all of these moments that somehow made sense on a visual, thematic, and emotional level. To be honest, we had no idea whether or not it would work, so we have to give a lot of credit to Columbia commissioner Bryan Younce for supporting this project on pretty much blind faith.
We shot for 10 days, all over CA. Originally, the idea was to go cross-country, but we realized early on that with the price of gas these days and the limited time to deliver forced us to stay pretty close to home. That being said, CA is an infinitely weird, diverse, and mysterious place. We never felt like we were missing out on things to point the camera at. The people you can meet and the moments you can find with no money, no crew and a little bit of enthusiasm are pretty limitless.We used an Arri super16 HS camera, mostly on the new Canon super16 zoom lens, though we also brought a set of master-primes for some of the interior and low light stuff. We barely lit anything, but for the few scenes where we needed something extra we had a small kino and a set of LED lights. We had a great crew to whom we’re infinitely grateful for roughing it out with us for a string of 20-hour days, grungy motels, and the most disgusting roadside food imaginable. The grading was done by Marcelo Aprile at Riot, who did a beautiful job nailing the look we were after, and managed to keep a smile on his face (and ours) while we were nit picking over every photographic detail for what turned out to be an epic 4 day telecine session.
We normally cut our own videos, but in this case, we worked with Akiko Iwakawa at Final Cut, whose contribution to the project was huge. With around 10 hours of footage and seemingly infinite options that we had become emotionally tied to (in the most unobjective way, of course), someone had to bring the hammer down and make sure the thing got delivered on time, and Akiko really rose to what was, by all accounts, a serious challenge. It was definitely not an easy edit and it was tougher than it normally is to leave some of our favorite moments on the cutting room floor, but such is the nature of the beast…
The online and effects were done at Method, who we work with a lot. One thing that was interesting about finishing this project, is the amount of digital manipulation we ended up using to help clarify the horizon-line. Probably two-thirds of the shots in the video were significantly painted in the flame in some way or another to make the horizon more defined, accurate, or simply to make the shot look better. We were laughing at the simple truth that there just is no 'real' anymore".
--> watch "Something Good This Way Comes"
Jakob Dylan "Something This Way Comes" (Columbia)
Josh & Xander, director | Jenna Felling, producer | Streetgang Films , production co | Lanette Phillips, rep (US) / Alexa Haywood, rep (UK) | Max Goldman, DP | Akiko Iwakawa, editor | Marcelo Aprile, colorist
