The Sanctuary

So my friend Nate Neal has just finished a 170+ page comic book called The Sanctuary, which will be published soon by Fantagraphics - quite an achievement I must say. One night I told Nate that we should do a video project together, since I have a camera and full access to a edit suite. At the time Nate sort of laughed at the Dionysian intensity of my insistance, but the next week Nate showed me a very well done storyboard he had made. We talked about it for a while, then went to scout out a good location. After a couple of hours of driving around, we found a nice blank wall that seemed to meet our lighting and audio requirements.

The next morning we shot the video. It stunk a bit there, and there was quite a bit of garbage, including used underwear, in the environs. Dad found what looked like a handgun bullet on the ground. We started shooting at around 10:30 and finished slightly after noon. Me and Nate had lunch together, then after a short repose went straight to the edit booth. I popped the tape into the deck, pressed play, and to my spine-scorching horror saw amateur porn on the monitor. See, we were using a DV tape that my Dad had given me. He had recently found a DV camera downtown (in a planter in front of a bank) and this was the tape that was in it. I knew that there was some black guy shooting himself fucking a girl on it, but I thought I had rewound it completely before shooting! For some reason the first part of what we shot didn't get recorded well. There was half porn, half our garbled footage for the first 5 minutes. Luckily we ended up not really needing the stuff that got corrupted, but it was quite a scare nonetheless. After around 3 hours we were essentially finished editing.

The next day we came back to add a few details and upload the video on the web. It was just so fun to have a fun project come together so harmoniously, and in so little time. I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed making it.