Filmed on a Canon 60D. Edited on Adobe Premiere 2022. Runtime: 19:39. A special thank you to key participants Matan Birnbaum and Lucas Donovan- you made this project. Directed by Truman Urness, you can reach me at urness@oxy.edu and I am an LA based filmmaker.
In this project I conducted a series of four interviews between three people. Two being with myself. The first was me simply recording myself dealing with this realization that one project simply could not be made. The next was a sort of expansion on the thought being presented.
Next I interviewed my friend Lucas Donovan, a bassist in many projects and a visual artist. He had so much to say on what it's like to make in close proximity to other peoples work and a sort of fraud complex that we had both been talking about.
The over arching plot through this though was found in my interviews with one of my roommates; Matan Birnbaum. They recently went through a struggle where they had to kick the lead singer and creative force of their band, out of their band. This left them in a similar state to what I briefly experienced but for a much longer period of time. I felt like they had so much to say that really drove the project in an interesting direction.
Overall this is a contemplation of what it means to fail. What is failure as artist and when do we truly fail? It was such a great experience to be able to collect this unique perspectives and I felt such legitimate joy in finding overlap across our three distinct perspectives and experiences.
My name is Truman Urness, I've been making short films since I was a freshman in high school doing SNL weekend update style sketches. I didn't really start taking film seriously until my junior year when I started making short projects that I truly fell in love with filmmaking and studying film itself. Since then it's been a really, really fantastic journey of learning and getting better and better with each project. It's been an amazing opportunity to be able to put out projects at a school like Occidental.
As I said before, this project came from something else entirely. It came from feeling like I was bad at doing the thing that made me the happiest. I wanted to really sus out an answer to where that comes from, why artists are so sensitive to that. I feel like in the media arts and culture community at my school theres this animalistic intent. People are waiting to smell blood in the water all the time because they are terrified of someone being better than them, and I wont exclude myself from that statement. The documentary I always come back to watching is David Lynch: The Art Life, I hope that was obvious from watching this. I used his composer Angelo Badalamenti's soundtrack for Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Obviously those are heights I am far from soaring near but at its very core I loved the idea of an artist talking about how they feel, and then connecting it with images of how they express this exact emotion. That's what drove the visual aspect of this piece.
Starting late, having given up the previous project, I went out and filmed as much as I could. Once I stepped into the cutting room it was like a horrifying realization that I had written my own death. I realized the (seemingly) herculean task that sat before me: taking around 3 hours of interviews and taking it all the way down to a sub 20 minute project. I know it was over the time constraints we were provided but I simply needed to include all of that. In full retrospect there were maybe 3 more minutes to be lost. Regardless, I felt I did what I could in the time allotted.
This is maybe my most successful project yet. I don't think it's what looked best but it's the one that made me feel the most. I wasn't sure how I felt until I put it to music. Something magical happened then, I just dragged Laura's Theme onto the timeline and without any effort the swell of the chorus synched up perfectly with Matan's reflection on the removal of 'Gabe' from their band. At its emotional core, this was my work at its best I believe.