Making Demolition Dreaming

The work on Demolition Dreaming is wrapping up. Dreamland Faces has created a great score for it and we are looking at premiering the movie at the Square Lake Film and Music Festival on August 20 2016 with a live performance of the score and narration. This short video looks at the making of the movie.

Animation finished

In early April I finished the animation all the way to the last scene. Now I am at work figuring out the soundtrack and re-editing based on that.

28

I have finished 27 of 28 sequences of Demolition Dreaming, so the animation work is getting there. My painter character has fallen for a second time onto the huge empty parking lot next to the quarry shopping center, the parking lot where the quarry used to be, where the stone was mined and where it was dumped when everything was demolished. That's over 55 minutes of stuff that has been made and animated.
Just one sequence to go!

1998 Demotion timelapse

In 1998 I was able to place my super 8 camera in a 2nd floor window in Minneapolis City Hall and record a time lapse of the demolition of the Augsberg/Fortress building and other buildings on the block on which the Hennepin County jail would be built. Soon after the demolition I added some sound to the film, which includes an early version of the story that would turn into this film project. It's a pretty strange image, almost like the building is melting. I found the videotape on which I had made the transfer in the last couple days and am trying to figure out how to incorporate this into Demolition Dreaming.
I have an archive of film that I shot of various buildings being demolished in Minneapolis the in the late 80s and early 90's. It seemed like there was so much demolition going on those days. That's what made me interested in the whole history of demolition in Minneapolis, which all leads to Demolition Dreaming.

Library

It is years later, and months later since I wrote the last production blog post. My character is an old man in the library, but he is not sure why he is there yet. He is looking for something, for what happened to everything. I now have over 49 minutes of animation done.

Demolition

The whole demolition thing is pretty frightening. Smashing down something that somebody else built, maybe you even built. Just ramming a big heavy ball into it to tumble it down, to pull it down with explosives or a backhoe. It's not like just letting something tumble down, letting nature grow cracks in it and gravity take its time guiding that wall back into the ground. It's taking complete control over time, it's lining architecture up with a firing squad, it's loud and it's dusty and it shakes the whole ground.
Passing by a demolition site, seeing an old building revealed of all its veins and its floors, seeing the insides released to the outside, seeing it as a skeleton that can be shaken into pieces, that's what puts a pit in my stomach. I can almost imagine the painted signs themselves shrieking out in pain. I can almost hear the building wonder why, trying to justify that it was strong enough, that it had good bricks, that it's only being torn down because something unpleasant was once associated with it, but that unpleasant idea can clear like an odor and you're still tearing it down.

30 Minutes!

Today I just barely passed the 30 minute mark. I have created 30 minutes of animation for Demolition Dreaming. Whether all of that makes it into the final film is yet to be seen, but that is a major milestone.
I'm not even sure exactly how long I have been working on this. Serious work started just over two years ago, when I came up with the first elements of the story. Or maybe that is more like two decades ago, when I had the first parts of the story. Two years ago I wrote up a treatment that helped to get me a Jerome Grant in late 2012 that made this project seem much more serious to me. I started the animation work in December of 2012 or January of 2013. Also in January of 2013 I got laid off from my job of twenty years, which both gave me some time to devote to the animation but also put me a little off track because the work of figuring out what I was going to do to make a living took time and energy.
So in a little over a year and a half I have made 30 minutes of animation. I'm pretty far into the story. Heavy Steve is seeing hallucinations on the sides of buildings. That's what I made today.