Today, we are releasing a short film that Rob, Jason, and I have been working through the film festival circuit over the past year.
Telling Mattresses Stories: Jason and Ellie go on a Kafkaesque quest to keep a 3 day old mattress with a 90 day return policy out of a landfill.
This is a story that Jason told me at the Philly dive bar Dirty Frank’s when I first moved back from CA to NYC a few years ago.
He made a quick apology, “Sorry, I need to go charge my phone. It’s an iPhone 6, and I know if I get rid of it, it’s going straight to the trash, so I just charge it every ten minutes, so I know it won’t end up in a landfill.”
I responded, “I’ve been thinking a lot about trash, too, because I’m trying to furnish my entire house on Craigslist and FB Marketplace, but the one area I have been running into an issue is with a mattress. You don’t REALLY want to get a used mattress, you know.”
And Jason said to me, “Well, I’ve got a story for you about a mattress.”
Then he told me his tale – which was just so Kafkaesque – the perfect example of the guy trying to do the right thing in the twenty-twenties – and I said, “we gotta make this a movie.”
And so we did!
This thing spent a lot of time on the editing blocks, but by the time we finished it, I think we honed it down into a really tight – and I think universal – story.
Hope you enjoy it!
ps. Don’t forget to like the video and subscribe to @kortina on YouTube! More vids coming soon.
Last week, I got invited back up to MIT to do another talk at their DEAL program.
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about all the lessons I learned playing team sports as a kid that you just wouldn’t learn in the academic classroom.
We made this for AOD’s One Day Doc Competition, where you get 30 days to make a doc, and you must “shoot your doc in 24 consecutive hours.”
As I mentioned in devlog 10, I didn’t finish my Miyazaki essay til pretty late into the 30 days, so it wasn’t until 27 May 2024 that I emailed Travis Rix (founder of SaveArtSpace). He responded, we shot all the footage on 6 Jun 2024, and we submitted the final cut to the contest on 14 Jun 2024. Whew!
devlog 10 already has most of the learnings from this shoot, but one more to add… before publishing here, we made a few minor fixes to the video:
Back in Jun, I participated in AOD’s One Day Doc Competition — the rules are you have 30 days to make a doc, and you must “shoot your doc in 24 consecutive hours.”
Nothing like a deadline!
For each film I make, I like to do a retro, and I finally got around to posting the retro for our one-day-doc here:
Just in case you missed it… TELLING MATTRESSES STORIES, a short film I made with Rob and Jason, will be screening at 6pm on Fri 7 Jun 2024 at The Producers Club, NYC.
Also, I finally finished a film essay I’ve been working on for awhile…
Miyazaki's Beautiful Dream: The Technological Sublime.
Hayao Miyazaki tries to imagine an engineer that can sidestep questions of ethics by dedicating himself to the pursuit of THE TECHNOLOGICAL SUBLIME.
WARNING: Spoilers in here for THE WIND RISES and APOLLO 11.
Inso
This is a film essay about the Hayao Miyazaki film THE WIND RISES — which I’ve seen 5 or 6 times now, most recently at The Angelika in NYC in Jun 2023.
One thing I love about this movie is how much my interpretation of it has changed over the years.
I used to see this movie as Miyazaki's apology for "the best kind of engineer." Someone kind and generous; someone who is a pacifist; someone who is more artist than engineer; someone who finds so much beauty in their work that they just can't resist building airplanes... even when the customer is the military and they know that the planes will be used as weapons of war. Perhaps it's Miyazaki's idea of what might motivate him if he were an engineer.
Now I see the story as far more tragic — a story about an engineer’s obsession with his work that leads him to neglect his personal relationships and ignore the moral consequences of working for the military.
My personal understanding of the story on it has almost completely reversed, yet a lot of the people who've given feedback on this essay have an interpretation that's closer to my original one — and I don't think that interpretation is necessarily wrong, even though mine has changed.
What's so cool about this film to me — and this is REALLY what inspired me to make this essay — is that it's a great example of how one story can MEAN almost completely opposite things to different people — or to the same person at different times.
Retro
I was working on this essay back in Jan when I mentioned I wanted to start publishing more stuff straight to the internet. My original goal was to release it on 1 Feb.
By Feb, I had a decent rough cut, but I went down some rabbit holes with the voiceover audio (eg, I took a voiceover class) and I had a few other life distractions pop-up… So, by the end of Apr, when I announced the upcoming screening of Telling Mattresses Stories, I was close but not done… So I said I hope to get this essay out “next week.”
It’s now 23 May… better late than never, I guess.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In retrospect, I think the extra time on this was worth it. The original rough cut clocked in at 27:04 and the final is 23:46. I pulled out a lot of cruft, and I made the ending more pointed / specific.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out.
I posted links to a lot of the things I learned while making this in my last substack. I think the only addition I have to post here is some of the stuff I learned about mixing audio specifically for YouTube.
YouTube Administrivia
If you liked this essay and want to see more from me on YouTube, please subscribe to my channel and give the video a thumbs up – it seems like there are certain things you need to “unlock” on YouTube with a certain amount of “karma.”
