Rewind to the year 2004. I was 23 years old, working as a market and data analyst, and after a tragic event and loss of a loved one a few months earlier, I was quietly spiraling out. As fond as I am of some of the memories of that era of my life, it was an incredibly dark and perverse time. I spent very little of it sober.
I had moved into a large eight-room house downtown. It was a house that had a past of its own, built roughly 100 years earlier. It sounded like it in its bones. I left my doors open to all friends; literally, I think the back door was rarely ever actually shut, and it was never locked.
About twelve folks were living there with me. Upwards of 30, maybe more, spent the majority of their time hanging out there. It was the very definition of a communal flophouse, and an echo of where my mind was. It also happened to be an amazing breeding ground for creativity. Music, art, writing… all bundled in with drama, inebriation, and young love.
The basement was converted into a makeshift music studio, and several of my friends were local musicians. I had worked at a professional recording studio when I was a teenager and played the guitar myself, so it just seemed natural. Many nights were spent with live music blasting up from the basement through every room of the house. Bands practicing, preparing before shows, or just honing concepts into new songs.
It was from those musician circles that Seth Fentress and myself crossed paths. He was the lead singer and guitar player for a band named The Anti-Merger that frequented my basement, but over time he would come to write his solo works there as well.
A few years later after I had moved on from that place, and was starting to find my path, we would work together on one of his solo ventures. I would produce a music video, a short film set to one of his songs, and take on the task of media production and promotion for his music for a year or so. This section takes a look at that brief collaboration.
If you’d like to check out more of Seth’s music, today he is still making tunes under the moniker, “With A Ravens Quill” and you can check out some of his latest music by clicking here.
Music Video / Short Film Production
In early 2007 I wrote and produced a music video of the song “Behind the Trees” as a part of a music promotion effort for the songwriter, Fentress (Seth Fentress). My intent with the video was to tell a story using a hybrid style caught somewhere between handheld 8mm footage and silent film. I was going for a very washed, static-laced, and ephemeral vibe, with the song as an emotional backdrop. The original concept had intertitle cards just like an an old silent movie, but I felt like they were too jarring between scenes and left them out in the final edit.
The six and a half minute short film isn’t directly related to the song, but rather tells the story of an unnamed protagonist (played by the musical artist, Seth Fentress) slipping in and out of thought as he wanders through a forest searching for his past.
He is coping with a loss of a loved one. He feels her presence and continues to search for her; to no avail. Eventually he is forced to cope with her absence as her memory manifests (played by Denise Dugal), and they spend one last moment together in a dream before he finally has to let her go and leave the forest.
The concept was very much rooted in my emotional state at the time as I was struggling to deal with my own tragic loss a few years earlier. Its creation was cathartic, and consisted of more than a bit of self-projection into art.
The video production was a single weekend shoot, and sadly some of the last documented visuals of the heavily forested area. Years later the entire forest would be completely stripped away by logging.
Musical Artist Promotion
Around the same time I produced the music video for Fentress, I was also working on creating branding content to promote his latest releases. This included doing a couple photo-shoots and some digital artwork using those photos. I also managed his web presence and created additional content like show posters for a coffeehouse/cafe tour. I don’t think any of those posters survived beyond being slapped up up in coffee shops or stapled on telephone poles.
It was all volunteer work to help out a friend, but I did enjoy creating the series of plates featured below.
