Slide

i made Slide for a film festival with the theme of "things that must go". i had never made any films or anything like that before, but i have always wanted to and for whatever reason the idea of this festival sparked my motivation to try it. my friend bryan loaned me his camera, and became the actor for the film as well. i chose him because he looked like he could be my nephew grown up, and originally i planned to start the film with footage of my 4 year old nephew. my life and the life of a lot of my friends and family have been affected by drugs and suicide, and so that's the concept that the theme inspired for me. i actually wrote this story with another song in mind, by another artist, and a much different editing style, and with some dialogue and narration in mind. we ran out of time before the narration could be added, and i sort of decided not to do that when i realized that this song, Barfuck, worked much better than the one originally intended for the way i ended up editing the film. speaking of editing, i had never done that before. i had a friend who years ago wanted to get into editing, and he never did, but he had sony vegas sitting around and put it on my computer. i googled a bunch of online tutorials and used the help option a lot in vegas to figure it out....i ended up really loving the editing process, though if it hadn't been for the fact that i knew nobody who could edit, i never would have thought it would be the thing for me. all in all the film took about two weeks to complete. a fun fact: bryan and stef are both members of the band Plastic Furs, whose music i coincidentally ended up using. another not so fun fact (and spoiler): the scene where bryan is committing suicide in the tub was super emotional for him. he was incredibly emotionally vested in the film right from the start, and was "changed" for a couple of hours after each shoot...but especially for the bathtub scene. he was incredible, especially for never having acted before - it was amazing to see him become this character. but anyway...after we shot the suicide scene i learned that someone close to bryan had ended their own life years earlier, and that the night we shot that scene was the anniversary of that suicide. it was incredible to consider that bryan had wanted to go through with doing the scene when it hit so close to home for him on that day of all days. bryan later told me that coming away from a shoot was similar to coming away from an intense meditation or something...like a great release after finding that place of pain inside him to act out, and then trying to shake it off and get back into his usual happy head right afterwards. i will leave you with one other fun fact: the scene where stef is walking out on bryan, there was supposed to be some slapping and intense yelling at him going on. trying that kind of thing was almost impossible for stef, who is totally non-violent and a gentle but rock n' roll type of girl..plus she and bryan are so lovey dovey that getting a realistic argument out of them is not possible. so when she turns around and yells on her way out, i asked her to scream something like "fuck you!!!" as loud as she could. it kind of looks like she did that right? in actuality, she yelled, very mousy-like, "you big stupid!". i thought that was kind of hilarious. Slide was an official selection for the 2010 Radio From Hell "Things That Must Go" Film Festival, where film critic Jeff Vice voted it second best film of the festival. Also an official selection and will screen twice at the 2010 Fear no Film program of the Utah Arts Festival. Canadian writer and recovering heroin addict Kimberly Gray featured Slide in her article "Rehab. I say no, no, no." City Weekly news magazine journalist Gavin Sheehan interviewed Bryan Holbrook, Stef Marlow, and Justin Langford about Slide for his May 2010 feature in his blog "Gavin's Underground".