One of the things I’d always planned for Echoes of Iceland was to turn some of the stories into short films.
Recently, I was asked if I’d like to submit a short film for the latest version of the One Young Punk Festival, an online festival put together by Richard Wilkins and his son Rod (two wonderful folks who were at Frank Turner’s Lost Evenings Festival in Anaheim last September). They wanted their Spring Festival to concentrate more on short films and asked me if I had one. Naturally, I said yes.
Because I intended to turn a few of the Echoes of Iceland stories into short films.
And I’d taken a ton of video while in the Eastfjords.
So I selected one of the pieces that wasn’t too long (a bit over six minutes when I read it) and catalogued most of the video I’d shot. That took a while.
I came up with a very rough sense of the type of footage I wanted to include and fairly quickly had a first (very rough) rough cut.
I spent about three weeks refining that cut, playing with the sound and video to make it look good.
I used an animation plug-in to make a little bit of the video look a tad more interesting.
I realized there was a half-second of me in the video, which later was shaved back to about a quarter of a second.
I discovered that a few of the long pans looked jumpy in the edited video and I spent about a week trying to fix that (and eventually did).
I fell in love with some of the odd ambient sounds from the video and left them in.
When it was finally done, I decided to enter it into a few film festivals. The Red Moon Film Festival (which literally was the first one I entered) awarded it Best Symbolic Short. Then it got into the next two festivals I entered it into.
A few of the festivals seemed genuinely confused by the film.
One person emailed me and said it was more poetry than film. Someone else said the scenery was terrible. And look, not everyone likes everything, which is fine, but if you think the scenery in the film or in Iceland in general is “terrible” then there is probably something deeply wrong with you.
In any event, “Grace” is out in the world now and I’m really proud of it.
You can watch it here: