When I was 6, I heard Vincent Van Gogh cut off his own ear and I wanted to be just like him. My parents said I wouldn’t eat, so I ate as much as I could until then. I suffered from night terrors that made the whole world frightful and infinite, which the doctors blamed on an overactive imagination. I spent most of my time indoors playing Nintendo games and watching cartoons, or on the playground inventing my own to kids I resented at the time for disobeying my rule. Eventually I got into anime and running, and my soul blossomed on open sculpture garden streets. I chased powerlines to Howard Hughes’ grave before sunrise and hid in the Rothko Chapel after class.

The most popular anime [pl.], which are as popular as ever in the States, focus on losers who are chosen to overcome the impossible with tears in their eyes. The formula I played grew old, the outcome was always the same. There’s another sect I prefer, following the example of Dazai and Neon Genesis Evangelion, where the impossible is built into the whole reality of animation, where the ideal eccentrics, love triangles, exaggerated figure, bright colors, and silent floodplains conspire against the fullness of the protagonist’s outline, where anime is a last-ditch escape to imagination. Kaiju decorate the rice fields and coastal power plants visible from the school roof where lunch is taken alone. And across void’s horizon, madness and philosophy intertwine in ectoplasmic visions.

My eyes glistened yolk, my smile struck lightning, my feet stepped atop dust floating in window light. I’m going to make this school a lot more interesting. I’ll keep you company until he comes back. Let’s watch for aircraft and tsuchinoko. Do something pretty while you can. The magic’s there if you can sense it. Everyone has their own song ringing out if you listen. I’ll die for my canvas of inked parchment and colored screen. Make it new. I caught the drumbeat.

My first film, apart from YouTube content pastimes, was built of nightmare God, Bergman silence, traffic jams, and mistranslation of consciousness to reality. I titled it in Icelandic which means “weather that looks appealing from the inside, but outside is unpleasant,” filmed it on a broken phone camera which blurred and stuttered, and included Chinese dialogue and CCTV footage. It wasn’t supposed to be avant-garde, just far more interesting than cookie-cutter Hollywood lead. Traditions are defended as knowledge without conviction in a dark room. I told the story of goodwill which martyrs itself without reward, as I experienced it--routine drives, fatigued vision, music whispers, conversations with friends whose meaning and value is indescribable. I was on a kick of putting image to the fragmentation of reality and nonsense of the river current I was born into, without a clue to what the modernists and mimes had said before me.

The next things I made were parody commercials for our school’s record-holding scholarship fundraiser and a twenty-minute graduation video which moved an auditorium to tears. Crowds are easy, so why does the media majority disappoint? I don’t experiment to forge an elite privatized form of art, but to give the people what they want. Name a teen unrocked by The Graduate. I dug Van Gogh before I saw his paintings, that was an individual. Munch’s The Scream is a train-halting laugh. My expressions have story, they have philosophy, they have ethos, they have reality, they have animated unreality. They’re humorous, nonsensical, disturbing, raw, tearjerkers, cosmopolitan, memorable, and chiefly weird. There’s an old saying where I come from, passed down from the shuttered tie-die factories, “Keep Austin weird.” It’s never meant much to me, but has meant galaxies to other freaks just like me. They keep me around till nightfall, where I learn how to drive spikes into space for a future kid’s trip on the galactic railroad.

I do this through film, because of how it fossilizes space and time. The two necessary points of inspiration for me to make a film are music and location. Exploring the world on runs and drives listening to music, unheard verse trigger phantom scenes enclosed by graffitied concrete in my mind. In a silent film, there is still melody. I sculpt the story the actors will reenact, adding oblique edits, unique animation, and untried visual effects to the beating waves of the echoing song. The location is its own transitory tune which the audience must inhabit via film, which transports it to them, if their outlook on reality is to be cultivated. Film is a medium where music, voice, sight, space, and time converge, so the edit must be tambourine in-time, the voice like Canon in D, the space like a voice of its unseen people, the time as the pace of the museum.

The film should represent the eternal through what is now: how people dress, talk, live, think, and what they think, build, lose, forget. By being unmanipulative, the artistic film is ethnographic. The actors’ performances are recorded as in a documentary, yet directed for provocative fiction. Likewise, almost all of my work has an element of diary verité (inspired by Jonas Mekas) in it, handheld snapshots of common life: the words that slip out talking to yourself, the places I walk, people I kiss, the memories whose end is my beginning.

The imperfect and DIY is often more valuable than the rocket science of coordinated (studio) production. A hundred actors may dance in synchronization, but if they are only puppets, and not poised model subjects for some Baroque painter, then I may surely achieve the same effect with classical strings and cardboard, or post-modern pick-up sticks. The technology provides canvas enough; films should only be as costly as the type of art they admire. Sometimes a director aims for the Sistine Chapel with their millions, other times one constructs an interstate highway with a postage stamp. Cinematography is pixel by pixel plagiarism (or sampling) of every atom at this moment. The nicest camera and lighting sees for our fatigued souls what is beautiful. The worse camera reveals how we see. Each are good and fill an exhibition room.

I make films to blend animated ideals with modernist realism, to electrify the beauty in drama-less expression with the imaginative impossible. I pursue film as a medium to document the physical wonders of time and place, to lather daydreams into captured sublime spaces.

My most common themes are accessing fantasy through love in an incomprehensible world, confronting the hidden darkness of life without shame in balance with its beauty and instinctual fun, and travel as a means of reflection and spirited recovery. My influences include Antonioni's bleak wandering realism, Wenders' global humanistic searches for meaning, Yuaasa, Birney, Anno, and Hertzfeldt’s multi-medium escapist animation, Mekas and Weerasethakul's observational purity, Joel Haver's lighthearted DIY ambition, and Jodorowsky and the Japanese New Wave's defiant reality warp. My creative process is to construct sequences based on music I am listening to, and unique, striking, locations I want to film at. I edit all of my films myself because each work requires lots of animation, VFX, and editing tricks to transgress reality and the literal. My goal is to strike the many with disbelief that the madman artist persists in modern media, and the growing loner few with the inspiring feeling that no matter how awkward, bored, or unhappy they are, imagination prevails in flowering fields where people gather to watch what they prepare to do next. 

As we get older, every day feels longer, but although I know I’ll struggle I will do my best to never get tired. Do something pretty while you can, don’t fall asleep.