11:11

In August 2013, after we finished filming our initial music video collaboration “Boomerang”, Robb and I had begun talk of what was next in Paint’s bag of tricks. He mentioned he’d been working on a visual accompaniment idea for the band’s next EP - to be called “Based On Truth And Lies” - about a young man’s failed relationship and his subsequent decent into illicit drug use, casual sex, and debauchery: a very “sex, drugs, rock and roll” kind of tale.

Robb sent me a copy of his 16-page treatment, which he had titled “11:11”, and I perused it off-and-on over the weekend while marathoning old episodes of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: I had a moment of epiphany.

There’s a recent trend in music videos where bands perform in white rooms devoid of any distractions for the viewer: the focus is solely on the band. However, this type of video runs the risk of becoming too generic and getting lost in the crowd: someone else has already done that, so why would anyone pay attention to this one. Robb had illustrated in his 11:11 treatment that Paint would be performing each of the songs in a white room throughout the project’s four acts but was only visible on television sets in the background of the scenes. My thought was: “when our protagonist Trevor overdoses at the climax of ACT II, what if he ends up IN the white room with Paint?”

In the initial production meeting that followed, Robb and the rest of the band were excited - “Is Trevor just hallucinating, or is he ACTUALLY in the white room - like Agent Cooper in The Black Lodge [the ethereal ‘other realm’ in Twin Peaks]?” The David Lynch homages continued alongside a strong Cronenberg-esque vibe of strange drug use (Naked Lunch) and twisted perceptions of reality (eXistenZ), as the references to parallel dimensions, alternate timelines, and hallucinogenics started to overlap to form the convoluted universe that became 11:11.

The project quickly escalated even further as either Robb or I would come up with some new idea on the fly and present it to each other, only for the counterpart to get equally excited about that and piggyback something increasingly strange or ridiculous on top. Robb, myself, and our fantastic leads Zac Ché and Victoria Urquhart ended up using each scene of that original screenplay as a framework and really digging into each one to find what was buried beneath the surface narrative as we continued to add new elements into the fold throughout production — obviously this might be the reason why the project inflated to five times the initial project size, but we like to think that the film needed — or wanted? — to become what it ultimately did.

The small scale of the operation and the guerilla filming tactics made the shoot extremely mobile and much easier to contain than a traditional film set, and the low-budget we generously received from our fundraising campaign meant we all pulled triple/quadruple duties some days on set to stretch the budget as far as it could go: if we were going to do this big, weird thing, we were committing. There were a great many happy accidents throughout the course of making this film: something in the environment shifted in a particular way which changed blocking, a location flooded so we were forced to use an alternate which turned out much stronger thematically, props or gear malfunctioned and we were forced to improvise on the fly - all the good staples of a great indie filmmaking experience. But I think the spirit of the production is best summed up with a quote from Robb one night as we were nearing completion on the pickup shots for the final edit in the spring of 2015: “Let’s grab some beers, light some shit on fire, and film it.”

I’m not sure I could have summed up the theme of our production any better myself.