5:04PM, OCTOBER 17, 1989

Seven Point One is about a man who tries to shoot himself in the head at the moment the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake strikes. Although I have no discernible preoccupation with suicide, it's the second movie I've made with self-destruction as the central narrative. You can call it therapy. I call it drama.

I shot the movie on digital video in and around San Francisco: South Oakland, the Marin Headlands, Briones Regional Park, the Presidio, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Marina district, Yerba Buena Island, Treasure Island, Mussel Rock, on a boat to Alcatraz.

My second movie had to be -- had to be -- much better than the first. I spent about the same amount of money on each movie (i.e., almost nothing), but I spent it on entirely different ends. I wrote a far more demanding script, but couldn't find talented friends to submit to my whip and schedule. As an obscurantist, I knew I wanted to evoke the experimental roots of film, the power through image and sound alone to construct a movie.

I fussed over Seven Point One far longer than any director/editor of a 15-minute flick ever should (nearly 2 years). But I wanted it to be right. To suggest what I have in store for the future.

The Movie Star

How do you describe a talented, handsome man brimming with creative energy in the context of a film about sadness, loss, and magic-realist sociopathology?

Terrance Tierney is the sole actor in the film. He plays two roles, a grown up named Martin and the shadow of himself as a 7-year-old boy. That wasn't always how it was to be. The original screenplay required two actors to play Martin: Terry as the adult, and a real (not digitally enhanced) 7-year-old. There was to be yet a third actor, Martin's mother. Circumstances prevented me from working with the mother and young son, so I asked Terry to play his younger self and we transformed the mother into a series of bodiless manifestations.

I don't think Terry had any idea I was going to ask him to play the shadow of a 7-year-old, throw himself out of a car onto gravel, or hurl himself from a chair during an earthquake. But he did all these things, eagerly and with invention.

Terry is 7.1's soul. Without him, I'd have shelved the project and moved on to something else. I knew he could inhabit an entire short, with practically nothing to say, appearing in nearly every scene, and consequently anchor the film's dream qualities in something you could touch. He's eminently photographable and, in the film, always seems to be someone else, somewhere else...instead of a guy on his days off doing odd stuff in an experimental short.

Technical Details

Running time: 16 minutes, 16 seconds
Medium: Digital8
Camera: Sony DCRTRV520

This is the last time I'll ever use this camera. Now 5 years old, I've milked it for everything it's worth. Armed with a wide-angle lens, a slightly better command of in-camera exposure, and a steadicam fixture, I did all I could do. For the next production, if I shoot it myself, it's all about pro-sumer models with 24fps.

Post-Production Computing: PC

Pentium 4, 3.0Gh, 800MB front-side bus, 200GB hard drive space, and 1GB RAM

Post-Production Software: Adobe Premiere Pro, SoundForge, ACID, and Quicktime

You can have your FinalCut Pro. For the no-budget filmmaker, Adobe's Premiere Pro is remarkable. I bought Red Giant's MovieLooks plug-in, which supplies multiple filters that crunch hard and unattractively crispy video artifacts into soft elements that try (not entirely successfully) to emulate the dreamy fuzziness of celluloid.

Music: Zoviet France and myself

For opening music, I heavily distorted a bit of "music" from Zoviet France, which itself distorts natural sounds to produce exquisite music. All remaining music I assembled in ACID using royalty-free packages from their site. I even resurrected unused orchestral samples from "Her Last Interview."