Echotone’s Transmedia Playground

Transmedia gives us the ability to move beyond the limitations of the feature film format to provide context for the stories being explored in Echotone. From blog posts and to short form web content, to streaming Filmmaker Q&A’s, the windows for media on the internet and in mobile devices expands daily, giving the Echotone team unique tools they use to continue the Echotone story. This complex transmedia story is guided by Director Nathan Christ’s vision for an umbrella narrative that encompasses the diverse opportunities for conversation around the project, both online and off.

Is this a movie about city development? The construction? Construction and how it relates to artists? A rockumentary? Why isn’t Band X in the film? Band Y with that drummer was really where they got started -… a very specific line of feedback that stems from a particular proximity, either industrially, emotionally or geographically influenced. According to Nicoletta Iacobacci, head of interactive TV at Eurovision, the transmedia format develops storytelling across multiple forms of media in order to have different “entry points” in the story; entry-points with a unique and independent lifespan but with a definite role in the big narrative scheme.

It wouldn’t be fair to say the feature film format is limited, but it’s true that within ninety minutes choices have to be made for story, mood, tone, and texture that force a filmmaker to remove strong segments, sounds, and images that at times may have served as inspiration for the project itself.  Ted Hope states in his blog that transmedia holds tremendous potential in its efforts to turn the presentation into an actual dialogue, although we still lack the defining work that goes beyond cross-platform to an actual back and forth with audiences, with both sides being equal creators.

One of our favorite case studies is Heroes creator Tim Kring and, of course King George and the Star Wars franchise. Fast Company wrote an amazing article on the transmedia space of Heroes in April of 2008, that you can check out here.  These examples are rooted in the world of fictional narratives, so how does this larger concept apply to the world of documentary?

Transnarrative storytelling is particularly useful for documentary filmmaking. The 300 hours of footage collected in the production of Echotone holds a world of performances, conversations exploring in the history and influences of the Austin music community, a wide range of visual perspectives on Austin’s development and changes, and much more. Even more importantly, it will give the Echotone team room to continue chipping away at the larger thematic ideas the project explores, such as the differences between being a working musician in Austin as opposed to in New York and Los Angeles, or covering new DIY marketing and distribution “how to’s” from our favorite music mavens like Indierect Record’s Dániel Perlaky

The first piece of content we decided to release is this teaser trailer. It is crafted to be something you feel; a moment that is brief and doesn’t linger, keeps you guessing, but doesn’t give you the story right up front -… the first emotional glimpse of the film.

Since Echotone is an esoteric state of mind that exists in the physical and emotional spectrum of the creative class, we felt that anchoring the first piece of content in story mechanics would be too familiar and traditional. Instead we just want the audience to feel it, and feel the world around the film.

We will be sharing occasional thoughts on Echotone’s process while it steadily churns toward completion. Please join the conversation if you like what you hear – share Echotone with your friends or followers, and we hope you enjoy(ed) Echotone’s first teaser trailer.

Stay tuned…
- Nick and Vic, Reversal Films

Sunset featured on NPR’s World Café

Echotone featured artist Bill Baird and his band, Sunset, are featured on National Public Radio’s World Café program with legendary host, David Dye. They perform a sprawling, layered song called “Fishtown” into a fabulous rendition of “Rivers of Babylon.”

Click to listen to the performance on NPR’s World Café.

More than a Year and a Half in Pursuit

When we started filming in April 2008, we weren’t clear where we were headed. We didn’t know where or how the story would present itself. All we had to do was look up to know that something was brewing in Austin. The dozen-plus high-rise condos hung over everything, most of them just shells. I’d been hearing rueful whispers about our town:

“It’s turning into a city, but it still thinks it’s a sleepy town.”

We knew we liked the music happening around us. Belaire, White Denim, Black Joe Lewis. Something seemed to be happening, but when Robert Garza (Echotone’s Director of Photography) and I discussed the burgeoning vision of the project, we avoided the phrase “music scene” like cancer. There was something so presumptuous about it, as true as it might have been.

We were also extremely leery of music documentaries that relied on the cultural cache of movements and zeitgeists that happened decades before.

“You shoulda been there,” they’d tell us. “But if you had been there, so and so would’ve broken your fuckin’ nose.”

Even the documentaries I respected like American Hardcore or Kill Your Idols read to me more like vital historical relics than anything else. We get the sense that the opinions and viewpoints are cemented in time. Kill Your Idols, about the so-called No Wave movement that surfaced in NYC in the early 1980s, attempted to bridge the gap from the old vanguard (Lydia Lunch, DNA, Sonic Youth) to the new (The Liars, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Black Dice). It trips itself up, though, in its determination to define the musical culture of New York. There are tons of talking heads, which we knew we wanted to keep to a minimum in our film. Our maxim from the gate was that a film about music should be as kinetic as the music itself. It shouldn’t be chock-full of people telling you how you should feel.

The seminal influences for Echotone’s baby steps forward were the Maysles Brothers’ Gimme Shelter (About the 1969 Rolling Stones Altamount show that ended in four deaths. A true freak show. Feels like the end of an era. Its extended depictions of crowds flowing from all across the world to see the Stones is breathtaking.), D.A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop (filming Janis Joplin’s foot stomping while she wails is a stroke of genius), and Penelope Spheeris’ The Decline of Western Civilization.

Western Civilization was clearly directed by someone entrenched in the culture, riled and probably even scared by it. It was shot in a small cluster of L.A. clubs over the course of a few months in 1980. Spheeris depicts a world in a state of near-anarchy, as groups like X, Black Flag, and the Germs blur the lines between rage, politics, poverty, and music. The beauty of her particular form of documentary lies in that it confronts a particular moment in history, when the future seemed unwritten. Western Civilization is not looking back on an era with rosy-colored glasses. It is made by a fan wanting to dig deeper not only into the music itself, but the surrounding sociological factors, the press, and the upheaval of the American identity proper. It feels unsafe, volatile, alive.

I’m not sure what sort of cultural hype L.A. punk carried at the time the film was released, but I’ll bet it seemed like bullshit to anyone that was actually there. Which brings me to Austin, TX, circa now. Look no further than the recent New York Times travel article “36 Hours in Austin, TX”. It does well to allude that the city is in supreme flux, but its tips to tourists are unfortunately the same old phoned-in mainstays. It might as well read:

Mosey on out of the downtown Hilton, pardner, put on yer cowboy duds and head on down to the Broken Spoke for some good ol’ honky tonk.

Before it takes the absurd cowboy clichés too far, it makes sure to mention the city’s ubiquitous slogan “Keep Austin Weird.”

This is the home of Janis Joplin, reminded. And, you know, Willie Nelson, who we all know bridged the hippie/cowboy divide in the 60s, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. There’s Scratch Acid, Doug Sahm, Lightnin’ Hopkins and (most relevant to me) Townes Van Zandt and Daniel Johnston and the wailing 13th Floor Elevators. There’s a cultural history here, and it’s anything but dead.

Certainly the New York Times has a bottom line in the realm of tourist dollars, but their cultural snapshot of my town misses the mark by totally neglecting the Red River District, the epicenter for Austin’s current cultural renaissance.

It’s with this spirit that our cinematic journey began, with a balanced blend of love, desire, torpor, impending financial ruin, investor faith and generosity, Lone Star beer, creative connections, and the need, however improbable, to ascribe some meaning to our rapid and frenzied times. There was also a sense of urgency to the whole endeavor. Look at NYC’s St. Mark’s Place or dot com bubble San Francisco as proof that culture can go away, or shift so drastically as to be unrecognizable.

It became clear to me that Austin was at a very similar crossroads. On one hand, the music is as good as it’s ever been. On the other hand, musicians can no longer afford to live downtown, there are midnight curfews for playing outside, and renewed noise ordinances are popping up all over the city. The concept of the “ecotone,” the metaphorical moment where nature and civilization meet, organically grew out of the issues everyone seemed to be talking about.

This will be the first of many writings that attempt to illuminate the independent filmmaking experience as I have experienced it over the course of directing ECHOTONE.

Town of Machine

Originally written December 2008 during the heat of production, I’ve updated this blog with new photos and music. – NC

Construction, progress, noise.

We’re shooting the skeletal high-rise condos in our film as if they are characters themselves. Noisy, moving, rhythmic.

We shot the IDM duo Machine over the holiday break (Ha! Break!) as they walked through the construction sites of the soon-to-be lofts for Austin’s well-monied. The workers slammed, hammered, and drilled and Machine recorded it. They looked like two musical bandits, aiming their shotgun mics directly at the sound (music).

Machine walked along railroad tracks. A train blew by. They got as close as they could to the clanging and screeching while Rob and I filmed it all, my voice rising above the noise: “Don’t get too close to the tracks!” They were so focused.

Jonathan – the keyboardist, with his bleached white hair and Chase, down by the tracks in a placid crouch. When the train passed, they looked up at each other and smiled knowingly. Jonathan simply said, “We got it,” and they walked down the tracks with their newly-collected booty.

Machine got to work, standing before their analogue motherboard of keys, sequencers, Kaos pads, and turntables, turning the city sounds into percussive beats. With Chase living in Boston and Jonathan living in sometimes San Antonio, sometimes Austin, their meetings together are long and intense dump sessions of all the backlogged material they’d both been toying with in the previous year. Their song titles are hallucinatory dream-like portraits of parallel worlds:

‘Order in the Clockroom’
‘Andromedia’
‘Town of Machine’
or
musical sketches of poetic moments:
‘Sun Slipping
‘Balloon at My Door’

Machine photos by Kate Boswell

After a 2am lull, they launch into an industrial freakout number called ‘Moonface,’ morphing the hissing drone of the city into an undefinable cacophony. This is not exactly Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, but Machine’s music is taking us into experimental realms we haven’t yet explored. Beyond this, they are the youngest musicians to show up on-screen. Walking down Lamar, Chase marvels at how quickly the city is changing. Because they aren’t ingrained in the “scene” (a term I’m usually loathe to use), there is a freedom about the way they operate. In the grander scope of the film, they represent the young artist taking a seemingly untenable change and turning it into something beautiful.

After the New Year’s countdown is over and cracked drunk voices croon ‘Auld Lang Syne’, Machine leads us into the next chapter. Jonathan sits against the back wall. It’s incredible to hear a trained pianist make such innovative music. He traipses two genres in ECHOTONE, this IDM collision, and a more classical, stripped-down sound.

02 The Town of Machine

We recently re-recorded it as a motif for ECHOTONE, but you’ll have to wait until the film’s out to hear it.

Jonathan sits against a wall and recounts a story of the first time he ever heard a drum machine mixed with organic instruments, many years back. The band he had heard was just getting on their feet themselves.

“I had no idea what I was getting myself into,” he says.

“What was the band?” I ask.

“The Octopus Project.”