For a while now I've been working on a little movie, my first film, not counting that extremely short one I made about the fire hydrant on Ontario Road. Originally I intended to collaborate on it with Jim, whose knowledge of filmmaking might help elevate it slightly over the embarrassingly amateurish results I'd doubtless get on my own. But between my frequent nights at the rescue squad and Jim's parenthood we blew one opportunity after another. This was doubly vexing because I also depended on Jim for the provision of a movie camera, which he would liberate from his workplace from time to time when it was needed to answer the higher callings of art and travel documentation.

So I was faced with a bit of a problem: how to make a movie without a camera. I could, in theory, buy a camera, but that plan was torpedoed by some new notions I've been having about fiscal responsibility. Besides, I would only be happy with the finest equipment, the perfect optics and complete manual control to insure that no technical limitations would stand in the way of my clumsy amateurish vision. At that point it's no longer a question of fiscal responsibility but an issue of financial impossibility. So no movie camera.

Remind me to tell you a funny story about this sometime.

Fortunately, I do own a digital camera, which immediately suggested a solution. I would simply shoot my film frame by frame, as a series of stills that I would then string together on the computer (in other words, as stop-motion animation). Obviously I would be limited to filming things that would stay still for long periods of time, and there could be no sound other than what I put in later.

So I started shooting a little film in which some things stand still while other things move around them at high speed. This effect was easy to achieve since I was shooting one frame every fifteen seconds. The sped-up passage of clouds and shadows on a landscape is a commonly-used shot in modern TV and film, but it's still pretty spectacular when done well. I wanted to add motionless human beings to these tableaux, cryptic figures who would stand completely still as the chaotic scene flew by around them. They'd be like people who used to have to sit for hours for a photograph. I thought that would look exceedingly cool.

One day while I was out shooting a landscape I called Doug DeMaine and, since standing outside and shooting photos at regular intervals is extremely boring, I told him all about the project in excessive detail. He liked the idea enough to do the musical score. We agreed that the most interesting way to work together was that I would send him an early edit on a CD with absolutely no instructions about what I had in mind as I made it, or even what kind of music I was listening to as I shot it. He would record some music and send it back to me. And I would mix our two pieces together. That sounded interesting.

There were, in retrospect, some drawbacks to my methods. First, the weather was frequently uncooperative, falling short of the perfect conditions of sun and scattered clouds on most days I had time to film. Second, it really started taking fucking forever to shoot. One hour of patiently standing beside my tripod, shooting a frame every fifteen seconds, yielded a paltry 24 seconds of actual video. (That's at a crappy 10 frames/second, and assuming I don't later edit down the scene.) And finally, it turns out to be hard to convince your friends that it will be really fun to stand completely motionless for over an hour. Even in the name of art. By this time, my little movie was already several minutes long, but was missing the human component. Without the people I just thought it looked like a bunch of transition shots from a cheap action show -- "cut to clouds racing over the city as darkness falls."

So I took out an ad in the CityPaper asking for volunteers who could stand very still, "no talent other than stillness required." To my surprise, I got quite a few responses. One was the answer to my dreams: a former "living mannequin" who had been paid to stand extremely still in shop windows. We met on a fine sunny day in Meridian Hill park. My volunteer was a young African-American woman who was exploring a modelling career and interested in participating in some local films to bolster her resume. A soccer game raged on the far side of the park and a few kids came up to ask what I was doing as I set up the tripod. She took her first pose and I dutifully hit the shutter at the predetermined intervals. It was boring, but I was still excited to see how it would turn out once I downloaded the pictures and strung them together to form a cohesive scene. She stayed still like a trooper. Her pose was vaguely reminiscent of a department-store mannequin, but I felt that's what she knew best so we'd go with that. After three separate angles and an hour and a half, we parted company amicably. I promised to get her a final copy once I the project was complete.

I went home to find a small mob of neighborhood folks camped out on the doorstep sloshing beer, and so I put the camera aside to join them. It was several days later before I got back to it. I downloaded the shots, reformatted them en masse, and ordered them as a sequence at 10 frames/second. The results were disappointing. My perfect candidate, the living mannequin, just wasn't as still as I'd hoped for. She swayed slightly on her feet and shifted her body -- imperceptible when you looked at her normally, but magnified by the time-dialation. I was discouraged by the results. If this participant couldn't do it, I had a hard time imagining that some civilian without special mannequin training would be able to pull it off.

Which left the question of what to do. I began to reconsider buying the movie camera. With a real camera I would be free to make movies that didn't require a zillion hours and perfectly stationary figures. But then I thought: if I'm really willing to spend that amount of money, am I going to buy a camera or a used dirt bike? Obviously the dirt bike.