Disappointed, the client will ask me what is possible in 24 hours, and I might say something like “I could make a 1/32nd scale model out of Legos.” I pause for a moment and add, “it would look pretty sweet.”

In a client project, exceeding expectations is a goal but respecting limitations is key to averting catastrophe. But not all projects need to have this sensitivity to the possible. I participated in such a project this past weekend (August 5 – 7) at the 48 Hour Film Project for Perfect Strangers Productions. The completed romance genre film follows and “Backstage Pass with Luke.”

Pollinating from Perfect Strangers Productions on Vimeo.

Backstage Pass with Luke

It’s not my intention with this post to describe the minutiae of what goes into a 48 Hour Film, or to provide a blow by blow account. Instead, this is a highlight of what my experience and role was.

11:45PM August 5. Friday.

Almost five hours have passed since the directors of our film received the genre for the film, kicking off the concepting and writing stage of the film making process. Kerwin Carambot and I filled the roles of co-art directors, and we’re sitting at Nemo Design headquarters several rooms down from the War Room, a glass box lined with whiteboards and cluttered with laptops and printouts.

Despite being fueled by Skittles and Starbursts, the writing team are stalled out, frustrated by the indecision of commitment. This is not just a story we have to film. It’s a story that will involve literally as much as 600 hours of combined work crammed into only 48, and will live on the intertubes until the end of time or Vimeo (whichever comes first).

Who would put themselves up to this kind of god awful pressure? Can they be real? What do they do?

Meet Director Martha Koenig. Born on a raft in the deep Congo, this intrepid designer and independent art director is known for her tenacity, sustainability work, great shoes and inventing a “non-backfiring” slingshot. We thank her for her contributions on all fronts.

Meet Director Sam Leinen. This exceedingly professional filmmaker, designer and photographer purportedly met Martha during a sky dive interview with Richard Branson off the coast of England. Sam and Martha crossed paths there while she was testing her slingshot in high velocity winds and filming the (mixed) results on an ultralight. They mutually recognized that together, they could provide the  accelerating force required in directing a 48 Hour Film.

I might point out that creating fictions are not even close to being inappropriate here. At the 48 Hour Film Project, every moment counts, and nearly every idea has potential. We very nearly made a film about an anthropomorphized sport boat. Creativity overfloweth.

8AM August 6. Saturday.

Early drafts of scripts had been written and distributed to the cast and crew about an hour earlier. Kerwin leaves Nemo HQ to select props, and I move out to the primary location, a backyard I need to transform into a convincing east coast BBQ. I suspect the directors felt it necessary to place the BBQ on the east coast (Connecticut actually) because making a Portland BBQ is both too easy and somehow not Cannes worthy. Sorry, Portland, you’re just not the stuff of international fame. Although Zooey Deschanel does visit you from time to time. And that’s pretty cool.

12PM August 6. Saturday.

Much of the yard work has been done and I have had three cups of coffee. Lunch approaches at 1PM, and I’m attempting with Kerwin’s excellent co-direction to prep as much as possible for the actual filming that will occur sometime in the next four hours. We find ourselves fussing over the fact that we will be serving lemon drops at this BBQ and not the script-specified margaritas due to the wrong kind of prop glasses. I try not to take out my disappointment on the production assistants. “IF WE CAN’T HAVE FROZEN BLENDED MARGARITAS IN OVERSIZED GOBLETS THEN YOU CAN’T EAT ANY OF THE PROP TORTILLA CHIPS!”

1PM August 6. Saturday.

Caterer Clinton Downs reveals lunch. So awesome, thanks.

3PM August 6. Saturday.

We set up the food table, make sure all the lawn torches are in the right spots. Kerwin greases the peaches with olive oil to make them look juicier. Someone also seems to have greased the watermelon as well, which a crew member reported after trying to eat a piece.

Around this time I am asked to fake a pregnancy test, which I do with surprising difficulty. No one finds it suspect that I carry around a technical pen exactly the right type to do the job.

I also set up a croquet course (wicketless to prevent tripping). Writer John Vincent kicks one of the balls out of place apparently in an attempt to unhinge me. I contain a vast rage and continue to art direct. Yet he is forgiven, for “no man shall put asunder what can be righted with minimal effort.” This is a good proverb for the 48 Hour Film Project, actually.

8PM August 6. Saturday.

Filming has been going strong for hours at the central location, and after a stint providing cues and making sure plates are full with hot dogs and macaroni salad, I go back to Nemo with the fantastic production assistant Kaitlyn Allegretti, who earlier had scoured Portland just to find me some plain white chalk. With said white chalk, I design a grade school biology teacher’s blackboard diagrams. The only negative critique I receive on the hummingbird I sketch is that the beak needs more “girth.” I don’t get the joke for at least 20 seconds but then I’m not sure it’s a joke anymore. I enhance the beak anyway.

12AM August 7. Sunday.

Filming is a wrap, and everyone is mildly delirious. The directors may actually be delirious. I leave and go to bed before 2AM, ready for another long day to assemble credits. I may write about this later, but in the meantime, watch the film, share it, show it to Sophia Coppola so I can meet her. Please, thank you.

Expectations are, if anything, the one thing W+K is best at disregarding. Expectations create work either in advertising or art that evokes style or manner and either way, will always fail at entirely surprising, although sometimes exceeding expectations (rather than avoiding them) are the best way to generate awe. It’s through this that artists like Takashi Murakami, Christo, or Damien Hirst function. They burn expectation like fuel and create work that they need never apologize for, and why would they? They’re making millions and arguing with that kind of money would be silly.

The members of the WK12, on the other hand, sacrifice their incomes in order to participate in their self-fashioned gr(ad) school. They remind the public of this in the biggest “artist’s statement” I’ve ever seen, installed on a wall overlooking the gallery. In brief, it explains how 80+ productive members of society have checked out for a year—from jobs, from families, from everyday life—to live and breathe their own grand Ironman-esque experiment, to shoot high and sometimes miss.

To be honest, after reading that I wished that when I looked down the walls would be empty, and the only thing in the room would be the people standing in line to get their free alcohol. It would have been the perfect failure. But people come to see a show, right?

So what about it? For all the bustle in the room, there was something very lonely about the exhibition, which consists of a single line of small square compositions hung on walls all around the room each by a different member of W+K staff or the WK12.  It’s this loneliness that prompted me to write this, and on reflection, I admit I was partly seeing myself in the work in an empathetic kind of way. As a designer, I intimately understand the loneliness of pursuing a creative life. It’s not a conventional loneliness, it’s not about people. It’s about yourself making with yourself. And when professional creatives gather together to create an art show, I expect to find some of this internal challenge played out.

And it did. I wonder if anyone noticed. It was a little strange being inside a widely recognized powerhouse of creativity and seeing it funneled and precision dripped onto little squares on the wall. There were no apparent rules about what had to happen IN the squares. Some were lumpy and sculptural, some were clever, others funny or flashy and most of the rest just sad or afterthoughts, like the artists were having a really good conversation while they were making but forgot to put their conversation into the frame. A good deal of the pieces were self-referential or tongue-in-cheek. Even here, with full creative license, and they can’t help but point out that “yes, yes, we  are doing art.” All of them. For themselves.

One of the best damn art shows I’ve seen in awhile, and almost totally noncommercial. Color me surprised.

Sustainability of yesteryear would browbeat you for eating a steak. Even if you really, really liked steak. The problem is that default verdicts (i.e. You Love Steak = You Bad Person) suck. It turns sustainability into fashion, which is certainly part of our culture, but it is the most fractious of cultures, and is largely why for the past 30 years anything “sustainable” risks being part of “hippie” fashion. My slightly snarky position is that we need to find a common ground even if it means making a few people surprised and forging weird alliances.

What kind of alliances? Jersey Shore, anyone? I’m kidding, but only a little. What we need to do is help everyone love it and hate it, we need people to consume sustainability so much and so frequently that they start to process it without thinking. This means you can’t turn anywhere without hearing the language of sustainability. Which, by the way, isn’t necessarily about recycle symbols or even saving the planet. It’s about maintaining ourselves and a world we want to live in. That’s all. I want to live in a world that has mind-blowing, delicious food plentifully available, with nearby walks in natural areas full of the sounds of birds and the smell of wet dirt. I want to live in the same world that has arcades with cheap PBRs and vintage pinball machines. I want to be sure it will continue to be possible to travel to one end of the world to the other in a day.

Sustainability is to make sure we can still do these things and cover up the scars. Sustainability needs to appear on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and in Heavy Metal music. It needs to be in all sorts of places. How will it be? To start, that’s a question all designers and experience makers need to ask, so we can help Mary Poppins sustainability into a medicine we all want to swallo. How can we improve people’s lives in a way that its reciprocation will help improve our world socially, environmentally, economically and culturally?

It raises a lot of questions but it doesn’t make our world any more complicated than it already is. In fact, this perspective actually tends to reveal new possibilities rather than eliminate them.

To try and sidestep the whole issue with the contrast between the hyper-visual content of the story in my head with the largely linguistic content of the book is to bridge the gap with music. This way, I can give up trying to worry about filling the space with the feeling I’m going for while I’m writing. The feeling has already been captured, perfectly, rhythmically and emotionally in music. If I can just allow my characters to hear the music as they congeal on the page, they should be able to follow my directions and perform as they do in my head. Stage direction via music mix. I feel like there should be an experimental stage production based on this concept.