Conn:
First, I recorded my Dad while we sat looking at the ocean. We've talked like that for years while watching what he calls 'trashing waves'.
I asked him to tell me about about his two big loves: the sea, and music. These are private for him. He's an 'old school' man, so he never talks about himself.
The next step was some cross-Atlantic talking with my friend Oscar about how to make this film and its soundtrack, about 'visual music' and about art + utopianism. Oscar went off to record the North Sea off the Dutch coast, and some French streams. He created the music around my father's voice and those water sounds.
And I spent months driving up and down the coast of Vancouver Island filming seascapes and especially waves. I re-traced the highways we drove when I was a boy, sometimes my Dad took me on his business trips and we'd go fishing. The miles of dark, moody forest, steep mountains and little, angry logging towns. And the patches of sea where we trolled back and forth in tiny boats.
Each of the superimposed, Super 8 film leader stripes represents a musical instrument. The film was from my last supply of Kodachrome colour stock. It's now a dead medium, I filmed with it for 25 years and I miss it a lot. I drained the stripes' colour so they'd be like black arm bands, but in the spirit of a wake, as they mixed with brilliantly coloured waves, new media and song.
