It’s been a month since my last newsletter. I’m typing now, do not worry. I have nothing else I could possibly be doing right now, since a rabid and deranged fan of this newsletter designed a complicated trap that I totally walked right into. They baited me with a print out of a really eviscerating yet tasteful letterboxd review that they knew I would want to read really badly. They dangled it in my front yard, and once I grabbed at it, they pulled out the stick that was propping up this box. I was trapped within the box, wherein they had set up an elaborate maze out of cardboard. Still not sure if there’s a minotaur in here as well. It might be nice to have company.
Once I got to the end of the maze, I found my laptop waiting here, plugged in with an extension cord that I believe will help me escape if I were to follow it to its outlet. They left no instructions, but I’m pretty sure I know what my assignment is: to put out a newsletter before I leave for my trip to New York.
I’m working on several projects right now: three plays, a feature script, writing a video game, and a feature film. The video game is what I want to talk about today, because we’ve been working on it for almost a year and are reaching the final stages of its first phase of development.
I’m not much of a video game person; I’ve never been able to play one and be good at it. But the mechanism for storytelling is really interesting to me. It’s a very different way to write a narrative, where instead of pulling characters along a predetermined story arc, you give a player the ability to chart their own character’s arc through offering them decisions. In this case, the game is basically a choose-your-own-adventure style story. It’s text based, and the writing of this game has been an extremely gratifying challenge. It’s high concept, taking place in a foreign fantasy world, and dealing with subject matter such as war, colonization, occupation, reincarnation, and mythology. When it’s out, I will write more about the story, and I hope you all will play it. But right now, I’m writing about process.
My partner on this project referred to this stage as “sunsetting.” I had never heard of “sunsetting” a project- I guess it’s a really common phrase amongst tech folk, and I’m surprised to feel positively about jargon coming from that world. Though I guess if I’m going to be writing video games sometimes, I should get used to overlapping with the technocrats.
I love sunsets. They are so beautiful. Sunset is probably my favorite time of day. It’s August in LA, and right now, sunset is a blessing. The sun begins to lower in the sky, the heat starts to break, and the sweat on my forehead as I type in my living room (a place with lots of natural light and no air conditioning unit) cools.
When I think about the most gorgeous sunsets I used to experience, I think about living in my apartment in Evanston, Illinois, during the pandemic. I was on the sixth floor of an apartment building on Hinman Avenue. My windows faced East, but I lived across from another building, whose windows would reflect the light from the setting sun into my apartment. Every evening, regardless of the time of year, my apartment would fill with golden light.
Even in the milder climate of Evanston, Illinois, sunset was a joy since it meant the end of the school or work day. It seemed to say to me that from here on out, the day was mine, and I could do with the remaining hours whatever I pleased. During the sunset, light shines so intensely, and polishes every color you see outside. Sunset provides one final, dazzling show; it reminds you of how beautiful the world is before she is put to rest, hidden for the night.
“The day is ending,” says the sunset. Every decision you make with the minutes you have left becomes that much more critical. With the light slipping away, what will you do with the final visible moments? What else will be etched into history, memory, or habit?
I like “to sunset” as a verb. As we edit the text of the game, a 90+ page document, we give it a last wash of golden light, shining into every small crack and crevice in the story. We discuss individual words, and evaluate the outcomes of decisions we’ve laid out for the player. We interrogate the history we’ve woven, and the characters we have borne. The day is ending, and the final visible moments become all the more critical.
The last time I wrote to you guys, I talked about the 25 hour film festival that I produced for my birthday. Doing that festival inspired one group of my friends (the team behind Gár) to sign us up for the LA 48 Hour Film Competition. This competition is much larger in scale; it is produced in cities around the world and just the LA competition had more than 150 teams sign up to participate.
The vibe was very different from RIFF. Teams were doing pre-production work for weeks leading up to the festival. On zoom calls titled “How to 48,” the judges lamented about teams doing films “for fun” and told us to not bother participating if we weren’t trying to win. The spirit behind this festival was much different from mine, but it offered an exciting opportunity to dial up the ambition and try to make something great. 48 hours is very different from 25, and a festival organized to accommodate thousands of participants fosters a very different energy than the 9-team festival I produced out of my front yard.
With 48 hours at our disposal, we could dream a lot bigger, but every hour became that much more consequential. We were ideating our story, learning about our characters and the world, while shooting what was essentially was our final product. Additionally, there were many more elements to incorporate for 48 than I had provided for Riff. They gave us two genres to blend (Superhero X Coming of Age), a character that had to be incorporated (Chef “Colby Huffman”), a prop to use (mirror) and a line to recite verbatim in the film (“Look what I did,” said by my character). In comparison, the RIFF teams just had a prop and a theme: “stop thinking about it, try dreaming about it.”
With the hours slipping away, confidence in any given decision had to evolve from 0-100 at the speed of light. There was no second shot at any hour spent, so we had to be incredibly intentional with our time. Every moment was sunset.
One decision in particular involved what time of day we would shoot our ambitious ending scene. It was a fight scene between two superheroes, myself and the lead actress, that began in my kitchen, traveled to my living room, spilled out onto my porch and then concluded in the front yard. Originally, our plan was to stage it at golden hour. However, as the sun set, we did a pre-visualization run of the fight that raised the question: would the fight scene look better at night?
This was not an easy question to answer, as shifting the scene to night would involve a lot more work in order to light the scene appropriately, and would push our entire shooting schedule far back into the night. But we all eventually agreed that it was the best decision for the film. As a result, we had nothing to shoot during sunset. Some people used this time to nap, some to write, some to plan, as the largest light source we had available to us disappeared over the palm trees.
Shooting the scene at night was extremely difficult and we eventually wrapped at 3am, pulling a 20 hour day. Now having seen the final cut, however, I can say without question that it was a great decision. We carried the project to term, even without the help of that sunset.
The day’s last moments of light are an inspirational time. They are full of awe, and they ask for discernment and decisiveness. Sunset is a moment where beauty becomes so obvious and unavoidable, yet also so fleeting and transitory. The night is coming, and we have the opportunity to act. What will we decide to write into history, cement to memory, and etch into habit?