From Tommy To Tornados

I am exhausted but I am still awake. My camera and computer gear is sprawled out across a dining room table. A dim lamp sits in the corner. Listening to My Bloody Valentine. I'm processing raw video files. We are mid-production on Storm Surge. A documentary film about communities rebuilding after natural disaster.

This is my first meaningful documentary film since my first effort, Tommy Dean & Friends.

I'm wondering how we're going to piece this film together. I'm wondering how this new project fits in with my personal development as a filmmaker. And I'm totally anxious about where this going to take me into the future.

The Tommy Dean film were somewhat high concept films. They were about Tommy Dean, the singer songwriter. As a character driven meditation on a theme, the narrative was free to jump back and forth and spiral out of control. Each scene revealed a new aspect of Tommy's world and the film held your interest for as long as you were interested in that special world I had to share with you.

Storm Surge is a different kind of film because we have important information we want to convey. First, we have the stories of survival. Personal testimonies of surviving natural disaster. Then we have the social and economical issue of disaster preparedness. We look at what people to do protect their families. And third, we have a call to action, inviting individuals to get involved with their communities in building something new.

Survival, resiliency and recovery.

I'm starting to wonder in what ways is Storm Surge also a high concept film. Is it about storms or is it about communities? Its about how storms shape communities. Storms can take the form of the literal natural disaster: a hurricane or tornado. Or in a more broad sense, a storm can be a man made disaster: oil spills. And in the most abstract sense, we can interpret storms as the clash of communities themselves: industry, capitalism, politics, religion, whatever, ect... everything breathing in and out and communing with the creative and destructive powers that be.

And like the Tommy Dean film, music is going to be the glue that keeps it together. More than that, music is the TARDIS that enables the narrative to jump from emergency responders to social media mavens to political figures to survivors.

This film is going to be a total psychic blast. A spiritual journey. And a tome to the human spirit. All that happy stuff.

More thoughts about neighborhoods and artists...

People want to be close to the arts. I think it is required of all white people to go through a phase where they dream of living in an area like Greenwich Village and neighbors with a character like Bob Dylan. Or maybe you would prefer to move into the an apartment over Pioneer Square and hang out with Tommy Dean. But of course, investing in Artists is often like investing in volcanoes. Science can tell us, beyond a doubt, Mt. Rainier is a volcano and could blow up any day. The problem is, science can not currently tell us when Mt. Rainier is going to blow. Nor can any economist tell us when Tommy Dean is going to become famous.

a little slice of life

i like people. tommy is good people. so many experiences out there, waiting to be discovered if only you had the courage to talk to new people. or you can watch film.
that's what i like about movies. it gives you an opportunity to live vicariously through someone else's eyes. because we don't all have the courage to go home with weirdos like tommy and talk to them about the trinkets hanging on the walls.



wish i could show you everything but you probably don't care enough.

tommy dean movies

tommy dean is a singer songwriter who lives in the seattle and tacoma area. his life is a work of art full of adventure and mystery. he invites his audience to live vicariously through his music. some of his stories are true and some of his stories are outright lies.

if my movie seems overly romantic and idealized, it is because it was my first documentary film. like my subject, i am trying to find myself as an artist. it is a labour of manifesting my dreams.

tommy dean show (38:41) from Joshua Guerci on Vimeo.

this second film is an hour long. much of the innocent magic has dissapeared and the result is a much more gritty and real dipiction of my subject. as a film maker, i feel that i play the role of a selective mirror. i must find a balance between what the audience would like to see and what the subject himself wants to see.

further, it is a challenge to balance between scenes of idealizing my subject and showing off his grubby parts. too much of one thing will ruin the sauce.

tommy dean & friends (1:07:14) from Joshua Guerci on Vimeo.

if you would like a physical copy of these movies, please leave a comment below. you can see some outtakes on my youtube channel and send me a message there. if you would like to share this movie with a friend, i would be happy to send you a copy of the dvd in the mail.

i am an independent filmmaker living in seattle and i would love to do another project like this, to expand upon what i did right and practice some of the lessons i learned first time around.

tommy dean & friends

i spent a whole summer following around tommy dean with a camera. i wandered the streets of seattle and slept out of my car and hung out with some slightly dubious characters. then, i spent three months editing this movie.

tommy dean & friends (1:07:14) from Joshua Guerci on Vimeo.

i borrowed/stole the camera equipment from seattle university. i was not a big fan of the consumer cannon vixio cameras at first but eventually i learned to love them for what they are. little innocuous windows into people's souls.

not long ago, i sat down to make some "final" edits and i discovered that my hard drive had crashed. seagate external hard drives have a habit of overheating. if you buy a freeagent hard drive, i cannot stress enough that you need to buy two. if you are lucky, only one will over heat at a time and you'll still have your data.

the obvious fault of this movie is that it is too long. i might be a genius film maker someday but today, i'm a beginner. an amateur. it's too early to get self indulgent. even as a student piece, this film loves itself a bit too much.

there is no context for my subject. i don't have any footage of tommy dean in the market and i don't have nearly enough footage of him busking. and of course, the classic 'seattle shots' are missing from this film. no space needle. no viaduct. no pikes or pioneer square. of course, it might be a blessing that i avoid that cliche.

i would love to do another film like this but i don't know when life is going to allow me to do that. a student has so much freedom to pursuit things like documentaries and self-indulgent cinema. the rest of us have responsibilities to answer for.

tommy dean in olympia

finally you can watch it online. this is my first and will always be special to me. it is a bit long and i apologize for its length but i would like to share it with you here and welcome any comments or criticism. anything you have to say is helpful to me in future projects.

tommy dean is a street musician and for quite some time, i found his spirit to be so compelling. some people love him and some people hate him and from i have seen, the people who truly know him fit under both categories. and from what i have seen, tommy dean wouldn't have it any other way. he is truly on fire with the spirit of adventure and creativity.

tommy dean show (38:41) from Joshua Guerci on Vimeo.

as a local seattle film maker and videographer, i want to use this project as a demonstration of what i can do with video and a little bit of a flavor of what is to come. i like creating space with sound and video. i would like to create a sort of sense of what it is like to be with a person. not so much the details of what makes them interesting or anything like that but something more visceral.

if i have learned one thing from making this movie, it is to keep the camera rolling. you never know when life is going to happen and if you blink you will completely miss it. you need this sort of manic energy when watching an artist. you need to embrace every moment and every idea if it hurts you or makes you laugh or makes you cry or anything at all as long as you feel it. whatever you do, don't let it lie forgotten.

tod davies sings time machine

little by little, i plan to upload and share some scenes and outtake footage from my tommy dean show documentaries. my hope is to better understand what i did with tommy and get a clear picture of what i want to do with future projects. if you have any input i would like to hear it but i have no reason to believe anybody reads this blog so whatever.
this is tod davies. his rendition here of time machine was a tough cut from the movie. if i was to make a movie about the scene that develops around a character like tommy, then it would have been appropriate to keep it. for the final cut, i trimmed this song down to thirty seconds and reluctantly turned tod into the 'donavan' to tommy dean's 'bob dylan' and i never really felt comfortable putting tod in the back seat like that.

the conversation at the beginning is a bit amateur and obvious but the more i see it, the more i think it is so appropriately amateur and obvious. tod davies postulates the absurdity of becoming famous simply by incriminating somebody else. the unspoken implication here is that the camera (myself) is attempting to become famous simply by incriminating someone who is not famous themselves. cut to tommy shaking his head. oh i am so pretentious!
as a local seattle documentary film maker and videographer, i am always looking for new subjects and new projects to work on. my hope is that through this blog, i might be able to not only clear out my head but find other local seattle documentary film makers who are interested in sharing ideas and helping each other.