Kind of an epilogue

First of all, if you’re reading this and you haven’t either read or watched (or both) all 12 episodes of the Letterboxed project, I highly recommend you stop reading, bookmark this page, and go take in all 12 episodes - in order. I know an hour is a lot of time to spend watching other people’s faces say stuff at a camera, but Letterboxed makes less sense for each episode you skip. So, if you want to understand the thing - which I presume you do, if you’re reading a bloody epilogue about it - then take in everyone’s contributions before you read the rest of this. It’s not going anywhere. It’ll be here when you get back. Go on.

Alright, now that you’ve viewed all 12 episodes, let’s do this thing. 

Origins

A couple of days after Twootenanny 2009, I got the itch to put together a somewhat longer form, headier, distributed collaboration with a handful of people I’d either met at Twootenanny or had been in touch with about creative collaboration during the previous few months. I emailed Tony Delgrosso, who’d sat across the breakfast table from me as we made exquisite corpse drawings the morning after the Twootenanny party, and proposed the idea. He liked it, and his early contributions were instrumental in setting the project in motion.

Immediately, there were two big issues to be worked out:

1. How could the project be conducted so that none of its participants were aware of one another’s presence on the project, and so that each had a minimal amount of contextual understanding of the project’s structure and direction until it concluded?
2. What would the first letter be and how would its author be coaxed to write it?

Issue #1 was resolved structurally. I decided that I would serve as a hub, insuring that there was a sufficient layer of opacity and anonymity between one leg and the next. No one would get to see anyone else’s video readings of their letters. The scope of the project would be kept secret, as would the number and identities of the participants. I made the diagram below to help me keep it all straight.

Issue #2 was the harder of the two to resolve. I didn’t want to write a letter to the first participant, because I figured it would be too obviously mine - in my voice, with a bunch of dumb jokes about erections or male ejaculate being confused with hair conditioner or any number of other really obvious giveaways that would torpedo the project if introduced. Somehow, I got it in my head that a mad-lib, derived from some already-existing letter, would yield a good starting letter - a seed letter with which to start the machine. Tony suggested a letter Kurt Vonnegut wrote to his family upon release from a German POW camp at the end of WWII. It was a fantastic solution, and I went to work removing phrases and words from it and replacing them with blanks to be filled in by… by whom? Hadn’t thought of that. Neither Tony nor I made decent candidates for that, because, by then, we were both so familiar with the letter. So, I sent that mad-libs letter to an old friend from college - Jenn McCreary - and asked her to fill in the blanks. Then I asked her to read the result on camera. And just like that, there was the first letter.

I sent the text of her letter to Chris Velasquez, prepended with the following note of instruction:

First of all, thank you for agreeing to participate in this project. Here’s all you have to do.

At the bottom of this email is a letter. You may find this letter surprising, for any number of reasons. But I’d like you to read it with the assumption that - despite any confusion it may bring up for you - you are indeed the intended recipient. Then, I’d like you to write a fully engaged reply. This may entail assuming a back story in your head. It may entail asking tons of questions. All fine.

Once you’ve written your reply, I’d like you to read it on camera. The final cut will be edited to 16:9, so if you can frame your shot at 16:9, that would be ideal. If not, however, I’ll crop.

When finished, please upload your video to the dropbox share, “letterboxedproject,” for which you should have received an invitation today, and email your response letter to letterboxedproject@gmail.com. Then, I ask only that you say nothing of this project anywhere online, until it’s revealed in a couple of weeks.

If you have any questions while completing your submission, just drop me a line and I’ll invent a plausible answer. You’re the first, so we may find there are process bugs I’ve managed to look past. I’m constantly messing things up, and I don’t imagine this project will be any exception. But I do thank you sincerely for coming along for the ride.

That was November of 2009. And so they went, one letter after the other, after the other, until Toni’s letter in April, at which point I had decided I would do the job of writing a letter that could serve as a bridge between hers and our seed letter. I reasoned that, if the last and first letters could be tied together enough, then a viewer could start anywhere in the series and watch all the way around to the circle, and I thought that would be pretty rad if it could be pulled off. Writing that bridge letter was hard, because it required me to forget most of what I’d read and seen of everyone else’s submissions, while at the same time requiring me to set it up so that the seed letter could reasonably appear to have been written in response to mine. It took me 3 tries to get it even close, and I’m not especially pleased with the result of that effort, except insofar as it appears to be an adequate bridge.

It’s all about the hiccups.

It’s so often the case that unforeseen challenges become the meat of the story of a thing like this. In the case of Letterboxed, there were tons. Mainly, people were busy and a number of them had to bow out. There were also technical challenges. I pestered poor Jen Oslislo to redo hers over and over, in an attempt to get the sound up, and ended up using her original take. There was equipment failure. There were mixed signals, dropbox snafus, and delays. Lots and lots of delays. What I’d envisioned would take a few weeks to complete ended up taking 8 months.

One particular pattern surprised and engaged me the most. When accused of being crazy or somehow in the wrong, virtually everyone responded by defending themselves. This pattern emerged very early - almost immediately - and at times troubled me. I’d envisioned a series of letters which would successively and dramatically diverge - tonally, subjectively, everything - from the seed letter. But that didn’t appear to be happening, and it made me antsy. As the accuse/defend pattern became more entrenched, it was nearly impossible to resist the temptation to tamper with the system - to rewrite one of the letters before sending it on to the next person - in order to shake things up. But restraint won out, I kept my hands out of the system, and I’m glad I did.

Jen’s letter - the actual 10th letter of the series - was a major narrative leap and, as such, was probably the most exciting for me to receive. Especially so because she wrote it in response to Sam’s beautifully dark opus, which I’d thought would surely drive an even darker, more intense response. It was a delightful surprise, and the departure from Sam’s bit to Jen’s prompted me to rethink the presentation order entirely. It was the strongest buttress to my hope that a viewer could perceive the start or end to have been anywhere in the series, and I decided to test that notion by making them bookends in the presentation order.

Exquisite corpse drawings often read as nonsensical, whimsical, incoherent. Not so with Letterboxed. Something entirely different happened here. In the search for meaning, participants created a remarkably consistent universe. Sure, the thing drifts and truths are overturned, but in the end, one apprehends a world wherein a few mainstay characters navigate a single, dramatic narrative together. It’s nothing like I would have predicted, and for (as well as despite) that I love it.

Finally…

My gratitude to the people who gave their time and creative energy to help bring this to life is intense. They were generous and selfless and they gave significant attention to a pretty inscrutable task. My hope is at least that the outcome is interesting - even enjoyable - to them. It is both to me. And if you’ve watched all 12 episodes, and you’ve read this far, then it must have been at least somewhat engaging to you too. Yeah?

So that’s it. That’s all she wrote.

Not just her, in fact, but all 12 of us.

1 year ago  /  2 notes