Below is a short documentary film (< 10min) that I made about a few of my friends from way back (but after we had the red-and-black Lumberjacks).
The film resulted from the desire to explore a few related ideas. The first is that story-telling, even in today’s distracting digital age, is alive and well. My friends and I still sit around and kick stories to one another, riffing off each other’s anecdotes. Another idea is that everyone’s got a story. The pans to/from the exterior of the house, and the way the intro/outro reflect one another, allude to the random walk you could do down any street, pick any house, and find that its inhabitants had stories to tell.
Finally, I wanted to examine the space between suburban and urban America. My friends live in something of a border area between the two: the way they dress is from the ‘burbs, but the stories they tell are much different from the truly suburban kids with whom I went to school. Yet most of my friends aren’t “hood” either, and would not thrive in a fully-urban environment. Too “hard” by suburban standards, too “soft” by urban ones: this is the dynamic of a cultural no-man’s-land that is largely ignored.
[spoilers] “313” is the Detroit-area telephone code; “313 GAP” was the name of a self-styled gang at a local high school whose bark was worse than their bite. None of my friends were members, but the title alludes to the bravado of urban story-tellers.
