LATEST PROJECTS
Amidst the noise and bustle of Nashville's 12th Avenue South, Jon crafts made-to-order poems that grapple with the eternal topics: love, friendship, sushi.
First in a series of mini documentaries about artists and their crafts.
ITHACA happened because Mary Claire and I wanted an excuse to collab with our talented friend, indie pop artist Juli Strawbridge. We'd gotten a preview of her latest release "Jokes About the Rapture" and loved it and wanted to dig in to the album and make something together. Mary Claire took some time to research and theorize about what makes a good music video and found us inspiration from The Shins, Phoebe Bridgers, Dodie, and Moonrise Kingdom.
After pondering Ithaca's themes, MC came up with a great premise, wrote the script, and then most of pre-production was taken up with securing and creating costumes and props that would fill out the world of this quirky '40s fantasy board game that we made up. Frankly, we got in WAY over our heads with the paper mache heads. But it ended up being a fun medium to explore. The designs for the heads came from an artist friend of Juli's, Abi Prie, who designed and made the game-board. She did an amazing job and we just love her balance of '40s vibes, mythology, and whimsy.
We had also been doing location scouting in the weeks leading up to the shoot and found some great spots in Lebanon and Percy Priest Lake near Nashville. We gave ourselves a weekend of 1.5 shooting days, had an ambitious number of shots and setups, but ended up getting everything in just before the park closed.
Huge thank you to Abi, Brennan, Juli, David, Richard, Brent, Jon, and Selena for making this happen. We had a great time working with you all and we feel really lucky that we were able to capture the fantasy world we were hoping to create. These kinds of projects wouldn't happen without your dedication and enthusiasm.
Make sure to check out the other songs in "Jokes About the Rapture": Reincarnation is amazing and Tupperware just plain slaps.
One Way was Mary Claire's and my first solo project to produce after moving across the country to Nashville.
Mary Claire wrote the script with a little help from a couple of real-life experiences and a funny true-story from a friend.
Probably the hardest part of pre-pro was finding two locations that met the needs of the script, looked good, worked well together, and were available over a weekend. But after weeks of searching we secured two fantastic locations around the Nashville area, "Inside the Nail Bar" and one spot in Franklin.
We crewed it up, found some great actors, and filmed it over a weekend, getting 90% of it in the can in spite of inclement weather and just needed a couple more short pickup shoots to get what we needed.
We're SO grateful to the actors and crew who were incredibly patient and professional.
