Jesse asked us if we wanted to see Joni Mitchell together, we said yes and bought concert tickets and reserved a camping spot. Flying from St. John’s to Seattle would not only be extremely expensive, it would also take nearly an entire day of airplanes and airports—plus, the concert wasn’t actually in Seattle itself, it was 2 hours east at the Gorge Amphitheatre; would we have to rent a car?
I thought of another way:
“Jesse, if I could secure a car would you wanna drive to Joni Mitchell? I've done the exact drive before in much worse weather conditions and it's very nice.
I don't mind being the only driver if you two split gas money.”
I reserved the rest of the camping spots along the way and we booked our tickets to fly to Winnipeg where we would drive out west to see Joni Mitchell. On the heels of finishing A Traveller’s Guide and having just premiered it at WUFF 10, I brought my DV camera along with the intention of making a road movie out of our trip. I wanted to capture the landscape as it changed from prairies to hills to mountains and back to the bare rolling fields of Washington near the Columbia River.
Rather than driving directly as I had on my previous trip to Seattle, I scheduled the first stop to be south through Deadwood, which I hadn’t been to since 2011, and for us to sleep at the foot of Devil’s Tower, which I had never seen in person. There, we would meet up with Interstate 90 which would take us all the way to Joni.
The video captures nearly all aspects of the trip; how the landscape changes, where we would stop to eat, the music we listened to and the things we talked about. The music in particular I wanted to keep, again in homage to The United States Of America by James Benning and Bette Gordon.
Additionally, given that most of the driving shots I had taken ran quite long—and in an effort to build a consistent shot rhythm—I decided to cut nearly all of the longer shots to be exactly 6 seconds long. (I discovered that this also aided in avoiding major copyright strikes on the YouTube video)
***
While editing the titles, I wondered how difficult it would be to find the geographic coordinates for the first shot of the film—somewhere just above the US border on Manitoba Highway 5. I thought it would be funny to add it, especially considering that despite the title the video does not begin in Winnipeg. Using the tar patterns on the road, I was able to pinpoint the coordinates of the first shot. I then figured, well, how hard could it be to find the coordinates for every shot?
Using a combination of Google Streetview, Google Earth, and the footage I had shot, I was able to pinpoint the location of every shot—even the shots of empty fields, as the shots all turned out to be long enough to pass some kind of marker like a road sign or patch of trees. This process took some time, and it was somewhat surreal to re-live the first person perspective of the trip we had just taken through varying degrees of digital camera quality.
The prompts for Jesse’s monologues, which were repurposed from a separate video project, were:
Tell me a recipe
Tell me about velcro
Tell me about a hiking memory
Tell me about the city you live in