Shaun Scott might be our favorite Seattle filmmaker. A Stranger Genius Award Nominee, writer of several Drinks With features and all-around great guy, Scott was recently commissioned by the WA State Dream Act coalition to make a short film. Amidst many other project, Scott completed the film, which was so well done (partly because it features one of our favorite producers, Spekulation) that we wanted to reach out to him and ask One Super Important Question. 

Jake Uitti: What was the process like for you putting together this new short – especially amidst the release of your latest film and your participating in City Arts’ Genre Bender?

Shaun Scott: I got a telephone call in the doldrums of another Seattle winter in November of 2013. I knew it was good news, because the only time anyone ever cold calls me anymore is with good news.

It was from Emily Murphy, a good friend, rabid Seahawks fan, and legislative aid who works in Olympia with an organization called OneAmerica. In preparing to do coalition building which would help the Washington State Dream Act sweep through the state legislature, the idea was to produce a short film that could help drum up even more support than it turns out already existed for it. Emily thought of me as someone who would facilitate the making of the video—and would I be game to meet in Belltown on Friday night to talk about it further with Heather Villanueva of SEIU Healthcare 775NW, whose idea this was?

When I met with Emily and Heather, I expressed some concerns, and boiled them down to this thought: I refuse to be part of projects that don’t come together. So while I understood that I was wanted primarily as a facilitator, if it became too difficult to wrangle a crew of undocumented students to make the video on such a short timeline, I’d take an active role in making it as a director. Hell, I’d even already started storyboarding ideas in the 2 days since Emily called me.

As winter grinded on, it became increasingly clear that it was a much better option to have me on as the director than as a facilitator. The first move I made was to check on the availability of Toryan Dixon—a gifted photographer who, of course, told me he hated my storyboards. “They come only from your imagination,” he said, reliving the experience of working with me on my new feature Pacific Aggression. “I need to take the camera off the tripod to really feel like I’m part of the scene.”

We agreed to sit and work out a way of seeing and shooting that was more fluid, less-predetermined. Toryan spoke about getting inspired by Derrick Coleman’s well-circulated Duracell commercial. I followed that cue and prepared for our shoots by watching a things that were shot in a similar jagged, intense, abstract manner: the film “Upstream Color”, as well as a few Levis and Nike commercials.

The visual ideas on the table suggested taking a “reality” approach—I thought it would be appropriate to follow a student over the course of a single, mundane, quotidian adventure to school, to work, to home. By this time, Heather and I developed a great working rapport. She had taken on the role of production assistant, helping to book locations, and organize shoots. She cast the central role of the student we’d be following over the course of the short—a punchy student named Graciela who migrated here from Venezuela.

I reconnected with Emily and Heather and hordes of others at McCoy’s Firehouse to watch the Seahawks v. 49ers NFC Championship Game. I always wonder about whether or not the effect of seeing the team from our city do so well on a national stage influenced us for the better. I know it provided an incalculable lift for me—January was a busy time, between finalizing a feature film, penning a creative nonfiction piece for City Arts Magazine, and preparing the Genre Bender show you asked about. Did I mention that my hard drive crashed 48 hours before the film’s first showing? I think that I got a bit of a boost from the Hawks, and there suddenly seemed to be more hours in the day, and more energy to fill them, the deeper they went in the playoffs.

Like everyone else, I saw Seattle absolutely undress Denver in the Super Bowl. While watching the game on television, I got inspiration from a few commercials that displayed cinematic virtuosity in their ability to communicate an idea powerfully over a short period of time.  I took note of one in particular: a spot for Chrysler narrated by Bob Dylan, where the director made the decision to splice in historical footage along side contemporary vistas. It’s an approach that I use a lot, particularly in my feature “100% OFF: A Recession-Era Romance.” I sent it to Toryan and he opined “My only problem with this is that Bob Dylan should never have opened his fucking mouth”!

By this time, I had reached out to Matt “Spekulation” Watson, a rapper, producer, and annual Internet sensation. It was important to me to have Hip-Hop score our short. Everything about the music—the energy, the rhythm, and the use of samples—captures the aesthetic I wanted for the film, and I recognize a lot of my own artistic approach in Matt’s: maybe because we both studied philosophy in college. He sent me a track with isolated elements and gave me reign to play with them as I wished.

Editing was, is, and will always be one of the most enjoyable aspects of making a film for me. I get a sense of supreme calm from finding seams where I can insert creative consonance or dissonance. This project was a challenge, because it proceeds much faster than anything I’ve ever shot or edited. But once I learned to see what the footage had to say, muscle memory took over, and I was up to my old tricks again: jump cuts, matched actions with archival footage, and assorted visual bombs of various kinds. Worried though I was, as a director, about the style of shooting Toryan suggested, it perfectly suited my approach as an editor.

So you’ll see that the process of making of “An American Day” was really not too unlike the process of participating in a (functional!!!) democracy. I had certain ideas that I swore would take us to the Promised Land, but the process of negotiating them with members of a group who knew better was how we arrived at the finished result. I’m proud of the work we did and couldn’t say I’d come up with anything half as fresh on my own. I see it played back and I have to remind myself that I had anything to do with it at all—there isn’t anything quite like it in my filmography to this point. I look forward to refining the ideas presented in it as the years go by.

Watch the short here: