↑ LandmarkFilm

Page Created: 7/28/2014   Last Modified: 9/12/2021   Last Generated: 10/22/2024

A chronologist could easily divide up my life by looking at the projects I was working on at the time. Ever since I was young, I would focus on a project, then take a break, then focus on another project, etc. Life to me is meaningless unless I take the time to engage in it, to focus my intense gaze on it, which is what I do in my projects.

In fact, if I don't get the time, if I don't get time to reflect and think, to introspect, I will make the time, by bending the world around me. That's when I suit up and walk into the fire, stick my hand in and shut off that valve.

My focus is not just intense, however, it is a CO2 laser, burning holes in whatever is in my way. I will burn my way to enlightenment, lighting the fires of knowledge around me, but like Cyclops from X-Men, there is collateral damage. We were not meant to use this power.

When you choose to work on a project, you have to quickly acquire the skills to fulfill all the prerequisites of the project or you will never finish it. It narrows your focus and allows your mind to go deep, deep into a subject in new territory, like an explorer. It is very much an adventure, and you will bring fabulous new things back with you into your "real" life whether you succeed or not.

It is also magical. The world will open up and show you new things. It knows you are on a quest.

There are normal projects, where you can get them done in a few months, and then there are epic projects, which take years.

When I was around 28 years old, I decided I would start an epic project, to make a film, the best film I was capable of making. I would not release such a film if it wasn't as perfect as I could make it.

I had made films before, but nowhere near the quality or length of a professional film, let alone an epic. But I've been experimenting and learning for years, and knew what needed to be done.

I wanted to tell an epic story, a fictional, archetypal story, about the universe and reality and the patterns within, the patterns that have circulated in my head my whole life. The patterns were focusing, converging.

So, for over 10 years of my life, all other projects were on hold. This took a great toll on my mind, working on a behemoth with nothing to show for 10 years, which is one reason I created this site. I am a show off and have nothing to show.

But something amazing happened in the journey that I didn't expect. I uncovered an epic true story about reality, and life itself began to reveal the things I thought were science fiction. I always hated that phrase "life imitates art" but here it was in my face.

So many events in the story started coming true. We are already living in someone else's epic story, and to create a story within a story reveals what we truly are, part of a strange fractal being.

I did something very unusual with my screenplay. I wrote the structure first, then kept decomposing and rewriting until the structure "felt" right and had internal consistency, and then later added detail. People said no! They said you need to let the story flow and see where it goes, but I resisted. I abstracted these patterns into higher patterns and the script took a very strange shape. It was bizarre, but had this weird consistency to it. It was prophetic and still is prophetic.

I kept tinkering with it, and each change caused ripple effect and I had to rewrite. So I built a computer system to handle these changes. I built a visualization tool to see the patterns in my own script. It was so complex that I would forget why I added things... it would take me weeks of reading it to remember what I did. I was scared to modify it until I knew why my mind created it in the first place. In retrospect, that was a very good thing. The subconscious will nag and nag at you to do something, and when you do it, you feel a sense of relief. It can see the whole, the entirety, but your conscious mind cannot. So you have this inner dialog and ask yourself, "What are we really?". Are we of one mind, or more than one?

As I got further into this, my driving goal not to fail or waste my time, or let my friends and family down that knew I was making it, caused me to keep creating tools and constructs, keep trying to bring this phantom into the material world.

One of my favorite directors is Stanley Kubrick, and recently I saw Room 237, a documentary about the messages in his films. People who study them have many theories as to how he could have created such messages or patterns. He was either a mega genius, or there was a giant hidden conspiracy. In 1992, I made a short college film called "Untitled #249" that was "Kubrickesque", my instructor said. I made a mistake when I titled it, I meant to title it Untitled #149, the squares of the first 3 positive integers, to match the dimensions of Kubrick's monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and was disappointed in that for many years. Interestingly, Ganymede, Europa, and Io, three of the Galilean moons of Jupiter, the planetary system depicted in that film, are in a 1:2:4 ratio of orbital resonance, but still not 149.

But why did I make that mistake?

Marshall McLuhan's famous phrase "the medium is the message" was actually typographically misquoted in the title of his book, The Medium is the Massage↗. But he decided to leave the typo in place. Think about how ironic this--the very meaning McLuhan tried to convey was expressed in this very visible mistake.

To me, the answer to Kubrick's Room 237 is obvious. The subconscious is so, so powerful that no other explanations are needed. We all contain genius inside us, but it is raw, unfiltered genius, and it has its own agenda. The conscious mind is the light at the end of the flashlight, the subconscious is the person moving it. Kubrick's genius is that he was able to bring some of this into the waking world. Kubrick was not autistic, he was not a savant, but he was intelligent. His flashlight holder took him somewhere new, and he had enough clarity and capacity to record this event for the rest of us.

In my film, the details I overlaid onto the giant structure I was creating arose from my own experiences and life, so that is my individual contribution, but I was working with an epic story that went beyond me. I knew this story will be told over and over throughout the course of time. I just happened to be here for a short time working on one version of it.

So I began looking at the story as a window into reality. If I had questions about something in life, I would think "What does the script say?" It was like interpreting a dream, to get clues from your higher self.

Normally, when I work on something, it isn't that meaningful... but I think I know why. If you really, really want to create a fictional work or art form to show others, and you strive for perfection, the universe will help you add that perfection.

There is power in the "story". The story is an inner, recursive loop, generated from us, and we are generated from the greater story of our lives. It is a way of conveying meaning like nothing else, for what is more relevant to us than the language of our own lives? Our lives are the singularity that we can't explain.

Data and information are meaningless to us unless we tell ourselves a story of how they are important. Science is just a story. The story is like a fluid ribbon that bends and twists into time, like Mushi↗.

I named it Landmark for several reasons, but the primary one was in the abstract nature of the word. If you say to someone, "Hey look out for any landmarks", what does that exactly mean? It confused me when I was a child.

It is a purely connotative word.

It took me until I was about 6 or 7 to understand this concept. It took me until I was in my 30's to understand what an archetype was, a similar term.

I would go as far as to say that landmarks are of a "higher order", and archetypes are of the "highest order", an order not being a level or stratification, but fractal; another cycle of regeneration from the same source.

I had the same problems understanding man made abstractions in computers when I was younger, but time and practice has given me the ability to maintain large numbers of them. My HyperSystemizing mind is slow to grasp, but very, very fast when locked on since I compress so much in the structure. It has to rearrange itself to match the new idea, like garbage collection in computer science.

My film is the one project of mine that I put the most work into, have the most voluminous material, but speak about the least, as it is immensely important to me. It is tied to my life, I won't ever give it up. Much of the plans are still in my head, the same place where Pops keeps the Mach Five.

Science has caught up with the science fiction in my film, so I have to go back and rewrite those details that are no longer novel, but that doesn't concern me much. I feel I am telling an epic story, and the structure that I put so much work into is sound and shines with eternal beauty. In fact, any details I replace them with will eventually come true once more, as it is a repeating pattern.

When I set out on this quest, I decided I wasn't going to make an amateurish film and knew how to do this. One of the things I agreed early on was that I would entertain my audience and not force my ideas on them.

This has sharply diverged, and I began realizing that other people were not my audience, that my subconscious was. It seems to be almost a perversion, but I felt if I could impress my subconscious, then I would impress the subconscious of others, as we are all connected at the higher order.

The hand holding my CO2 laser is unsteady now, wavering just enough to burn a new groove in the cave wall, a new place for those flashlights to shine, burning away the irregularities of that erroneous 2, that imperfect square, turning it back into a 1.

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