Hi all! I just finished Ghost of the Skywalk Mall, my first proper short film since graduating high school. It's about a photographer who discovers something strange about the pictures they're taking in a defunct shopping mall. It's a little bit funny and a little bit sad. Death is discussed. It's the inaugural upload on my new YouTube channel, Eternal Sunfish, which will be a home for movie-like things I make going forward (as opposed to my other channel, Venbury Labs, which is for video-like things). You can watch it here.
Below the cutoff you can read some behind-the-scenes info about how the movie was made and what I was thinking when I made it. Full disclosure: it's a bit long.
I created this movie around a location. Since last year, I've wanted very badly to make a movie in Kaleidoscope at the Hub. I grew up in a suburb of Des Moines and my dad worked in the city, and when I was in elementary school and junior high sometimes my mom would take me and my sibling (Lu, portrayer of Des) downtown so we could explore the skywalk. One place we frequently went to was the Kaleidoscope, a small shopping mall situated in such a way that you had to pass through it to get to a lot of other places. Thinking on it, my mind is struck with image after image. I remember the toy store where I once bought a book on card tricks, the kiosk with a Friedrichs (a coffee chain I can only describe as an Iowa-specific Starbucks knockoff), the Burger King I only ever saw from the outside, the pretzel stand, the Palmer's Deli (a chain of delis that is also Iowa-specific and lacks any comparison I can think of), the tchotchke store with the all-glass walls, the Christian radio station headquarters I could occasionally hear sermons slipping out of. There was also the food court which Lu has very strong memories of but I'm pretty sure we only ever visited once. I recall the hours of the shops being somewhat erratic and odd-feeling, opening later in the morning and earlier in the afternoon than you'd expect. Even then, when I was much younger and all of the shops were open, I felt something haunting about the place. The first time I set foot in it I thought I had trespassed somewhere I didn't belong. Although there were many stores and they got good business, it felt to me like the place was dying.
Fast forward to last year. My family had moved to California, where we still live to this day, but we were out in Iowa visiting family. Lu and I had an afternoon to ourselves in downtown Des Moines, and we decided we'd explore the skywalk. After a bit of walking, we found ourselves in the Kaleidoscope. It was, pretty thoroughly, dead. There were a few shops still open in the front half (unsurprisingly, the Palmer's was in pretty good shape) but the back half with the food court was completely empty. It was utterly chilling to see what I remember as a fairly busy place reduced to an empty husk. But despite the emptiness, I found myself utterly attracted to the place. Maybe it was the nostalgia, maybe my own obsession with the otherworldliness of manmade structures, but I found that there was something downright beautiful about it. I knew, then and there, that I wanted to make a movie in the Kaleidoscope.
So then, summer of this year. My family knew we were going out to Iowa again, and I thought, if I can swing it, it would be really nice to make that Kaleidoscope movie I'd been thinking about. I broached the subject with Lu, who I knew would have to be the star, and they liked the idea. The whole premise actually came from a technical constraint: I knew it was going to just be the two of us at the shoot, which meant that only one of us could be on camera while the other was holding it. I really didn't want it to be a movie where it was just a lone person wandering around. I also had the vague notion that there would be a ghost somehow. I don't know when or how I got the idea, but I realized that if the ghost only showed up in photographs, then I could still make a movie where me and Lu are having dialogue with each other without needing a third person to operate the camera. That premise gave me the juice I needed to bang out a script.
The actual process of filming was a fairly slapdash affair. We were on vacation and on other people's schedules, so we didn't have a huge window to film. Also, we realized when we got there that the air conditioning wasn't working, and it was one of the hottest days of our whole Iowa trip. We thought we could power through, but after a while we realized that we wanted the whole thing done as quickly as possible. As such, we only filmed one take for each shot. That wasn't so bad, but there were some moments in the editing room where I really wished I had some other options. But hey, what can you do. The whole thing was shot on a smartphone with a Moment anamorphic lens, attached to a DJI Osmo gimbal. No microphones except for the phone's. I considered maybe re-recording all of Lu's dialogue in post, but the phone audio was good enough and I didn't feel like asking Lu to do even more work. In the future, when I have a crew larger than me and my sibling, I'll really want to work with better sound equipment.
And speaking of sound: I think I knew from the beginning that I wanted some kind of music playing over the establishing shots of the mall. As it happens, the song that was playing in my head when I thought about it was written by one of my friends. Ruby Tennant is a friend I met doing theatre, and I am utterly enamored of their songwriting. Their music is lush, beautiful, and haunting, qualities I thought would pair nicely with the movie I was trying to make. I knew I wanted "King's Son" to play over the beginning and "Milk White Hair" to play over the end. I needed more music in the middle, so I added "Feathers" and "November Dance." I assembled a rough cut with the songs and then shot them a message asking if I could use the music. I would have completely understood if they'd said no, but I had and still have no idea what I would have done otherwise. Thankfully, they said yes.
So there you go. A mall dies and creates a movie. I sincerely hope, however humble the trappings, what I created does justice to a truly beautiful place. And hey, I certainly learned a few things in the process.