"Remember the Chase"
a 16mm Short Film

During the first half of my sophomore year at Syracuse University, while I was still in the Film program in SU's college of Visual and Performing Arts, I made this film. It's the first project I've done on actual celluloid. It also just might be the "artsiest" movie I've ever made... some people still don't quite "get" the ending, something I may someday fix in a "Director's Cut" of sorts. However, even though I still want to fix that, this is the version of the film that I completed for the class.

Believe it or not, this short was not only shot on 16mm film, it was cut on film. That's right, I spliced this thing together – by hand – the old-fashioned way on a flatbed Moviola. The soundtrack was primarily mixed on a computer, but the picture editing was straight-up old-school film chopping. Also, becuse of the cameras we used, we couldn't do sync-sound, so all the dialogue had to be re-looped afterwards. All in all, I think it turned out pretty well!

"Remember the Chase"
Mr. Green - Dan Osorio
Interviewer - Jay Oh
Pursuers - Tony Lee, Ryan Tree, and Eddie Jacovino
Other Man - Kevin Martin

Shot entirely on 16mm B&W Kodak Tri-X reversal film, using a spring-driven Bolex camera.

The version I've put on YouTube is faithful to the original, with two changes. First, I did some color correction throughout to (partially) fix some of the more egregious exposure mistakes I made back then. Also, I finally added some proper end credits, with an original piece of music I wrote for this film.

Explanation

Spoiler Alert!

Ok, you still don't get the ending? Think about it...

All right, you really want me to just tell you? Ok, fine.

Mr. Green was never in the chase he remembers. Those memories belong to someone else, the "other man" referred to in the newspaper article. Mr. Green is part of an experiment in implanting memories. The idea is to take a criminal who died, and implant his memories in another person in order to interrogate him and find out what the other man knew. Unfortunately, Mr. Green's mind could not cope with posessing a memory of dying, so he blocked it out and fabricated the whole part about being captured. That's why when he tries to remember it again, it's fuzzy.

In my mind, I always imagined that this experiment was carried out by the same shadowy organization behind the events in my high school movie, The Vase. Perhaps someday I can expand on that idea...