The Gone Again project began soon after I met Benjamin Verdoes, while I was working as assistant director on a MSHVB video for the song Leaving Trails (dir. That Go). We had been chatting in between takes about other music videos and films and came to realization that we both shared a natural inclination towards more narrative story-centric music videos rather than just a simple showcase of the band and that the visuals were more interconnected to the message/ideas behind the album.
After the shoot, Benjamin gave me a copy of the Where the Messengers Meet concept record and said that if I was interested in maybe making something to let him know. The gist of the album was the story of man and woman who escape an insular cultish community against the will of the community leader. The leader then dispatches a posse to track down the couple and bring them back. Their journey is both physically and emotionally woven throughout the entire record with each song providing another chapter in their story.
I liked the concept and kept seeing it played out as a western, so I pitched the idea of this gothic gloomy Teddy Roosevelt era western set out in a wild woods and Benjamin was like, “Sure go for it, but the label can’t give any money, so it’d be all on you.”
I extrapolated key lyrics from the album and drafted a script that caught up with the couple after they had escaped the town and beginning when they had sought refuge in a cabin owned by a trapper and his family. The storyline then followed the woman sneaking out during the night and stealing a horse. Her partner wakes in the morning to find that she has vanished. The man tracks the woman, while in turn they both are being tracked by a cadre of elderly men, The Messengers, who have been sent to retrieve them.
The concept was simple enough but nailing down the locations and sourcing costumes and props provided quite a challenge. I drew a lot of inspiration from Jim Jarmusch’s film Dead Man and Andrew Dominik’s film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, going for a more rugged depiction of the western, where furs coats replaced leather and chaps.I had just come off of script supervising the feature film, Junk directed by Kevin Hamedani, shooting in Seattle, and I had quite enjoyed working with several of the key crew members so I reached out to them to see if they were interested in being involved. Junk’s cinematographer, AJ Rickert-Epstein, agreed to come up from LA, as well as local AD (and now producer) Mel Eslyn, (both working for virtually nothing) and local art department guys Collin Redmond and Jason Aumann. Another good friend and amazing illustrator, Juliana Wisdom, drew up some great storyboards based on the script that we used throughout the production. She has since storyboarded all my productions.
With the crew in place, the next challenge was casting. The hero woman was probably the easiest. I had an actress friend from UW who fit the look of part and she agreed to it right away. We were able to find most of her costume at the boutique Diva Dolls. Her white rabbit fur shawl, I luckily found a garage sale for pretty cheap. The hero man was also fairly easy. He was a friend of Hamedani, who had had a bit part in Junk. I reached out to him and he agreed. His main outfit was a combination of clothing he already owned and goodwill finds. The fur coat he is wearing is actually a bear skin rug that I had managed to find on craiglist. I had originally just wanted the bear rug as a set piece for the cabin but it ended up looking really cool as a cloak so we just went with it.
While we were concurrently casting, my girlfriend, Voleak, and I were also scouting all over Western Washington for potential forest and cabin locations. My dad, Jake Seniuk, was at that time the museum director of the Port Angeles Fine Art Center out on the Olympic Peninsula and had been living west of Port Angles for many years, so I had spent a lot of time out there and was familiar with a lot of the forests. Along with him, we drove up countless forest roads before finding a small tract of land owned by the Hoh River Trust, which we eventually convinced them to let us film on. I think we took maybe 5 trips out to Peninsula before finding all the loca-
tions.
We got extremely lucky with the forest because it perfectly encapsulated the old growth look we were going for but also conveniently was easily accessible from the highway and sat across from a huge barren hillside which allowed a lot of light to filter in and illuminated the fairly dark forest.
Having my dad’s museum connections provided invaluable as well. Through those connections, we were able to cast all of the elderly men, all of which were either board members or patrons of the museum, the trapper family, get access to the extensive costume shop of the Port Angeles Playhouse, and find the trapper cabin location (which we found by accident while following a lead for a horse owner). Sarah and Scott Tucker, who played the trapper parents, also donated a lot of time and support and helped us track down a horse and some thinner forest locations that we were also still needing. The rest of the props were a combination of eBay and Craigslist finds and the one-eyed owl I found at a raptor center in Sequim who generously let us film there for free.
The shoot was no less daunting than the preproduction. We shot in mid-january and the weather was pretty miserable. It was a three day shoot, the first day was the owl and the trapper cabin. The second day was the Hoh forest, where it rained close to 3 inches during filming. Everyone was utterly soaked within the first hour of getting to set. The final day was back closer to Port Angels for the scenes involving the horse and luckily the rain stopped for some great sun breaks in the morning. Amazingly, everything went exactly according to plan and we got all the shots we needed.
Benjamin had been completely absent for the whole process, so when I can back to Seattle and pulled together an edit he was super stoked at the project. Since the video now had definitely grown from just a video for a song to more of an experimental short film, I had him write a little more music for the beginning to help flesh it out. I remember him telling me that Marshall (his younger brother and drummer for MSHVB) walked past the computer while he was reviewing the edit and asked him what was the name of the film he was watching.
