Time is a river... a ribbon?... It's not a line.

I just recently made a short film entitled Waters. It's 30 seconds and runs rather fast. But through making it, I have talked to the dead, molded time and figured out what the hell i want to do with film.

I have lately become obsessed with water. Both due to its influence in my name (Dylan: god of the sea), my family (Waters) and my California rising sign (Cancer). So this film involved hand manipulation. I had to scratch, cut and color it. It had to be 30 seconds, and that's 20ft of film, so I measured my body three times, and grabbed a handful of footage that people had discarded from their projects.

I took it all home and started to ask the film questions. I scratched and scratched and listened to a silent hand guiding me. I scratched the ten feet of black leader with symbols and sigils and I colored the clear leader with the same. Then I branded my true name on the emulsion and hand tinted it.
But one odd thing I realized was that I had a small bit of footage of an old man. And some of the found footage was a guy digging in the sand. And what he discovered there was a can. My brain lept to the idea that my grandfather (Pop) was trying to speak to me and tried to let his hand guide me through the building of this film. I took all of the footage back to the edit labs and spliced it all together. But what was interesting, was that I embedded the last thing I had worked on at the beginning and folded the time worked in on itself. Suddenly, the film became about my journey to speaking with my grandfather. All of time collapsed in on itself.

The film I wound up making was about it making itself. And my frustration at the projector and the inability to make the three frames of the old man appear was reflected on the face of the actor in the found footage. This made me realize that (much like The Invisibles is to Grant Morrison) my creations are sigil extensions of self. I must use this tool of manifestation to change this world. I always thought it was possible, but never thought of doing it through the dream logic of film. It's much more freeing and primal. I feel as though I'm tugging on the strings of the universe and they comply to my touch.