directors statement
"Bathed in Light" is a cinematic exploration of disorientation and the sublime, set against the vast, serene backdrop of the California desert in the 1970s. The narrative centers on Lynn, a spirited young woman whose journey in her emerald Studebaker takes an unexpected turn with the appearance of a mysterious orb of light. This otherworldly presence disrupts the calm of the barren landscape, thrusting Lynn into a transcendent encounter with her doppelganger from an alternate universe.
The concept for this film emerged from an obsession with the feeling of disorientation and the desire to evoke an out-of-body experience for the audience. I sought to capture the essence of the sublime—interacting with something that is both terrifying and beautiful. The film invites viewers to experience the ephemeral, the rush of movement around an individual, and the overwhelming fear of being inspected and scanned.
Through Lynn's encounter with her alternate self, "Bathed in Light" delves into the mind-bending reality of parallel worlds where time and space lose their meaning. This surreal meeting forces her to confront her identity and the profound implications of such a discovery. It is a visually rich journey into the unknown, where each step blurs the line between reality and the unseen dimensions she traverses.
As both the director and co-creator of the music, I wanted the sonic landscape to be as integral to the film as the visual narrative. Working closely with my partner Ryan Dunn, we crafted haunting melodies that underscore the film's eerie and transcendent atmosphere. The use of a high-speed drone to simulate the dynamic movements of the orb added another layer of surrealism to the cinematography.
interview
What inspired you to create this particular short film? Were there any personal experiences or external influences that played a significant role in its development?
I was obsessed with the feeling of disorientation—how to evoke an out of body experience in the audience. But it was more the sense of the “sublime”— of interacting with something both scary and beautiful. How can I move the camera in a way that evokes the ephemeral? The feeling of rushing around an individual, the overwhelming fear of being inspected and scanned. And that simple motif grew into a narrative about a woman and a transcendent experience in the desert with an AI orb entity.
How did you come up with the concept for the story? What creative process did you follow in developing the idea?
Julian King and I started the process of relooking at the short form again a few months ago. What's in it for us in terms of a new opportunity in the work? We spent a month, four or five weekly sessions, where we pushed each other to write quickly—and more stream of consciousness-like, the scripts weren't meant to be masterpieces in their own right. They were meant to be ideas, little creative balls of potential energy.
We asked ourselves: “How can you take the concept and flesh it out enough to get through the other side with something that could be shootable?” Out of those sessions came a number of shorts. And from there, it's like just choosing the ones that are reasonable to do. I'm a big advocate for working from a place of options and being able to weigh those options against the realities of production and my aspirations.
The decision that you make and how you make something really follows some deeper objective because it's a huge project. Even the smallest things, shorts are huge projects. When you have no money and you have no defined help, you're really looking for things that you can do to get a lot of inspiration and momentum after they are done. So for me, this short was really about trying to find that. At the beginning of that process, we focused a lot on just what is an effective short in our mind at this time in film. We laid out a bunch of different things that we liked. That helped give some principles. We created this vast mind map of all the attributes that we liked about shorts. That process was a clarifier for us. That first step really made it possible for us to write quickly.
What do you hope the audience will take away from your short film? Are there specific emotions, thoughts, or discussions you intend to evoke?
The thing that I was the most interested in coming out of this sort of the basic obsession of how do you kind of disorient the viewer? How, in the melee and movement, can we stumble on a new vision, a mystery, a sort of symbol of the numinous — and it really just is playing with that magic of filmmaking. You know, to be able to play with your character, and the space, and the world, and our value, a sense of time period, an underlying mystery, that's hidden behind the fabric of that consensus reality.
Essentially what I was playing with is there something more to that introspective experience that she's going through just driving around in the desert, the desolate quality of that, and how out of that burst of the imagination.
Can you discuss the artistic choices you made in terms of cinematography, music, and editing that contribute to the overall atmosphere and impact of the film?
When I wrote the first words on the page, I wrote the crackle of a radio. The haunting melodies of Theatre, I have the good fortune of that being another aspect of my own expression in a way, so Ryan and I, who is my partner on Theatre, are an experimentation in the sort of sonic landscape of this is like one of the core objectives.
And since I'm playing a lot of different roles, as you do on these kinds of projects, each one of them is like another aspect or like a chamber in my mind. And music is like right at the top of this one because it's a film for that entity, for the Theatre, our larger Theatre project, we call it a mythopoetic intersection of new art, narrative, and music. And that Theatre is an art project that brings together all of the facets of the things I'm interested in.
When we get into the other aspects, the cinematography, that's intertwined. It's funny because the cinematography is sort of one of the core things that just brought me to the project in the first place. And it's not just the moving of the camera, it's actually that this orb is a free-flowing dynamic otherworldly engine is something that I think took a lot of work to try to bring to life.
I bought the large FPV drone that we’re using to act as the orb and we built the rig around that high-speed drone. It moves like an acrobatic drone. So it does radical things. And that, alongside moving the camera platform, another drone in some cases, all the way down to hand held. This really is the place where you really start to see the next level of quality of this. It's like drone on drone.Cinematography and the whole piece is sort of motivated by that kind of dynamic movement. Even when the car comes to a stop, she's parked in the middle of the desert but you still feel that momentum, this electrically charged narrative. And that gives us a lot of opportunity to apply to do wild stuff. And so we just started to push that envelope.
Are there any underlying messages, symbols, or metaphors in the film that you'd like viewers to pay attention to?
The kind of spinning rotational motif, I think of things as more motif forms rather than metaphor. Although there is one metaphor that came to light for me was just this idea of the eye. An ever-present third eye that I was very fascinated with, with visualization and mindfulness techniques that really are looking at how the infinite quality of the mind appears as your imagination. Filmmaking is inherently an imaginal act. No idea is born from any place other than the imagination.