Behind-the-Scenes Breakdown – OTA Series: The Medium Control

Tommy Kronquist, founder of Duluth, MN, design shop The Medium Control, walks a thin line. On the one hand, he feels it’s important to remember and know the past—and to stop and appreciate the simple things in life. On the other hand, he’s part of a creative culture that increasingly relies on digital screens and moves at a “fast, anti-attention span” pace. In this visual love letter, Tommy shares his hopes and dreams for his young son. Particularly that he’ll find time to experience real life—getting out in nature, learning to create, and maybe getting his hands dirty with the family business along the way.

As part of our Behind-the-Scenes Breakdown series, director Joe Hubers and producer Andrew Reinartz talk about the unique creative process that went into the making of this film; a process that included 8mm film, combining an array of styles, and revising a plan on-the-fly to help tell a truly sincere story.

This piece presented a really unique storytelling style. Talk about what went into the idea for this.
Joe: Doing research on Tommy when we were first given his name, I noticed he had a lot of 8mm film on his Vimeo page. So we came up with the idea of incorporating the footage of stuff he’s shot over the last few years into his OTA film. His son wasn’t born yet when we started the conversation, so we actually bought him some rolls of film and sent them to him so he could document some of that too on 8mm film.

Our initial thought was that we wouldn’t go to Duluth at all. We thought we would just be able to record the phone conversation of him reading the letter over the phone and work with the existing film he had. I liked the idea of him writing a letter to his son. The old grainy footage combined with this broken, over-the-phone voiceover felt perfectly nostalgic. It felt right. Then we got the footage and started putting it together and we did our interview with him, and we decided it might be good to have some higher resolution footage from Duluth to mix things up. So I did end up traveling up there to film and I think the juxtaposition of old grainy film against this higher resolution, digital footage worked well to move the piece along. Also, when I went to Duluth, we recorded the reading of the letter again with clean audio. Just so we could interject certain points we wanted to accentuate. Playing off the broken voice recorded through a phone and then contrasting it with the clean audio worked well when paired with the contrasting footage.

So being able to adjust as necessary ended up making the piece even stronger than planned. Can you talk more about that?
Joe: This was more a process of discovery partly due to the aesthetic choices and content needing to be assembled just so.

Andrew: It was one where the core concept was sound and good, but once you start to assemble the piece, you discover the structure as it reveals itself. So we realized as we’re starting to see it assembled that we need just a little bit more to make it happen in the perfect way. But we wouldn’t have known that until we started building it.

Joe: You really have to make discoveries as you go and use them to your advantage.

And that opened up the door to take things in a pretty unique direction…
Joe: Definitely. I liked it too because there was that organic feel behind it. Through the letter and talking with Tommy, it’s clear that one of his concerns is the amount of technology his son will be exposed to and what that will mean for him. Ultimately, nature and being outdoors are important to Tommy and his wife, and he really hopes to impart that mindset to his son.

So I think the organic nature of the footage kind of helps create that tension by contrasting with the high-definition footage. It creates this parallel between his hopes for his son versus the pressures of being more and more immersed in a technological society.

Did anything else stand out to you in regards to the creation of this piece?
Joe: The process of discovery was a lot more organic and prevalent in this one. Personally, I really enjoy that—finding out midway through that a certain cut works better a different way. So in the editing process, working with this footage, there’s a lot of going back and forth between his footage and our footage. It was a lot like playing that card-matching game Memory you would play when you were a kid. You think, Oh, there’s an image, and I remember a correlating image from earlier that might work together with it, so then you have to go back and find that image and put them together. Some would say it’s a little tedious, but it’s the type of thing where you get caught into the rhythm of doing it and, all of a sudden, six hours have gone by. There definitely wasn’t a set shot list for this one. And I think that worked out to this film’s advantage.