Documentarians statement:
This short documentary is composed of a personal collection of short videos I have accrued over the better part of three years. When I am out in the world, one of the things I find most interesting to watch out for is the vanity license plate. I cannot count the number of times I have passed one without recording it, but that is surpassed by the many times I managed to capture one just in the nick of time. I spend at least an hour of my day on the road, so I see a lot of license plates.
The amount of people who make the choice to customize their license plates is fewer than it could be due to the fee it incurs. This specialized, intentional individuality is a luxury that not everyone can afford. That begs the question: how much is individuality worth? It’s worth at least 10 dollars on top of the vehicle’s registration fee every year, so the worth of individuality goes up over time. Then you account for how much someone else might want that license plate and the ends seem to justify the means.
Frankly speaking, I do not know the individual reasons people chose to shell out 10 dollars a year in Utah because each reason is individual. What I can do is observe the fruits of other people’s labors and ponder what I would put on one. I think I would put ‘Western’ or ‘MothMan,’ maybe ‘Combust.’
If I were to categorize this documentary as any mode, I’d place it into poetic and observational. This film is about a third the length that it could be with all my footage, and this was never a film I planned to make in the first place. That’s part of the beauty of it in my eyes. I kept the raw audio because it was part of the observation and the moment it came from. It’s not the focus but it is the character of the film. I had Man with a Movie Camera in mind when I was making this because I realized even though I don’t have all those grandiose shots, I don’t need them to observe.
In the film, the audio is a frequent acknowledgement of why it exists. It exists purely because I saw something personally interesting that I wanted to capture and see repeatedly. The beauty of the work being distinctly chronological is that it shifts through most of a year; That gets reflected in the music as well as the shift in who you hear in the background. Those are the voices of people I love, people I don’t talk to anymore, and people who have dared to stick with me since these short snips were taken over a year ago. This is life observed through license plates, life captured in moments. I never expected to make a documentary from these live photos, but I didn’t know a lot about my life over a year ago.