As November comes to a close and the skies turn dark and rainy, we can be thankful it's just a conventional rain. Speaking as someone who spent a couple of weeks living out of a New Braunfels hotel room with a pregnant wife, three cats and a dog after Hurricane Ike turned our apartment into a water feature, the passing of hurricane season is always one that is met with a great sigh of relief. So many Houstonians remain deeply affected by the storm, to say nothing of the folks who fled here from Katrina and opted to stay rather than return to the devastation.
Director Matt Faust has released an amazing short film called home that offers a truly unique and moving look at the difference between the home you thought was secure and the ruin that is left behind in the wake of a natural disaster. Faust had just finished a round of chemotherapy treatment when his childhood home was destroyed in Katrina.
Distraught, but determined that his memories of home wouldn't fade, Faust gave himself a crash course in animation software like 3DS Max and Aftereffects to see if what he had in mind was possible. Clearly it was, as we spend five sober minutes watching images and videos from Faust's life in Louisiana weave piece by piece in and out of those same images after the flood waters had receded. It's not just a personal trip down memory lane juxtaposed with disaster shots, though.
"The bigger challenge was probably going through every surviving picture and video we had and deciding not only what pre- and post-Katrina scenes could be recreated, but also how to make those scenes relevant to a broad audience," Faust said via e-mail. "It would've been easy to create a self-indulgent archive of my favorite memories, but that wouldn't have meant much to anyone else. Instead, I tried to focus on the universal qualities of home and loss and how to reach a broad audience at an instinctual level. I spent a year thinking and writing about that before I ever touched a computer."
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