When David Marek graduates from the University of Colorado at Boulder on Friday, Dec. 18, he will have accomplished the goal he set out with when he decided to work on a master's of fine arts degree in art and art history: he wrote, directed and produced a feature film.
It's no ordinary film either. While many master's level films are in the five- to 10-minute range, Marek's is a 134-minute feature film shot in 31 days over the summer in 2009 in dozens of locations from the deserts of Utah to the lush green landscape of Wisconsin and Michigan.
"I wanted to come out of graduate school not only making a feature film, but also come out with a film I am proud of," Marek said. "For me, filmmaking is a leap of faith. And with this film, I'm all in."
His film, "Somewhere West," chronicles the last days of a terminally ill young man, Ian, who decides to forgo further treatment for a brain tumor. Instead he heads out onto the road in search of solitude and a beautiful place to die. And then, against his best efforts, he becomes the center of a makeshift family of broken characters who help him to open his heart and find peace.
The film's production was really unusual and challenging, according to Marek. First there was a cast and crew of nine people who needed to be transported around in order to make the film. They ended up renting an RV, which became home for the crew, who traveled nearly 5,000 miles while working on the project.
The journey began in Boulder and continued on to Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wyoming and Idaho before ending in the Bonneville Salt Flats in northwestern Utah. The crew included two actors from Naropa University and two CU-Boulder students who had graduated in May.
"It was really an incredible break-neck film to shoot, especially with so few people," he said. "It is really unusual to shoot a feature film in 31 days, let alone while traveling 5,000 miles and shooting everything on location."
Some of the scenes in the film can be attributed to a similar experience in Marek's life. In 1996, prior to moving to Boulder to begin his undergraduate work, he took a trip around the West, and many of the places he visited turn up in his film.
"It was very strange for me to relive the experience of my trip, while also creating this fictional narrative," he said.
Before going on the road, he had a rough draft of the script, which he said changed as the journey unfolded.
"As we were driving along in the RV we would be looking at the next scene and going over it and changing the dialogue," Marek said. "It was an amazing process to watch the story and the characters evolve while we were rolling down the road."
And they did plenty of "rolling with the punches," he said.
"Shooting on location was a touchy thing," he said. "We shot in a lot of national parks, including Yellowstone and Devils Tower. It was a real challenge to approach a location not knowing where we were going to shoot our scene and not knowing what the weather was going to be like or what kind of lighting we would be shooting in. It was a constant improvisation and reaction to what was in front of us."
He chose a brain tumor -- specifically one that affected his sight -- as an illness for his character so he could experiment with visual techniques that he had learned in school.
"In the film we did a lot of visual experimentation to represent Ian's visual experience, but also to get into the spiritual ramifications of his quest for spirituality throughout the trip," Marek said. "Even though I was doing a narrative film I wanted to integrate a lot of experimental theory and techniques that I had been learning about during my time in school here."
He made a personal and financial investment in order to create a more artful film, a long-term goal he holds for his filmmaking. Student loan money paid for part of the production costs of the film, and he also had several investors as well as grants, including the Beverly Sears Graduate Student Grant, to fund the budget of $18,000.
In the end, he said his experience working on the film has been great, and he plans to keep working on other "artful" feature films.
"Even though CU is an experimental film school, I'm a story teller and I believe that narrative cinema can really be a lot more artful than it is today," he said.