— DAY 6 —
OMAHA, Nebraska
DAY 6, In which Little Buddy hits a breaking point, and refocuses his passion.
Today was simply incredible.
We were struck by a seemingly endless rainbow the entire drive across Iowa.
Man, is Iowa so beautiful.
While Mike wrote out more postcards for our backers, we kept getting distracted by the majestic wind power colossi as far as the eye can see.
Mike and I talked a lot along the way, unclear of where to go with the story of Projecting West.
We felt we had missed an opportunity last night during Chicago’s projection, to introduce a character, to spark a narrative fire of sorts, but instead, it just kind of… was.
Knowing our character, who we recently would refer to as “Little Buddy,” is headed into some nature for the next handful of days, and we have to get him out of the city.
We sweat this for a long time, until we finally pulled into Omaha as darkness fell, and started to explore for our DAY 6 location. Someone suggested 5 specific spots for us to check out, so we felt hopeful.
WHO KNOWS, MAYBE WE'LL STUMBLE ON A LOCATION AND EVERYTHING WILL CLICK... BUT RIGHT NOW, WE HAVE NOTHING.
Unfortunately, they were all either too large, made of a difficult material for projection, or simply weren't logistically possible.
After Chicago, we realized that the past episodes we liked the most, were ones which simply came from the heart. Of course it sounds cheesy— but if we weren’t completely stoked about that day’s projection, we'd feel like we're letting ourselves, and our backers, down.
Then, this happened.
At 11pm, feeling completely defeated, we wander through a sculpture park called Spirit of Nebraska Wilderness.
It depicts a larger-than-actual-scale tribute to the true pioneers who uprooted their entire families to move west. It was not only deeply humbling, but the technical detail put into it was near unfathomable. This is an entire winding trail through a full city block complete with full caravans and emotions on everyone’s faces.
Experiencing this work at night is powerful. they're like true shadows of the past.
What you're looking at right now, is seriously all metal. Not cloth, wood, and rope just painted black.
Metal, rendered at slightly larger than actual size. Let that sink in. Cool. Let's continue.
It was a moment caught in time.
These were the true individuals projecting themselves west.
After mopping ourselves up, we wandered back through downtown, and right around midnight we walked back by a billboard I made a comment on earlier
All I previously notioned was how much I love those old signs— but in this new moment, everything suddenly became very clear.
We noticed a tree and some grass across the street from it, a perfect location for Little Buddy to think about life.
There was even a part of road blocked off, so we could "apologize later" and set up shop there once our content was ready.
Game time.
Tonight we felt Proud success.
Once we finally visualized what we wanted to create, it was (only) a solid 4 hours of work and we were done. We pushed through what felt like our lowest point yet, only to finally prevail.
Here's one of our favorite audio logs from this whole project, recorded right as we were packing up for the night.
Little buddy’s headed to big wilderness.
Unfortunately for us, this marks our 6th day in a row staying up past 4AM, and the wall we thought we avoided... was about to get its vengeance.