5 Questions with Corey Hughes ("MyToeShoes.Com")
1) What have you been up to since we last spoke in Dec. of last year for "My Expanded View"?
Been spending this year working on smaller collaborative projects in Baltimore. The music and art scene is really special and I get a lot of energy and joy collaborating with other artists here. I directed & filmed some videos alongside a couple of my favorite Baltimore and Baltimore adjacent musicians: Horse Lords, Chiffon, Midnight Sun, Sham, Av Moves, and Sauber Zauber.
Was lucky enough to start off the year premiering a new feature film Crestone at True/False, that I co-wrote and shot with Marnie Ellen Hertzler, who produced MyToeShoes.Com. It was really nice to get to experience screening a film with an in person audience before lockdown.
Trying to be in sponge-mode while in lockdown. Taking time to take things in. Reading sci-fi novels. Catching up on movies. Learning 3D animation and meditation. Hiking in the woods and listening to gabber mixes. And still doing lots of YouTube yoga tutorials.
2) What was the initial idea for this project and how did it evolve from there?
I’ve wanted to make a movie about toe shoes for a couple years now. I think they are one of the funniest objects on the planet. I’ve always been attracted to failed technologies. It is interesting what things catch on and what things don’t. People thought the segway was going to revolutionize transportation and everyone in the future would just be on segways all the time. I think the toe shoes were similar, a technology that was supposed to change how shoes were made but ended up becoming obsolete and weird. In sci-fi movies technology is so seamless and pretty but in real life technology is clunky and frustrating and covered in fingerprints and grease stains. I wanted to make a futuristic sci-fi movie that felt like going to the mall.
In 2018, I was working a video job for a cyber security company at the Orlando convention center and I got a call that my grandmother was dying. It was really upsetting because I was close to my grandmother and I couldn’t be with her. I would go for big walks after work around the convention center zone. It was crowded with tourists eating at all the chain restaurants on this strip. I would walk, listen to house music, and cry about my grandmother dying. One night while walking I had a vision of a man wearing toe shoes and floating through a landscape on a hoverboard. I heard his voice. The film started from that feeling and that image.
I started to create a narrative around this character which intersected with getting really into YouTube unboxing videos and hearing from Marnie about an island in the Florida Keys that has a rare species of endangered miniature deer called Key Deer. It seemed like a lot of the YouTubers making unboxing videos were a similar and specific type of person. Often these middle aged, slightly conservative, white tech Dads. I started to think maybe in the future these Dads could end up like the Key deer, an endangered species roaming around on sinking islands while still attempting to record to their YouTube channels.
The final element was talking to my friend Nick about playing the unboxer in the film. Nick Vyssotsky is a visual artist that had a project called Nowhere Zone, based on doing these walking tours of strip malls and deserted suburban areas outside of Baltimore. I went on a few walks and felt like that vibe could work for the unboxer character. This film is an intersection of a lot of different images, sounds, and ideas. It was an experiment in a lot of ways, to bring all these elements together and see what happened.
3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And the easiest part?
Filming in June in the Florida Keys was pretty intense. It was a kind of next level sun and heat that made it almost impossible to shoot during most of the day. We were constantly driving from location to location in a minivan filled with equipment and sometimes felt like there was nowhere to hide from the sun. I was worried that the equipment was going to melt.
Pretty much all the cameras we used on this project were glitchy in some way. The 360 Go Pro would overheat and turn off or just change exposure in the middle of a shot. But the 360 camera was a big conceptual and visual part of the film so we were patient and kind to the camera and eventually it would work.
I made this film at a difficult time in my life when I was having pretty intense anxiety and panic attacks. I would get into these anxiety loops and not be able to sleep or do basic things. It was kind of surreal, making a film about an existential crisis while undergoing an existential crisis. I think films have the power to manifest things. Often things start off as a fictional element in a film and then become real in my life.
The easiest part of the process for me were the collaborative parts. Marnie and Nick are super talented artists and were essential in shaping the project. John Jones recorded the whole score in a day to meet a deadline and added some new strange energy into the film. Anna (who made the 3D animated figure) and Max (who assembled the toe shoe model) both helped take the visuals to the next level.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
Just rewatched TT the Artist’s film “Dark City: Beneath the Beat,” it’s my favorite film of 2020 so far. A really beautiful and energetic portrait of the history of Baltimore club music. I love how it moves between so many different vibes: archival, music documentary, performance, etc. Next level visuals and serious Baltimore energy. Highly recommend.
5) What’s next for you?
Super excited to finally get to share my second feature film as a cinematographer in 2021, a film I’ve been working with Theo Anthony on since 2017 called All Light, Everywhere. It's about police body cameras, aerial surveillance, and the sun.
Wrapping up editing on my last two music videos of the year for Midnight Sun & Sham. Keep an eye out for those coming soon. Also, writing a new short about meditation and astral projection that will hopefully start filming Spring 2021.
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coreyhughes.info | IG: @coreyhughes2030