Short Film, Big Vision

Trevin Matcek makes Life Begins at Rewirement for ITVS Futurestates

By Valentina I. Valentini

Labels: Feature Film

This Article Features Photo Zoom

Jessica Ender (Jill Endre) enters Gateway TransCare, a retirement community where one's consciousness is uploaded to a computer.

Life Begins at Rewirement is set in the near-future, a film that follows a son as he puts his elderly mother into a nursing home, only this home isn't what we know as a retirement home today. Gateway, as it's called, combats the overpopulation of seniors in a world that has made living longer easier than ever by transferring a loved one's consciousness into a program that allows their physical body to cease, but their minds to live on—making memories last (beyond) a lifetime, the film's tagline.

Director Trevin Matcek (center) rehearses with actor Barry Del Sherman on the set of the holodeck.

Writer/director Trevin Matcek was invited to pitch this story to Futurestates via Film Independent's Directing Lab. Futurestates is a series that Independent Television Service (ITVS) produces in association with PBS, picking seven to 10 filmmakers to explore stories in the not-too-distant future from a social perspective, focusing on how society will deal with technology.

Matcek is a sci-fi guy, with visual-effects previsualization credits on The Avengers and Men in Black 3, and another sci-fi short film You, Me and We, about human cloning. "My interests are more suburban sci-fi," explains Matcek, "like how your Aunt Donna is going to deal with technology's advances, not some star fighter in a galaxy far, far away. There's also a retro-future bend to my work, incorporating a lot of elements from my childhood, like how the future is seen from the late 1980s and early '90s."

Cinematographer Jaron Presant came onto the project fairly early, seeing both the first and second drafts of Matcek's script. Matcek wanted to try and do everything in-camera on the ARRI ALEXA, leaving the visual effects to a minimum, but from a practical standpoint, Presant was the one to bring his director back down to earth.

"We didn't have an unlimited budget nor unlimited time," says Presant. "An [Tran, the producer] made the resources go as far as possible, and Trevin made the creative go as far as possible. So in order to make the visuals go as far as possible, the smartest approach was a mix of in-camera and post effects."

(Left to right): Matcek checks the monitor as DP Jaron Presant sets up the shot with 1st AC Vanessa Manlunas; Edgar Gomez operates sound boom behind.

Having run in the same circles and wanting to work together for a number of years, Presant describes Matcek as a very visual director, which gives a great starting point for discussion on a project. "We both went through the script separately and brought our ideas together," recalls Presant. "It gives this collaborative experience where the ideas get better and better because you're taking the best from each side."

One of the places the team felt they really benefited from using the limitations to their advantage was the downloading scene, where the mother is "put into the system." Offers Matcek, "Originally, I had the idea of it taking place inside a computer machine room, but we weren't having any luck finding that location. ARRI, who was a huge supporter of this film, owns Illumination Dynamics, which has a demo room. This room is set up to show what they can do with their event and theatrical lighting with all these programmable smart lights. So we built the scene in that room, giving it a surreal technological vibe."

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