The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Remember when the first graphical web browsers were developed? At the time, circa 1993, “going online” meant dicking around with dial-up modems and text menus on Gopher and CompuServe. Then the World Wide Web suddenly exploded in full color with pictures, formatted text, and rollover hyperlinks. Almost overnight, the Web gained critical mass; within a single decade, we went from fewer than ten thousand Americans online to more than two hundred million.

By now we’ve all been ravaged to the point of insensitivity with breathless language about what the “global digital revolution” meant to humankind, and what it means to us now. And it is, of course, still evolving. For example, once high-speed and broadband net access became widespread, high-quality sound files and true moving pictures proliferated the internet. Now full-motion video is becoming normal and even expected.

So if you’ve been paying attention, you know that yet another alleged digital revolution is under way. Coming quickly on the heels of blogs are vlogs, or video podcasts—clunky names for a form of self-expression that shows great promise. A vlog is a short-form movie (or, depending on how you look at it, a long-form commercial) running between two and four minutes.

It’s hard to talk about a medium as a “movement,” but blogging already established the precedent. Even though vlogs are relatively few in number, the variety is already infinite. There are extemporaneous and planned vlogs, fiction and nonfiction. There are vlogs along the lines of excruciating home video—dog walking and cooking seem to be common starting points—and there are others that have impressive production values.

Some that have been celebrated in the national press, like the daily variety show Rocketboom and the monthly “comedy” show Tiki Bar TV, are not exactly inspiring. Their main weakness is inconsistency. More to the point, when they’re bad, they’re fingernails-on-blackboard bad, with mannered or wooden hosts telling jokes that wouldn’t make the cut on community-access TV, introducing the unfunniest out-takes from America’s Funniest Home Videos. At this writing, iTunes offers eighty-three video podcasts, about eighty of which are futile or feeble. Just like non-video blogging, one person’s musings are not necessarily enough to sustain the interest of anyone else on the internet.

But the best vlogs today take the idea of audience seriously, and compare favorably to what we already see on television and at the movie house. I suspect that by this time next year, there will be thousands more vlogs, and their general quality will have risen dramatically, as truly talented filmmakers see and seize the opportunity presented by video blogging. With a tight focus and premise, vlogs present opportunities for populist creativity that move way beyond what’s come out of the keyboard-pecking blogosphere, with its rictus of righteous indignation.

It’s a happy coincidence that one of the very best vlogs, Chasing Windmills, is produced by two Minneapolis residents who post a four-minute film each weekday. Television is the model here. The website, chasingmills.blogspot.com, refers to itself not as a vlog but a “daily web video series,” and its creators refer to the current postings, going back to last September, as the “show’s first season.”

That’s good, because it suggests they’ll eventually give themselves a much-deserved summer break. With monastic self-sufficiency, Juan Antonio del Rosario and Cristina Cordova have developed a daily soap opera with one main storyline and two nameless characters. Chasing Windmills is by and large a domestic situation drama, dealing with mundane disagreements and pleasures between a young married couple. But there are dark elements as well. The edgy Juan Antonio, with his perpetual five-o’clock shadow, shows signs of incipient insanity. He apparently hears voices. Cristina is a voluptuous and sharp-tongued matron. She gets pregnant and is not, at first, overjoyed about it. She sleepwalks. He secretly smokes cigarettes. The main plot engine, though, is an ancient one: the possibility of infidelity and the quiet tearing of unseen things inside a relationship.

Mid-season, Cristina seems to take special pleasure in henpecking Juan Antonio, especially as he begins to suffer from his demons. If a viewer begins watching episodes somewhere in “mid-season,” perhaps with “Car Trouble” (November 28), and works in both directions, it captures the essential dynamic of the series—love, touched by neurosis. In the uneven early episodes, Juan Antonio is cruel and invulnerable, while Cristina is thoughtful and conflicted. Some of the subplots, while rich in emotional drama and anticipation, are undermined by earlier shows that give away too much, but with no reward. They hadn’t yet learned the paradox of great drama—that what makes it great is what is withheld, what is hinted at, what is unspoken. Chasing Windmills very quickly incorporated this subtle truth, and now uses it to great effect.

That’s not to say all the early postings are bad. Within the first six episodes there are clear flashes of brilliance. Even though “Quality Time” (October 11) manhandles the characters, it is the first indication of how artful the series would become. The couple get into an argument on the tennis court, and Juan Antonio’s belligerence would, in the real world, justify a domestic-disturbance call to the police. But things end poignantly. A ground-level shot shows Cristina’s feet kicking through leaves that have gathered at the base of the net, apparently looking for lost balls. The multiple shots and setups, seamlessly edited, contrast with the single, sustained verite-type shots used in earlier posts.

Chasing Windmills is strictly a two-person operation; Cordova and del Rosario seem almost willful about it. Considering that six months ago, the pair apparently had never used a camcorder, it is astonishing how quickly they mastered the basic techniques of modern digital filmmaking. It almost becomes a distraction to figure out how, with just four hands and a tripod, they manage the sophisticated cinematography. The pair agreed to meet me on a Sunday afternoon, when they do most of their filming.

Cordova and del Rosario met in Puerto Rico, where they worked as journalists and together started a weekly newspaper in San Juan. Giving up on the long hours and the long odds, they moved to Minneapolis last summer. They explicitly wanted to find a low-overhead situation that would allow one of them to work full time on their new passion, video blogging, which they started a few weeks after settling here. Cordova had lived in Columbia Heights when she was in high school. She currently works at an advertising firm, while del Rosario is devoted to the vlog, including composing and recording its spare soundtrack. “This is basically all we do,” he said, gesturing to the living room, a frequent set, and the digital camcorder standing there on a tripod.

When I asked how they manage what seems like a massive operation, they brought out a large bulletin board that maps three weeks’ worth of episodes, from concepting and scripting the narrative to storyboarding the scenes, filming them, and editing them. Typically editing happens the night before an episode is posted to the web. So while the rest of the work is proceeding weeks in advance, there’s rarely more than one episode ready to post at any given time. It is a staggering workload. “One episode probably takes about twelve hours of work,” del Rosario told me. “Each,” added Cordova, working through the math.

The pair live on the eleventh floor of the Towers, a high-rise apartment twenty steps from the Hennepin Avenue bridge. Looking out their windows across Hennepin, the scene is dominated by the big gold ball on the last flagpole remaining in the old Gateway area. Though the storyline could be set anywhere, the series is rich in Minneapolis scenery. It is shot mostly downtown, but ventures as far south as Edina. When they visited family in Puerto Rico over Christmas, they took the show with them. Enlisting the help of family members, for the first time they introduced other characters.

The vlog’s storyline has developed into a rich and noirish soap opera. There are hilarious episodes like “Anal Longings” (December 20) and touching ones like “Cleansing” (February 8), as well as some disturbing, verbally violent episodes like “Pillow Talk” (November 30). With the modern conflation of short films and advertising—BMW’s celebrated serial starring Clive Owen comes to mind, as does the silly yet seminal Taster’s Choice series chronicling the dalliances of “Matthew” and “Alexandra”—it seems like some episodes of Chasing Windmills, with some tweaking, could be hip commercials for, say, Target or Dunn Brothers. Others, however, seem more like mannered homages to obscure, subtitled auteur films. Cordova and del Rosario are clever and self-aware enough even to get meta; in February, they developed a delightful cycle in which Juan Antonio announces he’s going to start a video blog, because “everyone’s doing it.” Thereafter, the couple briefly plots to make money on Juan Antonio’s new vlog by developing a porn storyline. Alas, Cristina was only playing along.

Fans wonder how fictional Chasing Windmills is. Having spent an afternoon with its creators, I would call it fictionalized memoir. Here, the main difference between life and art is that the couple obviously adore and admire each other, the way co-creators and artists often do. Then too, violent disagreements may be a part of life for people like that, and that may explain how episodes of intense conflict are often followed by serene stories that seem to have forgotten the rough patch. I won’t give away which plot lines are true and which are fictionalized, except to say that both Cordova and del Rosario emphatically agree that it “basically is fiction,” and neither seems serious about giving up smoking.

Talking with the Chasing Windmills crew, I was reminded more than once of how late-seventies punk rock, as a populist, do-it-yourself movement, revolutionized music and the music industry. It was a moment when the audience bum-rushed the stage and took over the means of production. Of course, punk was not just a means of production; its style, voice, and aesthetic were paramount. In the nascent vlogging scene, there is no comparable core, no there there. Most vlogs that I’ve seen are modeled either on public broadcasting news, network variety shows, or raw home video. Besides Chasing Windmills, very few—in fact, none that I am aware of—are fictional, produced serials. But as more young filmmakers realize that they can simply take the keys of production and the keys of publishing into their own hands, the creative class may yet break free of New York, Hollywood, and even Sundance. Punk rock had the local bar, where you might see a trashy quartet called the Clash, say, or R.E.M., before they got big. As vlogging becomes more common, we may get to see the next generation’s Coppola or Fellini or Wes Anderson while their short, self-produced flicks are still playing on the local podcast.