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Production Notes

In the Spring of 2002, 25 visual artists gathered at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), one of the top visual arts colleges in the nation, to create the sacred space and ritual elements used in THE INSTRUMENT.  They were given no production sketches or rules to follow. The process was entirely spontaneous and collaborative — the room came together bit by bit, with multiple artists often working on the same space of wall, the same costume, or the same electronic musical instrument.

This method of production design — the maximum amount of artistry with the minimum amount of expense — exemplifies the sort of improvisational spirit explicitly dictated by budgetary constraints.  THE INSTRUMENT is a feature film completed on a production budget of $9,000. Such a small budget meant that certain choices were made in order to keep costs down.  While some of these choices were indeed founded in practical constraints, the script, the manner of filming, and various other elements of production were structured in such a way as to use these seeming limitations to an artistic advantage.

Since the production did not have the budget to pay for room and board, the entire production cast and crew (nearly 30 of them) lived in the director’s house for the month of June, sleeping ten to a room at times. While the living arrangements were, in a sense, less than ideal, the intensely concentrated atmosphere actually mimicked the plot of the film — a diverse group of people thrown together for one month with one common goal — and thus, aided in developing the culture necessary for the cast and crew to play their roles effectively.

Evenings at the Nemett house were not filled with relaxation.  Everyone was engaged in some aspect of production at nearly all times — the costume designers constructed ritual garb in the den, the musical directors were composing and recording drum loops in the kitchen, actors practiced choreography in a vacant bedroom, all to ensure successful performance of a ritual scheduled to be shot the next afternoon.  In the most real sense, we were all actually experiencing the same process being fictionally presented in THE INSTRUMENT’s screenplay.  The line between fiction and reality became wholly blurred. It was quite a ride.

Since the actors were very often engaged in the same process of preparation for ritual performance as was scripted, the cast was asked to refer to each other by character names for the entirety of the month.  This way, the camera operators could shoot constantly and capture serendipitous moments of method acting.  Indeed, many of these golden unscripted moments did end up in the final cut.

After a two-year edit, the final cut represents a creative collaboration between professors and students at two of America’s premiere institutions of higher learning. In addition to the feature film, THE INSTRUMENT has spawned a novella (“Verity’s Million”) and a critical analysis (“Unlocking The Instrument: A Critical Companion to the Film”).

Production Design by Barry Nemett

Art Direction: James Gillispie, Adam Nemett, and Arthur Zarek

with artwork by: