February 11, 2010
By Iain Stasukevich
As a filmmaker, Marcus DeLeon has always maintained a close relationship with music. “There's a joke that God created the music industry to make the film industry look respectable,” he quips. While growing up in Orange County he and his friends would to hit up the local art house theater to catch rock docs like The Song Remains the Same and The Last Waltz, all the while hoping that someday he'd get the chance to make his own rock-and-roll tour documentary. 
Flash forward a few decades: DeLeon produced Border Radio with John Doe of X, wrote and directed The Big Squeeze, scored by Marc Mothersbaugh of Devo, and wrote Walkout, scored by Carlos Santana. His latest film, The Misery Signals Story, brings that long-standing relationship full circle as his first rock doc.
DeLeon first became acquainted with the band Misery Signals while staying in New York City. He heard some of their songs over the radio and was struck by their sound, described as “progressive metalcore.”
“I loved the music,” he enthuses. “I thought the sophistication of the songwriting and the production was one of a kind, so I went to go see them in Phoenix and was blown away.” DeLeon met the band in November of 2008, and they suggested he film them on their 2009 Canadian tour.
He balked at the idea at first, intending to do something more all-American. After an all-nighter with the band at his apartment in Los Angeles, DeLeon had a change of heart, “I said to myself, 'When is this opportunity ever going to come again? Screw it. Make this movie.'”
The first order of business was to procure a camera. A filmmaker acquaintance suggested the JVC GY-HM100U, so DeLeon approached BKW, a multimedia company and JVC dealer in Tempe, Arizona, with a proposal for his film. DeLeon was the first person to unpackage the camera in the BKW offices. He and the staff went through the menus together and he was granted the tiny camera as a demo for five days. He shot a local band around Tuscon and was pleased with the results.
“It performed well beyond its size,” DeLeon reports. “A lot of my friends were dubious that a camera with such a small chip could produce bright, vivid colors, but it picks up the stage lighting beautifully.”
In the following three weeks, DeLeon needed to learn everything about the equipment, the technology, and the workflow. “It was an action-packed three weeks with a very steep learning curve,” he recalls. “I bought a Macbook Pro. I had to learn about media management. I had to learn the camera, how to record sound. I had to book all my travel.”
Most of the Canadian tour took place on the road, with DeLeon following the the bands (there were four others on the tour) in a separate car. They drove through Chicago and Detroit on their way to Ontario, then onto Alberta and British Columbia.
“It was usually me alone in the car, because my agenda was different from the band,” he explains. “Their mission was to get from point A to point B, and my mission was to film them doing so.”
Travel time was time for the band to rest, but DeLeon used it as an opportunity to charge his batteries, or get transitional material by filming the vans while he was driving. Sometimes he'd drive ahead of the band and pull of to the side of the road to catch a shot of the heavy metal caravan as it rolled by.
DeLeon and Misery Signals traveled 5,000 miles in two weeks across Canada, stopping only to play a show or catch a few hours sleep when time allowed. The entire time DeLeon operated as a crew of one. “Sometimes I wish someone could've done the driving when I was too tired,” he mentions, adding, “But I can't think of anyone I would've paid to live in those conditions. You're sleeping on the floor or in the car. Time was always short. In hotels I would sleep on the floor in a sleeping bag. In the morning I had a choice: shower, more sleep, or food.”
He continues, “And with all that driving and the band couldn't afford to stay in hotels every night. They'd stay with friends or fans... People they'd just met that night. We'd throw our bedding on any couch or carpet we could. In B.C. I slept in a closet.”
The whole time DeLeon maintained a mobile office, which he used for charging batteries and transferring and backing up data from two 16GB SDHC cards. He kept everything in two backpacks: A Macbook Pro laptop, cables, and two FireWire-connected 500GB LaCie Rugged Hard Disks. (“USB was a tremendous time-waster in the field,” he notes.) He made his office wherever he had the room: sometimes it was in a kitchen or in a utility closet. Sometimes it was in a filthy backstage area. Sometimes it was in a greenroom.
Given the lack of time and space in some of the smaller venues, the HM100U's lightweight, compact design came in handy when DeLeon needed to move quickly and keep a low profile. In most situations he held the camera from the top handle with his right hand and held a Sennheiser shotgun mic in his left hand. “The size of the camera allowed me to get up on the side of the stage and get between the audience and the performers. I could use my arm as a crane without inserting my body into the actual show,” he relates. “It's small enough that the size doesn't change people's behavior. People act more naturally around a camera of this size than they would a 16mm or 35mm camera.”
After Canada, Misery Signals embarked on a tour of Europe, starting in Amsterdam and continuing on for another 3,000 miles across seven countries. All told, DeLeon captured approximately 110 hours of footage for his 90-minute film. For the first seven months of shooting, footage was FedEx'ed or hand delivered to an assembly editor using at Pivotal Post in Los Angeles. “I'd come back from various travels and we'd discuss scenes in terms of chapters and locations. I interviewed people about the economy of the town, the history of the venue, and came away with some very interesting socioecological stories,” DeLeon explains. “What I particularly loved about rock docs – the classic ones – is that they reflect the times that the band lived in. Ten years from now I want people to look at this film and see an era captured.”
DeLeon is now back in Tuscon, Arizona, in the process of reconstructing those chapters into a feature length cut for the festival circuit. He's enthusiastic, and not just for his own sake. “After knowing Misery Signals for over a year and living with them on tour for seven months, I like them even more now,” he reflects. “People are unfamiliar with this kind of music think that when the band is offstage they're biting the heads off babies. They're not. They're good, humble people, and above all, they're artists.”
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