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            For my experimental film, titled “Too Early To Rise,” I try, in relation to Marshall McLuhan’s reading on the humanity’s relationship to “space” and “time” in his short book The Medium Is the Massage, to divulge the idea of the constraints of time and well-being made onto one by that same person’s self.

            According to McLuhan, for human nature today in correspondence to current technology, “…guilt is not…privately assigned to some individual, but is…shared by everybody…” (McLuhan & Fiore 61), and this quote as was phrased challenged me to identify the one facet of life with which every person shares guilt: time. And what other technology to project time in such a glaring fashion that a clock.

            We fear we will not be able to do everything we would like to do with the little presumed time we have on earth, thus we ultimately define our livelihood by the ticking of our individual doomsday clocks. In response to this fear, we attempt to achieve so many things in so little time that we eventually begin to overbear and make ourselves weary. This film is a personal testament to that situation, as I have often myself awake on early hours in order to fit more into my schedule in an attempt to be more ambitious, only to exhaust myself and sub-standardize my quality of life.

            Once the introductory title sequence cuts, we finally see the first few seconds of the film, where it is evident from the transition from the moon sky to the numbers of early morning alarm clock looming over the protagonist’s face that time has become a creeping and largely influential factor, even bigger than the universe itself.  The young man cares about nothing more than getting an early start on the day, it is apparent that this habit is taking a serious toll on his psyche and self-confidence. He has made himself more of an aimless creature than a strictly habitual one, a transformation visualized by his opening of the curtain, where he is welcomed by blinding light. He has caged himself with his misinformed and self-damaging decisions.