Restrung (2014)
Director: Mike Enns
Country: Canada | USA
Genre: Documentary | Biography | Music
Official Site: Here
Editor’s Notes: The following review is part of our coverage of the Niagara Integrated Film Festival. For more information niagarafilmfest.com and follow NIFF on Twitter at @niagarafilm.
The road for the idiosyncratic dreamer is a difficult one and wrought with perilous self-doubt and a lifetime of practicality nagging at one’s confidence. The ghosts of parents offer pragmatic advice in the back of the mind, sometimes leading the dreamer to forfeit their plans or relegate them to haunting whispers that become part of the chorus of “what if’s” and inevitable regrets that we all secretly carry. Randall Wyn Fullmer did the impossible and chased his idiosyncratic dream, leaving a lucrative career as a Disney animator to develop a line of hand-crafted bass guitars. It was a risky endeavor that put him in the terrifying position of starting life anew, but through his steadfast determinism and fastidious craftsmanship he developed a line of bass guitars that were wholly unique and tailored to the individual needs of bass guitarists in a diverse array of musical genres.
The road for the idiosyncratic dreamer is a difficult one and wrought with perilous self-doubt and a lifetime of practicality nagging at one’s confidence.
The beginnings of Fullmer’s dream started in high school when he used wood shop as a means to build the guitar his academic parents would not allow him to buy. Through stubborn determination he managed to build his first guitar but it would not become an immediate fixation as he entered a career in animation. He left the industry twenty years later, ending a career working on high profile animated features for Disney to pursue a riskier path that allowed for individual expression. Collaboration can often be the bane of imagination as each well-meaning party throws their incongruent ideas into the mix. In his search for an avenue of individualist expression removed from the often frustrating pitfalls of collaboration, Fullmer forfeits a lucrative career and abandons his comfortable safety net to set out to fulfill an old dream that had been relegated to the shoebox of forgotten memories at the back of the mind for two decades.
After a never ending string of minor victories and major setbacks, Fullmer meticulously designed a new shop that conformed to the rules established to keep the minor player from competing and increased production while maintaining his artistic vision.
Fullmer’s entry into this new career inspired by old fixations would not make for an easy transition and bureaucratic blowhards and nosy neighbors would attempt to put an end to his endeavor. Shadenfreude is sometimes a proactive process, some seemingly of the belief that everyone should be as miserable and unfulfilled in life as they are. After a never ending string of minor victories and major setbacks, Fullmer meticulously designed a new shop that conformed to the rules established to keep the minor player from competing and increased production while maintaining his artistic vision. Each bass guitar is a unique work of art, painstakingly designed and crafted to possess distinct aesthetic qualities and musical potential, making them sought after by musicians in genres ranging from jazz to heavy metal. His completely hands on techniques allow him to make modifications that larger manufacturers would be unable to accommodate and his meticulous selections of construction material make these instruments masterworks in craftsmanship and artistic expression.
Restrung captures a sense of evolution in the long dormant American Dream as the parameters of happiness and fulfillment are centered around passion and individual expression rather than monetary gain. Fullmer fulfilled this new dream at great personal risk, leaving behind a lucrative career to pursue an idiosyncratic passion and defying the odds by making it work well enough to live a life of tranquility and self-fulfillment. He finds inner peace during the innumerable hours of sanding, listening to the orchestra of sounds found in his self styled workshop and thinking up his next project as he lives a more objectively satisfying life than anything conceived of by Disney.
Restrung captures a sense of evolution in the long dormant American Dream as the parameters of happiness and fulfillment are centered around passion and individual expression rather than monetary gain.
