“Jim” Austin WADKINS

ARTIST PAGE

I hope this page serves as a sort of door into my psyche and builds upon the world of Liquid Lady. Each and every one of us are truly unique and special beings who deserve to connect with others around us. I often lack gratitude for the life I was given. I hope I am able to be vulnerable enough in this write up to given some sort of insight into my own perspective. And I hope that with reading this snippet into my own personal artists journey, that each one of you continue in your own journeys and remember that your inspirations and backgrounds are infinitely powerful and need to be shared and heard. I hope I can be there to listen. Thank you for reading.

I was born July 20th, 1995 in Houston, Texas. I had multiple homes in my childhood first living with my Dad then moving in with my Mom. I was an extroverted, optimistic kid who was always running around, literally, smiling and laughing and running and running and running. I couldn’t walk anywhere, I had to run. Simultaneously, I was a kid who always made things difficult on myself. I wouldn’t accept losing in any competition or allow myself to make mistakes, a certain unreasonable quality that caused me to be thrown out of many baseball games as a kid. I have so much appreciation for my parents showing up to my baseball games and supporting me all the while not knowing if there would be a supernova explosion on the pee-wee field.

Music was always a friend to me during my childhood through multiple parental divorces, the absence of my father who was sent to prison for 6 years during my childhood, and the death of my older half-brother, Christopher. 

I was shown the classics like “Fleetwood Mac” and the “Eagles” by my Mom. She would gift me “AC/DC”, “Jimi Hendrix”, and “Black Sabbath” CD’s that were instrumental soundtracks for me as I approached my teen years.  

I tended to connect with the outcast kids from an early age even though on the surface I certainly was not. I remember as a child having guest speakers come into my Elementary School. They were almost always writers. These were my favorite days. I was enamored with the stories these Writers could create. Listening to them speak about their lives was a story in and of itself. It took years later to realize I also wanted to be a storyteller. I enjoyed reading. The “Magic Tree House” series was my entry into a love of stories. Later on “The Giver”, “Watership Down”, and “The Glass Castle” all made a notable impact upon me.

My Mom and Stepfather would divorce around age 11 the same time I got my first real guitar. I lived between family, friends and my Mom during this time. This was also around the time a friend showed me “Princess Mononoke” in its original Japanese version. It is, to this day, one the most profound experiences of my life.

As I approached “teenage hood”, I began to become obsessed with the great musicians and their stories. I watched “School of Rock” a minimum of 5 times a week for a month straight to get through the 6th grade. As a teenager I was pulled to the heavier side of music particularly hard rock/metal.  It expressed my feelings of isolation and the trauma I was going through with my mom in and out of rehab and my anti-social disorders surfacing. My best friend became Music. 

I remember my Mom surprised me after a baseball game, by taking me and my friends to see “Eric Clapton”. My first concert ever. “Layla” was the first rock song I ever fell in love with. A few years later she would take me to my first metal concert where we both sat in the upper decks of “House of Blues” and I got to see my favorite band, “Trivium”, who blasted us with songs about Greek Mythology and Ancient Japanese Lore accompanied by progressive musical compositions, shredding guitars and vocal screaming.

During high school I started to isolate myself and became an outcast and wallflower. I developed a dissociation disorder specifically de-personalization while experiencing a panic attack after smoking weed. Most of high school I spent days silent, avoiding verbal communication, and nights and weekends isolating myself in my room watching the great rockstars and playing guitar covers of the bands I loved. This was also the time my mom showed me films like “Pulp Fiction”, “Amadeus”, and “Dead Poet’s Society”. Film and Music were an escape, but it was also a much-needed connection to the world I felt I couldn’t get any other way. 

This angst never really went away but college presented new opportunities. I was blessed to be sent to Baylor by my Dad who has been a constant financial support in my life. During this time, I was introduced to film and other genres of music such as hip-hop, soul, psychedelic, shoegaze, ambient, and later jazz, classical, folk, and blues…

“Apocalypse Now”, “A Space Odyssey”, “Blow Up”, “Blade Runner”, and “Laurence of Arabia”, were all extremely instrumental films I saw during this time. Later on after college, I would see “Stalker” by Tarkovsky which changed the way I viewed film entirely.

I was able to do an internship program through Baylor my junior year in college where I lived in New York for 6 months as I interned for a Casting agency, “Untitled Entertainment”. I read scripts most days, some days going to get groceries for the office. During this time, I became more and more obsessed with the 27 club.

The 27 club always had an impact on me. I associated it with “Rockstardum” and liberation as a kid. I am prone to the superstitious and was entranced with the mythology of the artists who died before their time or perhaps on time. As I grew older my own superstitions started to reveal themselves and the 27 club became more of an omen. I fell deep into obsession with the likes of Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse and Robert Johnson. What I feel with all these artists is that deep beneath the aesthetics they are singing the blues. They were birthed out of their time and simultaneously revolutionized their own time. Perhaps they were also outcasts and rose to the occasion to find a connection with the world around them. They simultaneously had the ability to wake people up and bring people together…

After graduating Baylor in the winter of 2017, I spent most of my early twenties smoking weed, going inward, feeling liberated then coming to a point where the liberation was a false sense of freedom. Death, addiction, loneliness, purposelessness were all my thoughts became.

LIQUID LADY

As I was approaching my own 27th birthday, feeling purposeless, I felt a pull to make a change in my life.

This is around the time I met Alejandro. Our first official hang out session was spent watching “Mirror” by Andrei Tarkovsky, both of us bewildered and captivated by the possibilities of cinema.

Alejandro would approach me in the Summer of 2021 with the raw idea of a cowboy musician who went to the strip club which eventually set the backbone for what Liquid Lady would become. I naturally latched onto the music idea, and we began writing together.

Although Liquid Lady started as an homage to our mutual obsessions, the film grew and became something more distinctive as Alejandro and I integrated our personal experiences into the writing. We spent about 8 months writing together, often calling each other nightly for up to 3-hour conversations. 

Most of the music I composed for the Desert section of Liquid Lady occurred in the Winter/Spring of 2022. Although I had written music throughout my life it was the first time I had ever attempted recording music. The music was roughly mixed, and my metal roots blended into a dark ambient, Brian Eno, “On Land” sort of dystopia, which I called The Venus Fix. A few pieces from this album would be reimagined and utilized in Liquid Lady.  

During Liquid Lady our mutually ambitious natures were met with the practicality and realism of filmmaking. The essential question that would be posed during the Production process was, “How do we create what has been written down into reality?” I learned quickly what our restrictions were from trial and error. Problem solving was the method used to accomplish most of the creative ideas we came up with.

A lot of the Desert became improvisation. What we wrote became unobtainable and the Desert became emptier that either of us had imagined. Two other characters was all Aaron was going to get in his Desert journey. The loneliness was apt. 

Miguel, played by Romario Solis and Andrea “the Shaman” or “Pacha Mama” played by Andrea Pister, two friends from Alejandro’s acting class he had the tact to cast as the subsequent parts. The suit Romario wore in the Desert was entirely Romario’s idea. Most of the time in the Desert was Romario, Alejandro, and myself driving in my 2020 Nissan Rogue. Many nights were spent camping out in a tent to save money. 

During a hiatus period while filming the Desert, I turned 27 and got spend that time in L.A. with my two best friends and the love of my life, Jesiah.

After the Dune’s Romario and Alejandro pulled an “all-nighter” trading driving duties to get us to Arizona the next morning where we stumbled upon the “Saguaro Cacti”. A total accident. One of many.

Filming was the highest of highs I had ever experienced as an artist. I learned to rely upon instinct and faith and gained an immense amount confidence and the ability to make decisions which were qualities I lacked before. I even learned how to start being okay with making mistakes, although I am still extremely difficult on myself. Without those things I could never have gotten through the process. That’s where the story of Aaron became not about a 27 musician but simultaneously a grounding and personal spiritual journey.

After returning from the Desert, Editing didn’t begin for a few months. We needed to reshoot much of Galveston as I realized the original footage didn’t hold up to the rest of what we shot at this point. We wrapped production in September/ October of 2022.

In total we had shot about 50 hours of footage and would later be met with a 3 hour movie by the end of its first assembly. 

I had the intention of finishing the film before I turned 28. Something became certain through the process was that I needed to kill off the darker superstitions within me.

In the winter of 2022, I got a call that my Mom had fallen and was in the ICU.  Hell froze over in Fort Worth and after 12 days of being in and out of consciousness my Mother passed. I was faced with the task of handling of my Mother’s estate. Simultaneously I was faced with editing Liquid Lady as we didn’t have any budget left to hire an editor. Naturally my Mom’s passing and Liquid Lady bled into each other. My work became part of the grieving process and I felt things I didn’t know I needed to feel through my time with Liquid Lady; Constantly interacting with a story that was written before she passed that contained strange omens about what I was going to experience.

Ruby de la Rosa was a great help during the editing period. There were many hiatus periods where I needed to step away from the film and Ruby took over the project. She created some amazing sequences, my personal favorite being the “Pool Gamble”.

In January of 2024 we showed Liquid Lady to a private audience including cast, crew, and family at the Alamo Drafthouse in Houston. It was a wonderful celebration of the hard work everyone contributed to the film.

After a few months of meditating on where Liquid Lady was, I decided there needed to be changes to the final sequence of the film.

After over a year of editing Liquid Lady was completed in May of 2024.

Liquid Lady is the first true statement I’ve made as an artist. What I tried to achieve was having as little separation between my style and myself therefore the aesthetic perspective being a total extension of my emotional perspective on these subjects of isolation, trauma, addiction, and spiritual growth.   Liquid Lady was the process of learning who I am as an artist and the through that discovery I learned more about my purpose here.

I am eternally grateful to the everyone involved in this project. I hope when people experience the film it allows them to heal through the darkness as it did and continues to do for me. Peace and Love.

-Jim “Austin” Wadkins