While we all have big dreams that we hope to achieve in the future, we typically don’t think about achieving them while still in college. Three Point Park sophomores, Dan Helbling, Alden Roth, and Mike Cooknick, had a dream of traveling, and they weren’t going to waste any time. The best part? They are turning their cross-country road trip (completed just after their freshman year of college) into a documentary to share with the world: The Whole DAM Nation! Her Campus Point Park’s Nikki Kalafatis decided to get the scoop on their upcoming film, and what it was like to explore some of the greatest destinations in America.
Photos by Lexie Mikula
NK: What exactly is your documentary about?
Mike: “Our documentary is about three college guys, who don’t really do much, deciding to do something really big and drive across the country in sort of this old-fashion style in that we leave modern technology behind and we use manual maps and just drive out with the sole purpose of seeing what’s out there for ourselves. We hear from people older than us how great road trips are, and we see on TV how wonderful the country is, but you get to this point that you just want to leave home. I think every teenager gets to that point that you just want to leave and get the hell out and go and see something. That’s what we did, and that’s what the movie’s about.”
NK: What prompted you guys to go on the trip?
Dan: “I came across a picture when I was on stumbleupon.com, and it was of the Salt Flats in Utah and when I saw it, I told [Alden], “Dude, this is awesome! I want to go there!” We had talked about travelling… We had been friends for a month and I showed him and he said, “Let’s make it a trip, let’s go this summer.” We decided to take Mike, and shook hands. At that point, all we were going to do was go to the Salt Flats, and it just continued to snowball from there and turned into the trip that it is.”
M: “I knew that Dan and Alden were doing it for whatever reasons early on, and I wasn’t invited until maybe two months into planning. I was just helping them plan because I thought it was funny. In fact, there were points when I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m just helping these guys so let’s find some really weird places for them to go to.’ But they asked me to go because they needed somebody to shoot it, when they decided they wanted to make it a movie. And for me, the reason I really wanted to go was because I was taking History of International Cinema and seeing all these really impressive places around the world, I thought it would be really cool to go to these places. But at the same time, I had just taken History of American Cinema the semester before and in the back of my head I had all of these western movies and where they were shot. I thought that going out west would be a good start to see the places that I see in the movies and start experiencing them on my own.”
NK: Was it difficult getting started?
Alden: “Well we each worked our own jobs over the summer-“
D: “Which was about a grand each, so it was a good chunk.”
A: “Yeah, and then we had our Kickstarter, and for a while I think we all thought it was going to fail. For the first two weeks, we didn’t even break a thousand dollars, and then, out of nowhere, we got a $1,200 donation and then people were just kind of like, ‘Oh, these guys are serious!’ So then after that, every day it would go up a couple hundred dollars and then it just went way over.”
M: “To get started, it was relieving because we planned it based on what we really wanted to do, kind of like ‘the trip of your dreams’, and whatever it amounts to, we’ll do it. Then when we started talking money, we worked to try to get the cost down to something feasible and doable and Kickstarter-able. I think because we let ourselves follow our dreams, as cliché as that sounds, it was easy because we already knew what we wanted to do.”
NK: How long did it last?
D: “It was a 25 day trip until we got to Texas.”
A: “Yeah, [the trip started on the 23rd of June and] we got to Dallas on the 17th of July, and then we got home on the 21st.”
NK: What was it like being with each other 24/7 for that long? Did you guys ever get on each others’ nerves?
D: “We absolutely got on each others’ nerves.”
A: “Well Mike’s an awful driver to start with.”
D: “Oh god, he’s terrible. And he’ll defend himself ‘til his death, too.”
*in a separate interview with Mike:
M: “I wouldn’t say I’m a bad driver, I was just under a lot of pressure from them and I hadn’t slept. But it’s not really me to blame- it’s really them. I felt really pressured to change lanes and move around these cars on roads I’ve never experienced. At one point we were driving and I was so hungry and Alden tried feeding me this candy bar while we are in rush hour traffic going into St. Louis. On the left of me is the barrier because I’m in the fast lane on the right of me is this huge truck full of hay or something and I’m just trying to eat…that was bad, we almost died. A couple of times we were driving, we almost died. But at the same time, I know that those were just flukes. We would have almost died if any of them were driving. So I thought, for the benefit of the group I will take a leave from driving.”
A: “For me, I had gone on a road trip before, so I guess I expected everybody to go on a road trip the same way, and right away I learned that that’s not the case. So we had to compromise on things and make it so that we all had a good time. We got in big fights about food, but in the end we were all still friends, if not closer friends than how we started.”
D: “After 25 days, you never realize how close you can get with someone and it’s pretty cool because the way it feels now, no matter how much we’ve drifted apart just from this school year—because school gets busy—I still feel very comfortable just talking to them about anything. We spent 24 hours a day, for 25 days straight together, so if I haven’t pissed them off yet, then I don’t think I can…I think this production we made created a really strong bond between us.”
NK: What was your favorite place that you guys visited?
A: “My favorite was Zion National Park in Utah. It was the first week of July and it was over 100 degrees and we were all just in a horrible mood. We met this girl on the trail that said we needed to check out the Narrows which is this trail that goes into the river and you can just walk up the river. So we ended up spending a lot more time at Zion than we had planned, but the river was amazing and perfect for a 100 degree day.”
D: “Mine was also in Utah at Arches National Park. I’ve just never seen rocks look like that and it was astounding. There are a lot more breathtaking things, but that was the most interesting to me.”
M: “Zion National Park because, unlike the Grand Canyon where you are on top of the canyon looking down, you start from the bottom of the canyon and look up. So instead of walking around the rim of the canyon in the desert, you’re down literally walking through a river. Now this river is only ankle-deep to knee-deep, but it’s cool and refreshing water. You’re looking up and occasionally you’ll see this little waterfall and you can just stand under it. I don’t know how tall it was upwards, but it was just a vertical cliff. There were tons of hikers along the path, so it didn’t look like a picture where there was nobody there, but it was still kind of cool because you got to meet all kinds of people. It was like the coolest pool party you’ll ever go to.”
NK: What was your favorite memory from the trip?
D: “You’ll never see this in the documentary because we shut the cameras off because we made it a point to. We were in Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve and there was this mountain that we walked up that we called Swiss Miss Mountain, and we got all our shots and I was doing something and they told me to come here. They were sitting under this tree and it was the only shade on top of the mountain and we were just looking over flat Idaho, and we decided to just shut off the cameras and take a while to sit there and not have technology and just really talk.”
A: “I’ll just say ditto.”
M: “I’m never going to forget breaking down in Death Valley. I’ll just paraphrase because you have to see the movie, but I will say that our car just stopped, wouldn’t turn over or do anything at sea level in Death Valley. In fact, there’s a picture on our Facebook of the sea level sign that we took because we were stuck there. “
A: “The best part about any kind of trip you go on is when you not only learn something about yourself but the people you’re with, and that was the entire trip because we were constantly learning what our limits were and what each other’s limits were and how to find a happy medium.”
NK: How is the film coming along?
A: “We hit a lot of speed bumps at the beginning of the editing process. For a while, one terabyte out of the six terabytes of footage we had was corrupt and we could not access any of it at all. So it took about two months to save all of that. Then I started importing and editing the six terabytes of footage and learned that Adobe Premiere has this thing called ‘memory leak’ where when you import footage, it accesses bits of your memory and revokes your right access to it. So after importing six terabytes of footage, 200 gigabytes from my hard drive were gone, and I had no free space on my MacBook. And then I was editing one day at home and there was a power outage, so I lost everything that I did that day. But since we have gotten back to school,
I’ve been pretty busy just getting back in the groove of things. I’ve had a couple chances to edit here and there but after this week I’ll know what my schedule will be like and I’ll be able to just hammer it out hopefully by the end of February.”
D: “We are hoping to have at least a rough cut by the end of February, because our original goal was to have [the final product] out by the end of February but then we realized, why rush it? It’s definitely coming along and we are planning on having our screening in the spring. The ball is starting to roll.”
NK: Would you ever do it again?
D: “Hell yeah.”
A: “Yeah, of course.”
M: “Yes, I would absolutely do it again, however I would change it up. I wouldn’t do it exactly the same way again. We didn’t really bring any food with us, nor did we bring any money so we really didn’t eat very much. We ate about the normal amount that a person should eat maybe three times on the whole trip. Most nights we shared a can of corn between the three of us, which was good and bad; good because we really got to know each other and bad because we really got to know each other. But also good because we really got to know people in America and how generous people are. We would have starved had it not been for people being nice and giving us food. I don’t think I would do that aspect of it again, because I know the outcome of it. I think I would try to travel the cheapest, not so much eat the cheapest. Maybe not have money for gas at every moment and see if we can get gas from people, or see if we can stay places. Having the confidence and the experience of going out on one trip already, I would change the challenge, but definitely do it again.”
NK: Is there anything else you’d like to say about The Whole DAM Nation?
D: “The only thing I can say is it’s going to be really hard to top the trip of a lifetime, considering I did it when I was 19, but I’m up for the challenge.”
A: “Samuel Fuller once said, ‘Young people, if you want to understand America, get off your asses and go see it for yourselves! It’s a big breathtaking place!’ and that just sums up our entire experience.”
M: “At this point, we’re not doing it for ourselves; we’re doing it for everyone else. I think somewhere, I felt that. I felt that more than any other feeling I’ve ever felt. I felt I wasn’t doing this for my own experience; I was doing this to show other people what it is like to experience things. And once I embraced that I’m sort of the guinea pig of this, the trip became so much easier because it became so much more real. It was easier to show ourselves and express ourselves through what we were doing. I guess what I’m trying to say is come out and support us, not because we want your support, but because we honestly want people to see this movie. We don’t want people to see this movie to make us money or make us famous. We want everyone to know what we have learned through this trip.”
- You can watch the official trailer for The Whole DAM Nation on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1TgGQWf45w
- And be sure to like their Facebook page for updates on the project here: https://www.facebook.com/TheWholeDamNation
The spring screening will be announced in the near future, so check back with their updates and Her Campus Point Park’s Events page to find out when!