Blog Post #287: Gabriel Rhenals on 'Flush'!

To celebrate the release of three new episodes of 'Flush' this week on YouTube, I am sharing this brand new essay exploring various facets of the series:

INTRODUCTION

A total of six episodes of my series Flush will soon be playing for free on my Reveu YouTube channel (three are currently available). The first three episodes were released at the end of April and three new episodes release this Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. But what is Flush? Flush is a dramatic (though not without a pinch of humor), micro-budget series exploring themes of sexual desire and temptation - with a moral dimension. The series relies heavily on suggestion and implication; never gratuitous or explicit. Episodic in nature, each entry in the catalog exists as its own separate yarn in service of an ambition to build out a massive ecosystem of these mini-narratives. With that said, the remainder of this essay will address the origin and nature of Flush.

ORIENTATION

On Valentine's Day 2025, I shared a short poem on social media in which I came out as asexual. If you weren't aware, asexuality is a sexual orientation characterized by the experience of little or no sexual attraction to others. Despite the immediate assumption of many, asexuality does not mean a lack of sexual imagination or functioning. Following puberty, I knew my experience was markedly different from my peers. However, I did not have the guidance and resources to definitively assess why this was the case. Only after so many years of denial and confusion, I finally understood and accepted my identity. And it wasn't long before I began thinking about a way I could harness the mix of emotions endemic to my peculiar perspective as well as the intriguing tension between the aesthetic and experiential nature of sexuality. It was under these auspices that Flush was born!

MATRICULATION

All Flush episodes begin with a brief preface consisting of three gradually appearing statements. "Where there is infinite explicitude... a little modesty" is intended to prepare the viewer for the lack of explicit or graphic content where it is easily offered elsewhere. "Where there is endless quantity... a brief offering" helps set the stage for the abbreviated length of each episode amid a saturated mediascape. And lastly, "Where there is moral certainty... a wee doubt" invites the suggestion that there may be a chink in the armor somewhere and this series recognizes it. By virtue of the soundtrack, the preface also serves to establish a grave tone to the proceedings; akin to encountering a deeply recessed inner sanctum.

EXPERIMENTATION

As Flush was developed in the immediate wake of my 4th feature film Ask Delphi, it inherited some of that film's experimental formal features, namely a disregard for continuity editing and a metrical scheme dictating no scenes longer than a quarter of a script page. So long as the episodes are bound by erotic themes, the series can invite any newfound narrative, technical, formal and collaborative ideas. Furthermore, a noteworthy feature I'm intent on implementing more often is soliciting the series' cinematographer, sound man, composer or acting talent for bold challenges in the work they would find professionally fulfilling to accomplish and include in a given episode. With Flush, the sky is the limit!

COLLABORATION

My collaboration on Flush with cinematographer Matthew Gonsalves and sound man Kevin Caicedo represents the first time I've worked with a dedicated technical crew on any of my productions over 24 years in filmmaking. And the experience thus far couldn't be more blissful, brotherly and brisk! Matthew is reserved but masterful while Kevin is good-humored and diligent. Rounding out the recurring talents involved on the series is Ben Morris, my go-to composer for 14 years and counting. He is the ultimate translator of my often nebulous ideas into concrete musical form. With a crew like this, I may never return to one-man band operation unless I'm severely pressed to do so!

CATEGORIZATION

Shortly after completing what I initially considered the singular pilot episode of Flush ("Episode 001: The Ranch"), I decided to produce two more episodes to realize what I thought would be a much more effective pilot trilogy of installments. However, these episodes would need to be a bit less logistically complex than the first owing to budgetary constraints; meaning fewer actors and locations. So, I derived the idea of major (E001) and minor episodes (E002 and E003). But after completing these first three episodes, I settled on the idea for a new, third category which would facilitate the ability for me to stay productive on my own at a far lower or even nil expense. This is where the idea of micro episodes (E004-006) was born. With these three classes of episodes configured, I can now contribute to the series in a much more flexible capacity as dictated by any quantity of time and money available. A promising development!

CONCLUSION

To wrap up, I've always seen Flush as a life-long project of limitless quantity. This is why the episode numbering format allots for a reach into the hundreds! With the built-in levers for experimentation, collaboration and scalability, I expect this series will keep me preoccupied for a very long time. In fact, I've said on numerous occasions that I wouldn't mind making Flush my creative life's magnum opus! Moreover, the relatively spare demand on time and resources (the major and minor episodes have been one-day shoots and only a few hundred dollars each), may encourage a potential artist or creative to launch a similar enterprise when all they have are weekends available to them. Setting such an example has been a scratch I've been meaning to itch for a very long time! Finally, Flush also allows me to relish a greater immediacy in realizing an idea; a characteristic I felt I lost when I began producing feature films in 2018 and even some short films before then. In many ways, these bite-sized works allow me to return to my roots.

Home again.

You can find all episodes of 'Flush' on the Reveu YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@reveullc