Article written about me and Abandonedmuse.com
Tanya Diaz, Abandoned Muse
Miami-based Tanya Diaz owns a website called AbandonedMuse.com. It’s a place where she posts up her own films, photographs, and documentaries about abandoned cemeteries, hotels, and anywhere else that has been derelict, neglected, or cast off. Diaz is also a strong voice in Latina filmmaking and photography, which comprises a small corner of the horror filmmaking world to begin with. Add in that she’s a woman and you have a filmmaker with a seriously untouchable niche. She directed a short horror film called El Meido: The Elevator, which you can catch as our featured short film on Pretty/Scary, as well as the documentaries Ramada and Cemetery. She used her videography skills to assist in shooting The Box, a horror film out this year, and she has cornered the market on making the creepy and lonely utterly beautiful….
Abandoned Muse started out as a project to film abandoned places all throughout Miami. I am a curious cat. I like to live life like one huge adventure so exploring is a natural part of me. I had always loved to be in places I wasn't supposed to go. So when an ex boyfriend turned me on to photographing these places and showed me what URBAN EXPLORATION was it was only natural to make it part of me. I am the type of person that is always looking for places to explore. I will always just stop my car and go into a place that looks deserted or a piece of woods that looks unexplored. I know the strangest, coolest places in Miami and I frequently trade places with friends and new acquaintances and they give me their spots to explore and I give them mine.
The word ABANDONED is the pervading theme of Diaz’s personal work.
Abandoned means haunting and beautiful. I love just first going in there and the minute I step in I take a huge breath. This might sound weird but I love the way abandoned places smell. It is seductive to me. It is always so silent except for a few creaks and clacks and it just really takes my breath away. Most of the first places I went to I went alone, after me and my ex broke up and it felt almost like a meditation. When I would go with him he would order me to not go here or there and to be careful yadda yadda and when I first went alone it was almost as if I had found peace. Peace from the city and people and cars. I had found a hideaway. Sometimes I just sit and look around before taking a single photograph because I want to absorb it all and feel it all. I try to imagine how it looked and who was walking there before. To me an abandoned place is like walking into a dream.
Abandoned Hotel is a documentary, like all of Diaz’s documentaries that showcases the silent beauty that people just can’t bring to a setting.
Abandoned Hotel, that is a small project I filmed with someone's old 8mm digital video camera. I went in there and filmed and photographed a hotel that had been in Miami Beach for a few decades. It was such a great experience. We went in there two days straight. Nancy, Lexie and Janet and I made up the girl crew. It was really interesting being able to walk around such an enormous structure without being caught. I was able to go into drawers with pictures and found numerous artifacts of the former employees. It was very haunting though. The later it would get the creepier it would feel and at about 9 pm we all decided to get the hell out of there. We had been there from about 3 pm. One of the weirdest things was that the electricity was still working so all the elevators were on and so were the lobby lights that would cast an eerie pink glow after the sun had set. Also the employee area was all the way down in the basement and there were no windows to the outside and only 1 door to get in and out. So filming in there was a bit crazy. All of a sudden I remember I was filming something and Nancy decides to turn a monitor of a computer on and the thing lights up! It looked like the matrix screen just sending weird words up and down the screen. That was so crazy! It was one of the most interesting things I caught on tape. Also it’s interesting to note that two weeks after, they started gutting the building...So if I had gone when I did I would have never gotten anything. I went in after and the construction workers had thrown everything out.
When can we see Abandoned Hotel in its entirety?
It gonna take a while for me to finish editing that one 1) because I haven't found the right music for it and 2) because of THE BLACK BOX and STRANDED...but it will be up by the end of the year. I also have another abandoned documentary about a mental hospital we found. But I haven't gotten around to doing anything for it yet.
The Black Box and Stranded are other projects Diaz is currently working on.
The Box is the brainchild of my fiancé Jose. The first day I met him he told me the story and I found it fascinating. So I became the director of photography and I started helping him edit the story. I also produced it and casted it. It was a mission! But it was so much fun! It has taken months of work and scheduling for 6 shoot days but its finished. It should be about 25-20 minutes long.
The Black Box is about a postman who finds a mysterious box. He starts
Believing its Pandora's box and the cause of the world's
Problems (wars, murders, etc...). At the end he figures out that the box
was his own excuse for blaming the world for his own inner demons.
Stranded was actually someone else's story. Jose was the videographer for it back when it was called 2 Coconuts. The first story was about two people stranded on two separate islands and they are communicating though a bottle. Then the bottle breaks and they get rescued END OF STORY. LOL!!! Jose helped the guy cause he was an old friend but we all thought the plot was a bit lacking to say the least. I was helping him on it and we had done about 4 shoot days when the director decided he wanted to go do something else and dumped it on Jose. Jose is a great storyteller so he totally flipped the script and made it a story about dreams and the collective unconscious. Now it takes a turn when the bottle breaks. The male character decides to try and meditate after exhausting himself trying to find other ways of communication and he finds the female in a dream. They discover they can communicate now in dreams but by the fourth dream she is being rescued and she has to make the choice between going back and looking disfigured or staying with the male in the dream world forever. I ended up shooting it all over and we got a new actress (Claudia) cause the old one didn't like latex on her face. And throughout the whole thing we had formerly filmed she looked like she had just come from a day in Miami Beach...not stranded for weeks on an island.
How was the experience of working on a bigger shoot, and on something that wasn’t her own project?
[On Abandoned] the filming went pretty well. It took us 4 days and things went pretty smooth. At the last minute a whole bunch of people came and helped us out and it was great! I had about 15 people walking around my house. We had beer, drinks, food and candy all over the place!!
We had to totally turn my whole house upside down to film it. My mom was SUPPOSED TO GO TO THE BEACH THAT WEEKEND and she was never able to, so, she ended up being there the whole time watching her house get turned upside-down (my mom is a clean FREAK). In one of the scenes it was so funny because her room was the supposed "KILLING ROOM” and Chad (the lead actor) kept opening the door and screaming "oh my god" or something like that and so my mom started laughing and in one scene we have her laughing saying "I AM NOT THAT UGLY!" LOL!
Also she says she felt like in prison cause she would turn on the TV and we would make her turn it off, the phone would ring and we would make her hang up 'cause her Cuba voice would travel way too far, the lights had to be turned off so she couldn't read...LOL we drove her crazy!
Most of the actors got a horror photo shoot out of it too. While some were getting their makeup done we got the lights and got some crazy shots of all their makeup work. Needless to say all their main photos are up on myspace as them dead! LOL
How does she see her job as a photographer?
Photography is also something I have done for a long time. I still have old photographs I shot when I was 8! LOL! I used to photograph nature and people before until my friend (ex boyfriend) turned me on to photographing abandoned locations. The difference between his art and mine is that he would normally take pictures with flash and most of his photographs don't look like anything. Then again he had just started taking photographs. I took his idea and I decided to use manual exposure and use different colored lights and also I tried to really keep in mind the composition and story telling aspect of the photograph. So not only does it take you and show you the place but also you feel the ambiance and the people that used to be there and can imagine the places how they were before. I want to capture the haunting feelings I get when I go into one of these places. It is like a rush. There is one place that felt completely haunted. It’s the ABANDONED HOUSE I put up in the Images area. We had to crow bar our way in. But when I got inside the feeling was really intense. I don't know how to describe it. It definitely felt as if we were being watched. My friend Mike and I spent the day in there and we explored every piece of it and what we found was pretty crazy. There had been stories that a man had killed his wife and two daughters there and then shot himself and what we found were random girl clothing and dolls ...All girl things. Also it looked like it had been abandoned in Christmas time cause there was a small tree still on the floor. It had a piano and an organ and my friend started playing it and it was so beautiful. It was a really intense adventure and when we walked out of there I felt almost as if I could breathe normal again. The footage of the place is all messed up because I felt so wired while I was in there that all the video footage came out shaky.
Diaz is heavily involved in the Miami independent filmmaking world.
Besides doing photography and filming short movies I am also the event coordinator for INDIE CLUB MIAMI and we host nights once a month here in So. Fla. where local filmmakers can showcase their new work. Kinda like an open mic night but for films. This month will be our 6-month doing this and we are really excited about continuing to offer this to local filmmakers. Everything is free for everyone
And, of course, there’s more to Diaz than just her films and photography. Everyone has to chill and live like a normal human being, even if they’re not a normal human being.
I am 29-year-old filmmaker/photographer.... I love traveling and I have lived in a few places...I basically decided around 25 I wanted to get the hell out of Miami and I did...I lived for 6 months in CR working in a hotel as a tour guide for the waterfalls and the canopy rides...and 9 months in NYC. When I am not traveling I am sticking my nose into places I am not supposed to be and I find crazy places in So. FLa. If it looks boarded and deserted I want to be inside. LOL I love taking walks around my crazy neighborhood going on train tracks and following them to wherever they go.
heidi
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