Festival

http://www.selectmediafestival.org/index.html

Cool festival features the yes men, tim and eric, eric fensler among others.

Crunkadunkedalorusaurush

I spent the whole cucalorus festival cucalorusing and recovering from cucalorusing. I'm somewhat screwed for the next week or so because of it, but so it goes and I'll stand by that as an acceptable trade off. I had no choice as one who takes advantage of opportunity but to take advantage of the opportunity to see what's out there in festival world, meet filmmakers, hang out with them and fellow film majors and drink drink drink the heavenly bounty of free beer. There was a little bit of bad vibes on the beer front; a friend of mine who worked at jengos, not joselyn, was stressed about the apparent dearth of it. There was a point at jengo's where I was denied it (rudely) because I wasn't a filmmaker even though I had a short in visions and my bumper played and I helped with ichthyopolis. I just didn't get a filmmaker pass. I thought this pretty absurd given the jengos situation I have come to be very comfortable with. I understand there were less sponsors but the glut of alcohol later that night showed me that booze really wasn't that scarce. Anyways, I got my drink on just fine and everything was crunk and dandy.

I saw a lot of films as well. Some favorites were Wesley Willis's Joyrides, Los Cronocrimenes, Shotgun Stories, Absurdistan, and Lightning Salad Moving Picture. I liked the Superkiiids presence at Cucalorus and Cucalorus' presence in their film (LightSalMovPic). They introduced several movies that I saw: Joyrides, Shotgun Stories, Absurdistan. Their tent outside of Thalien was pretty funny. They gave me and my friend a ride to Jengo's. And I liked seeing the guitar guy and an actual cucalorus in their film, along with all the familiar wilmington faces. Lightsalmovpic was pretty absurd but it was consistently A.D.D. in a way that worked. It was like a buddy comedy narrative built out of Stella-esque sketches. The machine gun sounds in the laundry room fight sent me into fits of gigglage.

Self - Portrait

The self - portrait is a great assignment because of its openness and the inherent desire to do well on a presentation of self. My mental draft had several phases. Initially I was going to do a grotesque/awesome long slow motion take of me naked dancing with a ridiculous prosthetic wing wang. This represents sarcasm, bombast, fun, and expressionism. I wish I did that. I was going to be butt naked with boots and goggles and fingerless gloves on a smokey field. However, my original idea of a meat filled magnum condom was bunk and I didn't have time to drive to south carolina for smoke bombs and the immense quantity of other projects really boxed me in so I was working with facebook pictures to create something. I was working a lot in photoshop trying to make an animation almost since i have almost 800 facebook pictures. I somehow did not anticipate how much time this would take. Not only did it take a lot of time to cut out the pictures and arrange them but I had a lot of trouble sequencing them the way I wanted to. This was the second botched idea, even more of a loss because it was a massive waste of precious time. I did use a little bit of the effort in my final though. My finished self portrait is a sort of understated comment on myself and the working process perhaps, I've commented enough about it I think in the self evaluation. It didn't have the same technical length of effort as other projects, but I think it has an aesthetic, it is cohesive, and I would include it on my reel because it is different from anything I've really seen before whether in this case it is percieved negatively or positively.

ElectroReggaeJam is essential for extraterrestrials

In the future, aliens will descend upon this planet in their metallic rotating station wagons. They will have one goal. To find the funk.

Our aliens were two different colors, and they were best buds, which means that in space there might not be racism.

Anyways, the shoot was plenty of fun. I was reticent wave around my directorial muscle ;-) around too much, so the crew positions weren't set in stone, especially mine. I agree with Dylan, Jordan is an organized lady, and responsible for having the juggling gypsy as our base of operations. Even though we were at times half naked, or dressed like ladies and whatnot, it wasn't much of a big deal. Pretty standard gypsy fair. I'd imagine that if you were trying to book a show at the gypsy and they asked what you sounded like, and you said pretty weird, they'd probably say OK. Side not: $2.50 for a tall boy is always worth it.

I was really worried about the costumes for a bit. There was another costume that a friend said that I could used, but then our shoot date moved and he was using it for something else if you'd believe it. It was just a purple sand bucket with a square eyehole that he wore a black "invisible man/grim reaper" hood under with a green robe. Very good alien. But ours came out well. Bags over our heads is looooow budget, but I think it effectively created the impression of an alien, at least a campy b-grade one. As a director I was firm in that we needed to obscure the faces of the aliens. I hope we successfully revealed the fact that the aliens had human skin color backs.

I really can't believe that we got the concert footage. It was so hectic for a while. I was trying to direct through a throng of people with a bag over my head. I know a bartender there which helped because I'd met the manager through her. Everyone seemed pretty amused by us. I got my butt pinched. I pinched back. All was well.

I lost my phone though.....

Le MicrocEnema

I wholeheartedly support this sort of decentralized, community based, DIY idea of film. If mainstream film is the lowest common denominator, then art film is often on stilts. Academia, cinerati, the intellectual elite have the means to stamp their favorites with a merit badge. This is the ticket to get on the stilt. Look at them up there. Their almost as tall as the giant blobs of money that explode through Mayfaire and whatnot. Microcinema are shrubs (youtube is grass). Fertile bushes that aren't so proud. Many of them are free, free, free. Thats great great great. We fest is $1 and that actually might be even better.

I've wanted to start little film events for me and my friends sometime. Hopefully when I get a house next year there will be high enough ceilings and I can get a projector and have one or two screenings a week. Probably just movies that I will want to watch. They tend to be hits among my specific demographic niche. Magnolia, Holy Mountain, Gummo, and Cronenberg's Crash are recent living room hits. I foresee a Rush Hour marathon. Russ and Dylan have people over every thurday for Its always sunny in philadelphia which is MicroTV i guess.

My career in film worries my. My concern is that I am not at present a strident individual charging straight at a goal. I'm more of a meanderer. I realize I am more of a community guy. I like having control of my own things, but i also like working on others things, acting and whatnot, not having the stressful job of organization. Austin or New York sound great for the kind of organic creative community work I would like to do. Getting more involved in the film community will help more than working on hollywood productions. I'm not going to work up from boom micist to director, I'm just going to make my own films but in the meantime there needs to some money making. Microcinema, or at least alternative theaters or film festivals seem like perfect venues for this, the perfect environment with the perfect fertilizer.

Proj 1 Response

I wasn't the biggest fan of this project. I mean, it was pretty fun in some ways. Taking pictures and collecting sounds. The technical hangups were a pain in the ass, but so it goes and I can't really complain. I thought that the soundscape and the video were pretty tedious. But this is biased and irrelevant, because my lack of expertise made me work slow, which contributes to tediousness blah blah blah. It was hard to be so abstract. I guess it made it easier and harder. I was lost in someways, since it was so experimental and it pretty much didn't matter what I did, but that freed me up to basically make scratches on the page, just doodle along. I made some pretty good subjective connections I think, Like the beams and the semicircles and railroads conflicting and colliding with the plane noise, and the chain link fence and building rubbing against each other with the metal rattle of the bike chain. I just wish it hadn't taken so long, or at least if we had gotten to control our own segment from start to finish instead of working with random peoples random work.

Self-Portrait Idea

I think distraction will be the theme of my self portrait. Distraction and procrastination, and then also my better side. My work habits are pretty manic and I have no way of planning my time, because even setting aside time is no assurance. I have myriad mental blocks against doing work ahead of time and in a timely matter. Often it seems the only solution is staying up all night the night before. Pressure is the only thing that can keep me focused but even then I take numerous side routes and wikipedia binges. But when I know how to do something or if it isn't required I need no prompting at all. I don't know what I'm going to do with myself in the long run.

ANYWAYS, I want to try do something with this. I'm thinking a segment of time lapse pacing in my apartment. Maniacal laughter.
This negative side of my personality shouldn't be the only thing in focus, so I guess this will only be one layer.

Light Journals.

From this window, that lamp appears to have a ghostly double coyly peeking out from behind it. The window has tiny raindrops trapped in the screen and tiny dirt smudges that make it seem as if the light itself, hot and wood colored, were made of particles and splatters. The wet sidewalk looks like silvery alloy, which perhaps changes colors in certain lights. The water puddles and the distance and angle make it look distinctly curved, like the brass on a trumpet. The brightest reflections are matte while the shadowy parts are smooth.
Further down the sidewalk, there is less illumination on the concrete, t he silvery tones are less present, there is more of a coppery tone, with a little more brilliance. The buddles are not so much gray as black with copper outlines.
The white on the buildings trimming has a similar warm radiance, the coppery, maybe sepia tone, except that it has more reds. maybe from the bricks.




Chili pepper lights in the hallway. They are red except for three white/clear/amber ones and one green one to the right. These are some radical lights! The lights are around the door at the end a hallway see, and they are real smooth and reflective. Ergo, when you blur your eyes it's like there are two sets of lights. Nice ambiance going on in this hallway. The lights shine like starssss. They really make the rug pop, as well as totally keep this small butler man statue really creepy. Normally his eyes would be blue, but in this light the're black. Like the kid with that alien virus in the x-files movie, or Wes Borland of "I dId It AlL fOr ThE nOoKiE" fame. Other lights of mention in the vicinity are a nice blinking duo on the smoke detector, a strip coming from under the door, and the TV. The smoke detectors lights are LED green, blink every few seconds, yada yada yada. Not too much light there. Under the door is partially obstructed, not too powerful, still not much of a contribution to the color tone described so far. The TV on the other hand adds a dynamic opposition to the warm reds in the hallway. The room adjacent is filled with cold blues and whites which accent the green and blue couches/seating arrangements. I feel warmer than that room just by being in the red hallway, mere inches away. I wouldn't want to go in that room. Too cold.

Seeing: What I Saw

Less Porn Than Brad's

Ass 1b

Whelp, it was a challenge. I've never used final cut before so I stumbled through it a bit. quite a bit actually. It worked out in the end though. I started out trying to do a beat, but it ended up being really tedious and frustrating trying to get everything exact, and it was pretty silly to try to do it with final cut rather than beat making software. The soundscape thing was slightly intimidating at first because I wasn't sure where to start, but then I realized that anything counted and it's pretty subjective and all, so I loosened up and got cracking. It's obviously a very intuitive process and actually reminded me of bleaching my film strip for 6x1. Impressionistic, very few rules. This wasn't as fun but that's because computers are so damn stupid. I mostly just played with cutting and expanding/condensing sound clips and a few echos/reverb here and there

CLANG! BANG!

My friend Trevor and I sometimes make music using mostly my voice and mostly his keyboard. He has a lot of music gadgets, but the oldest and fondest is his BOSS loop pedal. It is so simple to use, even a drunk idiot could use it. Some random noises here some keyboard beat hear, add a few harmonies, and voila. Something really cool out of nothing. Brian Eno said something brilliant about accentuating imperfections, and this is a perfect example. The most random and cacophonies combinations of sound can be beautiful when repeated.
When I got this assignment I was reminded of the loop pedal because that’s what most of my creative mic wielding has been. I was also reminded of the music video I have posted in this blog. I chose a lot of percussive sounds because they make for good beats. It was fun to throw a skateboard around and yell in a stairwell for homework.
When I heard the other assignments I realized all the other sounds I could have used. If I could do it again I would have come up with some more sounds to get beforehand and gone to a few more places.
For the Painting with sound I’m probably going to do some rhythmic editing of the sound. I’d like to incorporate a beat made from the sounds, and perhaps a simple melody. The beginnings and ends are going to be more ambient soundscapes that are less musical.

listening to one hand clapping

I'm sitting in my room. This is where I typically am, thereby I suppose it's a good place to pay attention to some noise. An air conditioning unit just kicked on. "uuUMMMM". The door just clicked from the other side so James must have gone to the bathroom. Faint tap of toilet seat. Guess it's a number two. Some people are chatting at the front door, but I can't hear what they're saying. It's a dude and a girl. Another girl must be down the way, I heard giggles. The air's ambient tone is defined by various pitches of insect and air conditioners. My room has clicks from keyboard keys. I can hear a slight air conditioner noise from the walls as well. Clicks of doors shutting outside is sporadic, but common. More girls chatting. Crickets. Air conditioners.

The elevator beeps me welcome, and the somewhat rattly doors close behind me. I heard a couple clicks above me, and the sound of someone bumping into a sheet of metal. That wobbly low tone. Their is the sound of air flowing and an oscillating whir. Faint. These are the most constant ambient noises. Girls voices from the hallway are reverby and indistinct, a door shutting, muffled. Voices sound like a softened version of the honk chairs make when they rub across linoleum. They peak and overlap in random clumps. The whir stopped and then a pause and the familiar sound of the elevator going down. Nice. Definitely, a steady hum and air flows. I should get off the floor. Its not publicly acceptable to conduct ones duties in an elevator.

Outside my neighbors apartment. Girls describing tequila shot. Several voices, different levels of far away. Someone wants to go to buddha school, this is funny. Someone wants to watch mean girls. The ambient tone is pretty boring, just the same oisen gas they always pump in. And they're out, walking away, pretening i wasn't eavesdropping; I was merely walking around with a laptop.

They're gone. The hallway is not the same. Pretty boring actually. I'm tapping my leg a little to make it interesting, rubbing my hands on the carpet. "shh.. shhh.. shhh..."

Responses

To Mr. Richter:

Your wrong. And your purism is off putting. Pure art and originality seem more like metaphysical realms of theorists than issues of the artist. I like to think that the purer art is less concerned with doing it right than doing it. Your theories about film seem dogmatic. I completely reject your hypothesis that narrative film is not original like experimental or documentary. Narrative film is not subservient to literature and theater, but rather literature, theater and film belong to a class of art that utilize story, whereas experimental does not, per se. Though the imagination is in some ways completely free in experimental film, I feel like of all the possible juxtapositions of illusions of photographic motion that can be found or created and put on film are more myriad and exciting than any oversized fingers can scratch, bleach, paint, etc.
Writing essays about varying degrees of art purity is onanistic. Anything and everything can be art. Why should anyone care if film as a medium isn't being utilized optimally according to an abstruse philosophy? Why don't experimental film makers branch out from film and use paper instead and make flip books? While fun, the whole direct film manipulation shebang seems like novelty use of materials.

To Mr. MacDonald:

I appreciated your take on avant-garde as an alternative that expands the definition of film as a whole, rather than at the top of a hierarchy, as I interpreted Mr. Richter's essay. You addressed the confusion and frustration many people feel when confronted with film well. It isn't that they are stupid, it's that they aren't trained for it. Picasso wasn't accepted when he was experimenting with new forms, but now he is one of the most well known artists of all time. Context is key, and more exposure means that one has a better idea of what it is. If, in exposing the uninitiated to avant garde film, one shows them something they might be more excited by, then they would be more open and ready to explore other films in the "genre", ones that are considered to be of high merit by professors/critics etc. Jumping into certain experimental films is baffling and frustrating without proper previous exposure. There is no precedent to evaluate or understand the experience. The same is true for art. Without history, context and experience, what are the blocks and squares of color to someone used to representational images?
However, Mr. MacDonald, I found it a little difficult to understand this piece as a whole. I see that it is an introduction, but it seemed to switch topics halfway through, from generalizations about common perceptions about Avant-Garde to summaries of historical movements to a meditations on the Lumiere brothers and Muybridge. It seemed to drift and was hard to digest in parts because it drifted from what seemed like a thesis idea. I feel arrogant for calling you out on it, but, like, it's just constructive criticism. You'll do better next time.

To Mr. Camper:

Your list is superfluous. Each of these qualifications are examples of that done so far, and thus could easily and quickly become outmoded when Experimental film does what it does best, break rules. Experimental film, as I'll call it for convenience, should be called film poems or something to do with that, because the divide is basically whether or not there is a narrative. I think film can be catalogued the same way as literature. Narrative film, Poetic film, and Documentaries are analogous to Fiction, Poems, and Essays/Nonfiction. A few qualifications should be made (Pearl Harbor wasn't a documentary) but more or less these classifications make work because they are based on a simple criteria. Does it tell a story? no. Does it depict reality as reality. no. It's a Poetic film!! I can't find anything wrong with my system. If there are films that cross boundaries then these hybrids will be referred to by both, like in literature. What's that? You have a film that has elements of narrative, yet is expressive in a not quite definable way? Perhaps the habitat in which the narrative resides isn't stable and perhaps the film drifts from this and starts directly interacting with the viewer through visuals rather than through character? Well, we'll call it a Poetic Narrative. Bingo. Gold. Sold.
Basically what I'm saying is that all the conventional means of defining film modes define them cultural terms rather than what they are. I understand that when one says "experimental" it could mean anything from eternal sunshine to mothlight, from gummo to empire. These films have little in common except for having nothing to do with the dominant use of the medium. It's confusing to define them along these lines. It's inconsistent. Might as well call it "unusual film".

While we're recording found sound...

http://www.hessismore.com/video/walksong.mov

Interested with a short attention span and excited to put some moving pictures together, my goals are "hahaha" and "oh shit, wow". Quiet reflection has its place. I just want to blow shit up. Experimental film is too limitless to take it too easy. Might as well go to extremes, huh?
Leaders in experimental film, at least from what I have read, tend to define themselves in terms of the norm of narrative. They are what they are not. But I reject the boundary that I see them making, the dichotomy between Hollywood narrative and basement experimentation. The realm outside my films will include whininess, dullness, tragedy, sentimentality, grandiosity, and moths. I am interested shamanic intuition, rational detachment, and an infinitely exponential cosmic sense of humor.
This manifesto is weak. I’ll draft it again once my hands are a little dirtier and these abstract intentions come to life at least a little. Sometimes I feel a little unreal when I realize that all that I’ve ever dreamed of is constantly blowing away, and that in the scheme of things one is ever on the verge of disappearing. I plan on sculpting my imagination with the filmic medium in this class, and beyond, a slight attempt at making myself real or permanent, etc. and so forth, blah, blah, blah, with liberty and justice for all. Amen.