MUFF & Robert Todd

I'm in a class that teaches you how to run a film festival. It's called the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival or MUFF. My duties were to watch submitted films and rate them a Yes, No, or Maybe. There was a lot of Nos out there but it was great to see so many submissions from all over the place like Canada, Germany, Argentina and even Croatia! My other tasks were to find sponsors for the festival. I went around asking for donations in exchange for ad space. Most of the donations were in the form of a gift card because we had a raffle at the festival too. I managed to get River West Film & Video to donate a $50 gift card, Exclusive Co to donate a $25 dollar gift card and Wade's Guitar Shop to donate $100 which we split in half. Half into a gift card and half into our general MUFF fund. Since we are not the most highly funded organization I thought splitting it would be a good idea. I also help put together/run fundraisers like bake sales and rock shows. I got Lord Brain to play for us like I mentioned in my Record Store Day post.

My favorite filmmaker of the festival was Robert Todd who's piece "Cove" screened at our Saturday afternoon program. Here is a clip from "Cove" from his vimeo.

https://vimeo.com/47720198

His style is very beautiful and it kind of reminded me of my own works in progress. His style can even really be pin pointed but I get so engaged with his work and shots that it doesn't really matter. It reminds me of my work because of its seemingly randomness and lack of concentrated characters. It's much more clean though where he is filming. So I may strive to be the dirty Robert Todd. Finding beauty in squaller.

Destruction Coming Soon!

I'm nearing the end of my VHS tape and soon I will be destroying things on camera. The biggest thing I want to break is my old TV. Its a tube television that just doesn't have the brightness it use to. I've watched a lot of good media on that TV but I thought breaking a television and filming it with my VHS camera would look cool. I'm thinking of throwing it off the garage roof if we can get it up there safe. I'll only have one shot to do it so hopefully it turns out to be cool. I'll also have other people filming it digitally so hopefully once we do that (perhaps before Thursday) I can put the digital version up on here. So stay tuned for DESTRUCTION!!

Record Store Day

On 4/20/13 I attended record store day at Exclusive Company near Brady Street. I only purchased one 45 Record which was featured in one of my shoots. It was the green Frank Zappa split vinyl with the tracks "I'm the Slime" and "Montana". On the back it has a quote from Zappa. He says: "Music is the best!" I'm inclined to agree.

There was also live music playing there. My roommate's band Lord Brain played a set as well as one of my other friends band Absolutely played. I took some footage of one of LB's songs and found a song by Absolutely too!

"Cheap Hills" by Lord Brain (2:38)

"Crab" by Absolutely (3:46)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeZg3bwq-yw

Then after listening to all of this loud music, I took a quick road trip to Madison to see another band play. They are called Pissed Jeans and before I post some footage of that show I wanted to post what we saw on the way there.

A upside down cross in the sky! It's like Pissed Jeans knew we were coming to worship them!!

Ok here is one of their songs

"Teenage Adult" by Pissed Jeans (4:09)

This was a long weekend of binging on music and other stuff....Thursday night I saw a show at Quarters in Riverwest, then Friday Lord Brain played a fundraiser show for the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival at Linneman's then it was Record Store Day. Great weekend filled with great music. Rock.

The Rules of Logic

The rules of logic have changed
Who do we trust?
The Mind? Or the Brain?
The rules of logic have changed

Much of what I understood has been shit
I sit n shit and can't get a bit fit
So it's time to get lit?

Perhaps this time around I'll trust my gut
What rut in my butt can't be shut
Time to jump cut?

Follow the heart may be the only way
I stay, she strays with no delays
Fade to grey

I've been arranged to be deranged and now estranged since
The rules of logic have changed
The rules of logic are estranged
The rules of logic have changed
The rules of logic are deranged
The rules of logic have changed
Who do we trust?
The Mind? Or the Brain?

Other Mini Works

I figured since others were posting some quick youtubes they've done in the past on their blog I would do the same.

This one is called "Splorin", a short walk on the beach, my friends and I find whats been lost under the snow.
https://vimeo.com/45762082

This one is called "Dub-eggZ" , an idea mentioned at the start of the video turns to reality.
https://vimeo.com/45762086

This one is called "Ssssmore Ssssplorin", another day at the beach.
https://vimeo.com/51979869

Right Now

So right now I am still shooting as much as I can with the cam quarter still and I wish I could throw some clips up here to show you (I may try again to record some clips with my digital camera while the VHS plays on my TV, it was just a little blurry and has a lot of glare on the TV right now. I hope I can post some screen shots of my recent shoots on here like I did a couple posts down.

Anyways, I have been shooting in the basement again. Shooting the fish tank again (one of the fish recently died so I got some [sad] footage of a floating fish). I've recently tried some new things with the camera too. I've been setting up shots then kind of moving on to something not set up.

For instance I had the idea of my roommate eating a banana with a fork. So I had him do that and had the camera sitting on the table cutting his head off so you only see his hands and the plate that the banana is on. Once he's almost done with the banana I moved the camera over to the burners on the stove and filmed close ups of the flames of each burner. I switched the lights off and filmed them more all the while this really creepy, spacey music (that my banana eating roommate made) is playing in the background. This is probably the most noticeable change up I have made in the project so far because it was set up. The other footage seems more observing to natural things but I don't think that its a bad thing to have shots that are set up because the aesthetic is so heavily "home movies-ish" so it's an idea i wanted to explore. I keep wanting to explore different options like I've been recently trying to not film the entire body or the faces of my roommates because I had a few shots that I thought were interesting with just the feet or just the arms and hands in the shots. Creating shots that have unknown characters that still show character in their non full form is interesting to me. Close interactions with the house and the things in the house gives you real intimate look at these people without being fully connected with their persona is what I'm going for I guess...

My project seems to be gaining more and more potential for from every time I have a day of shooting. I guess I'm at the stage right now where I'm starting to think how I would edit all this data I have collected. The first action I would take before transferring it to digital video would be to make a shot list of every single shot I have on the tape then check off the strongest/weakest ones and go from there.

I'll try to get some stills of my 2 latest shoots and put them up later tonight.

Spider!

Here's a news story that I found interesting....it's a short fluff piece Fox did around Oscar time on the ticket ripper at my theatre: Spider! It's kind of funny since I had this as one of my options for the project. Though I wouldn't take it in this fluffy of a direction it still a great profile on him.

Spider at the Movies

Art Bar Gallery Show

 Last Friday I had a show at Art Bar in Riverwest. It was a free Art Gallery with a lot of different paintings, photography, sculptures and video art up. They had the video artist play the videos during the live music. My band is called Slam Dunk. We all wear basketball jerseys except for one of our guitarists wears a referee shirt. Our gimmicks are based around loving Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny. We were nothing like the other two bands which isn't a bad thing. It was a really fun show and probably the biggest amount of people we've ever played for. It was also our last show because the Ref is moving to Alaska for 6 months to farm and he currently lives in Madison now so it's hard to get practices together. The band that played before us were kind of a mellow bluesy band with a keyboardist singer, bassist, slide guitarist and drummer. The were called The Something or Others and the band that played after us was a jammy, reggae type band who had a beat-boxer/vocalist, they were called Red Light Refugee. Our music is kind of out there...we don't stick to one genre but we have some heavy songs. Here is one of songs called Bed, Bath & Beyonce.

http://slamdunk666.bandcamp.com/track/bed-bath-beyonce

A Visual Collage

From the approximate half hour of footage I took around my house, using the old fashion, stone age camcorder I have, I got a lot of great visuals that got me thinking about what I could actually do with this lo-fi technology.

When people who have never been to our house and they walk into our living room for the first time, they are usually stunned a little by the amount of things on the walls. Most, if not all, comment on it and say it is almost a "sensory overload" (a term many people have used to describe our house). To us its business as usual but to others they become lost in our walls. Some have said that they could look around for hours and find new things. We have big canvas art (some collages) posters, magazine cut outs, smaller art, photography, smaller posters and some card board cutouts. I want to, in some way, make the video experience of being in our house.

I'd like it to be a "visual collage" of sorts. Not to be confused with montage. It would be very abstract yet real because I like having subjects in the frame as well. There doesn't need to be much story but rather, when it comes to editing, edit some of the common factors close together. Green shots, white shots, shots with just heads. I'd like to use all the diagetic sounds from the video as well. I would basically film a lot of footage then take the best from the shoot. There would be a lot of experimenting and eventually I would like it to have some type of arc to it.

I'd like it to start very abstract with a lot of close ups that eventually come out to medium shots. It will all feel very random. Much like our "art walls". Then I'm debating on whether or not I should have something happen to the "characters" in the film and eventually have it climax to something then have it go back to abstractions.

Here are some of my favorite screen shots of the first 30 mins I took with the camcorder.

Clips

3 Ideas Week 1

1. I like the idea of following a homeless person around for a day to see what their lives are really like. Milwaukee has a big population of people living off the grid so I could try following around a lot of different folks then I would try and follow up on one or two of the people I find most interesting. It could be a difficult task to actually get them to talk about their lives because I'm sure a lot of them are either disgruntled about it or even damaged mentally but I still think I would get some good footage of some interesting characters. There's this one man who, maybe, lives out of his car or just collects cans/random junk for extra money. He has a truck and I see him pretty often and my roommates and I even let him use our spigot on the side of our house so he can have water. He's asked us once and we didn't mind so know he just does it without asking which seemed weird at first but after awhile we didn't seem to care because he wasn't causing any harm or stealing anything from our back yard. He doesn't speak much English but maybe I could talk to him or even work up the courage to ask him to ride along with him for awhile.

2. There is a man at my job (I'm an Asst. Manager at the Marcus North Shore Cinema in Mequon) who is somewhat of a mascot of our theatre. His name is Mike Ryan but everybody, even customers, call him "Spider". It's a nickname he got when he was younger and he tells me that he got it because of his love for comic book heroes (i.e.: Spider-Man). He has a gimp arm and only does one thing at our theatre: rip tickets. He does this with one hand and is pretty good at it. He also recommends movies and food to customers and will talk with you for hours about film. He sees pretty much everything that comes out and is always tells you to come back out after the movie and tell him "yes or no" meaning if you enjoyed the film or not. He is disabled but I'm not sure in what way. He repeats himself a lot and has a lot of catch phrases. For the film I would basically do a profile on him. It would try not to make it go a cliche route and have it seem like a inspirational fluff story that a new station would do but rather a deeper look into his thoughts on things, not just movies. But mainly movies. I wouldn't mind for it to be inspirational but I don't want it to seem hokey.

3. Since I've worked in a movie theatre for 6 years I've always thought I could make a good comedy about working in a movie theatre. I have a good idea how I would open the movie.

You would see a black screen in silence then cut to a close up of a man's face being completely dead pan. Suddenly the man bursts out in hysterical laughter, cut to a different man's face being dead pan but more sad. Then cut to a profile medium shot of both of the men revealing they are in a stock room with candy and popcorn tubs, men both dressed in a tuxedo. Eventually the first man stops laughing and says "Seriously?! That's your idea for a movie? Who's going to want to watch that? <Laughs more> Who's going to want to watch a movie about what happens in the lobby of a movie theatre? A movie about a movie theatre...yeah good luck with that!" The first man would then leave the stock room and as the door shuts it would cut to the opening credits.

I've thought about this idea a lot and have a good amount of chicken scratch in some notebooks but the more I think about it the more it seems unrealistic. Not in terms of plot or story or characters but in terms of a student film. It would be a cross between "Clerks" and "Waiting..." but set in a movie theatre. I've only told a few people about this idea, all of which are close friends so they might be biased so I'm not sure if the laughing man is right or not. It would have to be a real funny script which I have yet to start.

NY Times Scrapbook Entry #1

Killer Penguins, Asteroids and Maple Leaves"In more than 14 hours of filming using cameras strapped to 11 Adélie penguins, not once did a bird fail to capture its prey." Watch it all on Penguin-Cam.

This article, which includes 10 other short blurbs of science news, caught my eye with its title "Killer Penguins, Asteroids and Maple Leaves". Science, mainly astronomy, interests me a lot because it can, usually, boggle my mind. The short blurb about Asteroids talk about how we, in the future, will start mining asteroids for rocket fuel, solar panels and components for spacecraft orbiting Earth. All 11 mini articles can be found here on the NY Times website.

 Agency Moves to Retire Most Research Chimps 

"The report says that for the future, only a small colony of about 50 chimps should be kept for the possibility of new research, which would have to be approved by an independent committee, including representation from the public."

This article caught my eye because I was curious as to how often (and how many) chimps are tested on. It turns out that there are 232 chimps that could potentially be tested on. The National Institution of Health or N.I.H. owns these chimps and have 219 chimps retired already. They plan to change the way the chimps live and the type of tests that are ran on them. I like the idea of the public having a say in the matter because we should have a voice when it comes to these types of things. Full article HERE

A Movie a Day, Without Going Broke

 

"Whether it is worth it, of course, depends on how many times you go to the movies. The company has set its monthly prices to equal roughly three movies a month, so it costs just over $30 in New York City. Subscribers tend to go a lot when they first sign up, and then their activity decreases, Stacy Spikes, MoviePass’s founder, said. "

I work at a movie theatre so I get free movies all the time (except on Saturdays) so I found this article interesting because it's basically like the Movie Fun Packs we sell which is a deal if you go to the movies often. This "Movie Card" idea seems like a good idea but what happens when there isn't any good movies out? You get charged for a month when you maybe only saw one movie that month. The thing with the Movie Fun Packs the Marcus Theatre sells is that, though there are restrictions to newer movies and 3D movies, they don't expire and you only pay once when you buy the pack of tickets. Overall the movie packs could save you 40% potentially in movie tickets. Perhaps it makes more sense in to do it in New York. I don't see it making it's way over to the Midwest anytime soon.

Full Article HERE