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A good friend of mine has started doing reviews of some of cinema’s more sleazy digressions. Check it out!

Here is the project that myself and the rest of The Last Quest have been working on for the last three months. We all love doing it and the results have been pretty awesome. Check out all the awesome local Seattle music we use for the soundtracks!

The story of one family’s search for shelter. Pilot story for the upcoming national online storytelling corps America in 5 (www.AmericaIn5.org). This video was produced in seven days by a team of Seattle-based storytellers including a comic artist, an audio producer, a journalist and a filmmaker.

Produced with the generous support of the University of Washington’s MCDM program and Department of Communication.

First shown Friday April 16th at TedxSeattle.

Joy from The Common Language Project on Vimeo.

So back in the spring of 2009 The Last Quest decided to work with The Common Language Project on the International Documentary Film Challenge. This film was conceived and completed over the span of five days at the beginning of March 2009. After screening at the official Doc Challenge screenings the film was submitted to many film festivals. Here is a list of some of the festivals it was selected to play:
The Seattle International Film Festival
DC Shorts
Milwaukee Film Festival
Tacoma Film Festival
BendFilm Festival
Local Sightings

Here is the “logline” for the film:
“As newspapers across the country struggle to stay viable both culturally and fiscally, Seattle’s own Post Intelligencer is slated for closure. ‘It’s in the P-I’ tries to capture the confusion and disappointment of the people who worked the last few days of this 142 year old Seattle institution.”

I have been a longtime fan of The Onion and of the wing of their website called the AV Club. They have great thoughtful reviews and give you the strenghts of blog writing (speaking from the 1st peron) with a healthy dose of the more traditional way to review contemperary works.

They started the TV Blog and I was very excited as I am an unrepentant TV junkie. I have watched and am currently watching a mirade of shows. If it tells serialized narratives without relying too directly on the soap opera plotlines there is a good change I am watching it attentively.  There has been a lot said about the fact that we are living through the Renessance of Television. I agree I remember that there have been older examples of serialized narrative but really HBO starting back with shows like OZ has hit on something amazing.

So tonight, well morning now, I was reading a review of two Deadwood episode. This show was cancelled long ago but the AV Club has a writer who is reviewing the shows as if they were playing weekly. The reviewer said something I thought did an amazing job of connecting the broader themes of some of the best television ever made:

Deadwood is about the birth of both that civilization and that war, while The Sopranos is about the long decline and The Wire, finally, is about the ultimate consequences of those actions. (In this way, The Wire almost serves as a funhouse mirror version of Deadwood, even though both series had completely separate creative personnel.)

So yeah… this is not really a fully formed blog post. It is sort of a blog fragment. I was just really excited that someone is writing about TV that transends it’s humble format. If you haven’t seen these shows watch them and know that as much as they are trying to just make good TV… there is the potential for something bigger and better going on underneath its skin.

I four hours I need to be up and rearing to go but here I sit posting to this blog…

For the next four days I expect to be very occupied. The Last Quest is shooting a new film called “Still Life.” I am the producer for this short so that means Brad = busy-boy.

Here is our schedule. I also posted to the other blog part of an epic production bible that I have been working on for the last week.

So yes busy-ness is mine. I will be back with more posts soon.

Be prepared for gory-tree-revenge!

“Treevenge” played at SIFF and was my favorite film from the “Nightmare Factory” program.

Thanks to twitchfilm.net

Thank you for your entry to the 2009 DC Shorts Film Festival. This year,
we have seen an incredible growth in interest in our festival –
receiving more than 680 films. This made decision-making to fill the
final slots even more difficult.

We would like to CONGRATULATE YOU — your entry is an official selection
for the 2009 competition!

Recently I did an interview with Monica Guzman from the online version of the P-I. I was glad to be able to wedge in a pretty good quote and some plugs for The Last Quest and The Common Language Project. It was an all around pleasurable experience. Here are some quotes:

“That something this old and prestigious was stopping its printed publication was brutal to hear,” said director Brad Hutchinson. “We needed to do something…

“What we were trying to really capture is the sort of collective loss that a community experiences,” Hutchinson said. “(The P-I was) this sort of cultural compass for Seattle…