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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.”

This is a movie I worked on as a part of the 911 Media team. We got our theme (superstition) and a required detail (taking a pill) at 10pm on a Friday. We had to turn the completed film in at 10pm on Saturday. It was kind of brutal and I’m not sure I’m going to do it again especially with a crew of 16. I ended up being a producer on the movie.

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Here is a film by David O’Reilly. It is the 2009 winner of the Golden Bear award for best short film. It blows my mind… truly.

The marching bands have invaded!

This Saturday the streets of Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood were covered with people holding instruments, dancing their asses off and confused drunkards whose faces rarely showed a frown. It was like being witness to some great random flash mob. I had no idea what was happening and like great acts of guerrilla theater the audience (myself included) was transfixed. These people had so much energy and joy it was hard to be the usual curmudgeonly old man I have a tendency defaulting to in public situations. Here is some iphone-o-rific videos:

In front of Smarty Pants:

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In an empty lot:

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In the damn street on Airway Drive:

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Here is some madman who figured out how to make his ipod touch a part of the horn section:

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So all the while that this marching band madness was going on The Stevedore was preparing to play at The Mix. They are normally a five person band that played as a four piece for this show. The other member of their band is in Pakastan right now doing international reporting. So they had someone sing his part. She was named Jennifer(?) and she was awesome. Here is some video of the very end of the show:

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Took a couple of days and a bunch of back and forth between Morgan and I… but here it is. The music was composed by Mr. Morgan Dusatko. The videos are taken from project we worked on over the last few years.

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Fun! Let me know what you think…

For my roomate’s birthday I decided to make a film. An event happen to them involving a physical fall and time lost in a coma. I wanted to address this somehow and try to fill in for the images and time lost in that event. To me direct animation is visual representation compressing time and experience into one fluid form. It is abstract representation in about as pure a form as you can get. In the best circumstances it is a reinterpretation of the old cliche “life flashing before our eyes.” Is my starting ambition overwrought and pretentious? Maybe. But hopefully a stretch that a friend would appreciate.

This is a very old videoblog I did back in school that shows a similar process to what made the raw film used here.

Unlike my pretty blustery videoblog above I did not run the film through a projector to capture the images.

Here is the scan used to make all the images in the film.

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This time I scanned the film and used After Effects to scroll down the footage in precise rhythm. The lack of a shutter dissolves the flickery snap that goes along with running it through a projector to capture it. I recognized this and decided to embrace it for this particular experiment.

After doing the initial assembly of the raw footage I dropped the frame rate down to 15 frames a second in an attempt to further separate the visual texture of this film from my other direct animation work. It had an interesting effect. The footage felt much more like an exercise in visual meditation than the usual overwhelming flood of flickery randomness that people associate with direct animation. With the sound I wanted to further this feeling of meditation with synth drones. The sound seems to do the trick for me. Watching this film again I also did not expect to be as transfixed by the gritty topographical texture that the pulled off bits of spray paint seem to give parts of the film.

There is a lot of power and poetry in direct animation. Stan Brakhage spent the later part of his life chasing this. There have been times in my life I understand why. To me direct animation is still the purest form of film making. You don’t need a camera or a computer, you don’t need much money or a bunch of people to help with the work, all you need is some kind of film base to start from and a creative desire for experimentation. It is the most tactile and personal experience I have ever had making films.

I always seem to forget that my first love in film making was animation. After making this… my brain is bubbling with experiments for the future again.

Here is the finished film:

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It is done. My life was eaten by this Doc Challenge thingy. Over the last five days I directed a movie. The final title was “Its in the PI.” It concerns itself with the plight of Seattle’s Post-Intelligencer, Seattle’s oldest daily newspaper. It came out much better then anything else I have worked on that could call itself nonfiction, but it took a toll on all of us. But I was so glad to work within this new entity “the Something Factory.” It is the melding of the Common Language Project, The Last Quest and some of our other awesomely talented friends. It was great to work with people who put as much passionate obsession into their work as I do. Here is the logo I created to go at the end of the credits:

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Alright well I have to prep background visuals for the Stevedore Skylark show this Thursday @ 8pm in West Seattle. If you’re not doing anything you should come it will be a hoot.

Also I have a job interview @ SIFF on thursday… All praise little baby jesus ’cause hopefully our collective bribery/worship will make him give me some very necessary luck!