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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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I am sitting in a car in downtown Seattle. It is 5:28AM and I haven’t slept. There is no one on the streets except the crazies and a lonely street sweeper who looks at me with disdain as he passes. Everyone else on the movie is at home, asleep or just waking up. Whereas I am waiting for an actor who has agreed to get up unreasonably early to be in movie that we he knows absolutely nothing about. A movie that has to be completely finished in 16 hours. It is clear I’m not going to sleep at all during this entire project. It is at this point that I realize that working on films really is the thing I should be doing. I will sacrifice sleep… sanity… just about anything to finish and facilitate projects. I would not do this for any other thing that could be considered a job. This is probably unhealthy and I know that, but it is important for me to give it what I have before the tectonic plates of my existence shift and destroy this fragile bubble I am currently living in both creatively and professionally. Even if the thing I’m working on is a low-stakes 24 hour film race.

I think I have a demented notion of “fun.” I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Jewel Box Theater @ 6:15
To buy tickets in advance.
Here is the 1:45 of the final film:

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We got into Seattle’s Truely Indepentant Film Festival. If you want to read our acceptance letter head over to The Last Quest blog. So our Seattle premiere will be in June!

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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My week started on Sunday where I was the gaffer on a student film called The lottery ticket. It was awesome to work on a very cut and dry shoot. It was one shooting day with two actors and a small crew. I really appreciate working as a crew member when so much of the time that I spend working on films is wrapped up in trying to force a story or vision out of myself. It’s very gratifying to aid someone else’s creative process. Crewing is relatively simple you just go, listen to the director of photography, do what is asked of you, and off you go. It was also awesome to see a good friend of mine, Ms. Sarah Ricci directing her first short. She did do a good job and I was proud of her.
For the past year Morgan and I have been guest lecturers for a communications class at Seattle Central Community college. He knows a professor, she invites us each quarter and it is a really awesome thing to be able to talk about your process to a class full of students. The last time we did it I was pretty displeased with the reception and discussion that came from us showing the rough cut of The Hot Dog Cycle. Our sound was rough, the color correction had not been done and it came across pretty bad. So this time I took it upon myself to do a series of blog posts for The Last Quest’s blog. These blog posts detail how the very first scene of the movie was made. It is a full breakdown from idea to final mix. They are up right now and I am really pleased with how well they turned out. I didn’t know I would get so much pleasure from writing them. I have gotten a lot of feedback on them and everyone has only good things to say about the posts. Oh and the students were much more engaged this time as we went through the blog posts with them in class.  One of the videos you might be interest in is this one:

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That clip is the first minute and forty seconds of The Hot Dog Cycle, a thirty minute shot film that will be playing film festivals all over the country this summer.

Here is a clip of me interviewing Morgan about that the making of that scene:

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So today I am preparing to start the frantic frenzy that is the five day documentary film challenge. We get our subject and theme at 8am tomorrow morning and have to send out our finished film on Monday. We did it last year and it was awesome. I will be updating you either during or after the competition as it is an interesting process to try to pump out a quality product in such a short amount of time.

I also really wanted to acknowledge all the new web traffic on my site:

Thanks everybody for stopping by and I hope you check back often as I try at least once or twice a week to post something new. Also feel free to leave comments for me, as I do read them. But do me a favor and don’t post any links to websites trying to sell me something that makes my penis larger… I’m good on that front for right now at least.

So the trailer is up on the site.

You can see it by clicking the play button in the “Video I have worked on.”

The movie is almost done… completely… for reals.

I am in the process of finishing up thehotdogcycle.com so that will be up soon and I also have to write a thing called “Production Notes” for our Withoutabox submissionto the Seattle International Film Festival. Withoutabox is amazing. It takes a lot of the pain in the ass out of submitting to festivals. Withoutabox has a special deal with just about every festival out there for an extra special withoutabox only exteneded extended deadline.  This extended deadline is the only way we are able to submit the film at all as this tuesday is the final mix session at Bad Animals. That process has been pretty amazing… but I’ll save that up for an upcoming post.