__bjh__

It’s is 9:30am… time to wake up and make some coffee or if you’re at work it about time to change up your work avoidance habits for the day before the boss gets wise. This would be true if you weren’t me. My mind is a slippery gooey thing that even I don’t comprehend. It is 9:30am and I haven’t slept for 20 some hours. Was it because I was inspired and on somekind of artistic high? No. My mind wouldn’t just shut the hell up.

Icky.

But along my sleep-deprived epic youtube/myspace/torrent tracker travels I found a band I think I like a lot. Their music strikes me as what happens when hippies listen to The Melvins too much. It warps the standard hippy mind into something quite interesting.

They are called Tweak Bird and they make me tingle in my special place. I am glad to have something new to cleanse the palette after my stormy three month romance (that I think has ended badly) with the new Animal Collective album.

Here is a weird video of them on some pretty bad TV show. It gets really good at the 1:13 mark.

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.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

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.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

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:

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

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:

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

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:

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

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.

Right now I am capturing footage I took while we were shooting The Hot Dog Cycle. It is a trip to see all of these people who helped us do something very important to us at one time. Making films is something I love so much because it brings people together who have often completely disparate lives and puts all their collective energy towards a common goal that sometimes seems unattainable. Making movies is really about momentum and collective inertia. I love all of these faces looking awkwardly at the camera as I ask them stilted questions about how it’s going or how they are feeling. The Hot Dog Cycle was an amazing experience and has turned into a pretty good film at the end of all our 9 months worth of work. I hope a lot of people see it. Our SIFF and STIFF entries are in so lets hope one of those festivals gives us an opening here in Seattle.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

So I have no love for css or html. If those two file types where to just magically disappear I would not shed a tear. They are so beyond annoying… but enough stock and trade standard fair web hate.

I got thelastquest.org revamped. It was a pain but I did it. I am now in the process of re-encoding videos for individual pages on the site. I also decided that having a Hot Dog Cycle blog is not nearly as good of an idea as having one for the Last Quest. So yeah boring blog post today… Well here is some video to substitute for this blog suckage.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

Where you’re from does not always reflect who you are… hopefully?

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

So CSX Intermodal other then being a trucking company is also a weird side project performance thing that Morgan Dusatko and myself started in an attempt to get back to our experimental filmmaker/music making roots. It started as a lark that led to us playing a show at The Mix Gallery in the Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle. It was a fantastic experience that made me remember what I loved so much about performance and theater- it is the fact that no matter what happens during the performance it is part of the magic of it. People in the crowd during a performance are experiencing something completely individual. Even though they are looking at a screen with moving pictures on it everyone in the crowd knows that you are in the same room assembling what they are seeing. It makes it less obligatory for them to be engrossed in an immersive thing like cinema. So while we performed I recorded it on my very awesome HV20.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

So finally the big day came and The Stevedore (south Seattle’s best country space punk band!) played The Mix gallery/bar in the Georgetown, Seattle. And I did visuals for them… And it turns out that Russian propaganda cartoons and footage of giesers in yellowstone make crowds lose their shit! It was a blast. I’ll be posting video in the near future… This really makes me want to do more performance. It seems like I will be doing just that for The Stevedore and my other vj dj project csx intermodal… So yes more to come on both fronts.

… and the movie Harold and maude is really amazing. If you haven’t seen it do and if you have seen it watch it again. I have never seen a movie that spends so much time dealing with death that made me so happy to be alive.

So just got The Hot Dog Cycle site up… it is janky but functional. Have a bit more work to do before I call it good. Stooopid HTML CSS making me crazy. Just put that there!!! Oh well.

Had to give Jed a lifeline phone call on web crap ala Who wants to be a millionare? He informed me of awesome things that I have yet to explore involving a video embedding implementation of a free flash plug-in that plays just about every file that I work with.

Also put up The Hot Dog Cycle trailer up on Youtube… I am super dissatisfied in the quality. Probably going to upload again in the next few day.