My Feeble Attempts to Attract the Masses

Trying to bolster the blog's audience, so starting to send the url around. Hopefully you reading this (yes you) are my new traffic, and my plan is working according to...plan. Shit.

Been working on a bunch of stuff that I'm going to post once all of my grad school apps are submitted and I have some time. Did a new cut of "The Agoraphobic" that is pretty fucking awesome. It's a couple of minutes longer, and just rounds everything out nicely and gives it all a chance to breathe. I'm sure I'll throw that up soon. In the meantime, a refresher of the first cut that we did for the 48 Hour Film Project:



Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. I always hate how everything slows down around this time, and you can't get anybody to do any work. But we had a good time and stuffed ourselves. So, not all bad.

Weekend Project

Shot another commercial over the weekend to help build on my reel. Wanted to try something different, and did the shoot using only a still camera. I'm going to edit the spot as scenes consisting of several photos played in succession. So instead of shooting a scene normally, I'm going to piece together an impression of movement with key stills. I got the inspiration from looking over a ton of animators' blogs recently. John K's blog in particular is pretty great in how it's mainly concerned with the nuts and bolts of animation. These all basically got me thinking about a different approach to the medium I work in. Film in terms of animation: treating my main images as key frames, and then cutting out the stuff in between. Controlling the image.

Mike Moghaddam's got a sweet digital SLR and I was able to beg him out to help. Shannon from USC (and the loopt commercial I did) agreed to be in it last minute. I'm excited to cut it together and see how the experiment worked out. Here's an example of a series of keyframes that I'll edit together to get some cool jerky movement:










I also did this a while ago for Megan, and always liked how I threw still frames in of stuff around the house. Probably stuck in my head until now.

Two Posts in a Day! Wow. Impressive.

I've been editing one minute clips of CMF movies to be played in college bookstores. Fun and challenging to edit one minute clips for five minute movies. For the first one, I stole the style directly from one of my personal favorite trailers, the one from A Clockwork Orange. Great, original idea for a trailer that really gives you a full sense of the film without giving anything away. I'll include the original for reference.

Symantec Vision 08

I've been getting all of my stuff together for applying to grad schools this past week or so, and it's given me the chance to re-watch some of my work that I haven't looked at in a while (always a scary prospect). I did this series of highlight videos at a conference in Vegas over the summer, and was pleasantly surprised when I watched them again. I thought they turned out pretty cool. The assignment was to make the conference look like a really fun event, which was not easy in dealing with a company that makes Norton Anti-Virus and other IT security stuff. Really dry subject matter. Anyways, thought they were fun and wanted to post them.

Day One



Day Two



Day Three



Day Four

Loopt Commercial

Shot this commercial a week or so ago in L.A. at USC. It's for a new iPhone app that CMF and AT&T want to promote. Didn't really get a budget for it as they'd already tried to do a commercial that got rejected. This also, of course, meant it was a month past the deadline and that AT&T wasn't happy with the situation. So I was tasked to come up with something that we could shoot cheap and fast. I'm pretty happy about the result, I just want to reshoot the close-ups on the phone. And I wouldn't mind getting some new music for it. Also, shout out to young Shannon for acting in it, getting the extras, and getting us all up on the roof.

Random Inspiration

Don't really want to be one of those guys that blogs everything he sees/reads/listens to, but also want a handy place to throw out little stuff that inspired me. Mainly here to remind me of little stuff I liked in whatever. So here we are:

How the West Was Won.



Seen a bit of this before, but recent caught the remastered version that fixed the lines in the picture. Nightmarish colors and distorted pictures from the cameras (3!) that they shot it with. Be cool to shoot a video or dream sequence with something like this. Sounds like a real headache to shoot Cinerama.


Redbelt.



Best Mamet thing I've seen in a while. "There is no situation that you cannot get out of." Awesome mantra. Dialogue felt more natural than usual for his scripts, though mainly just Ejiofor's character. So it could of just been him.


The Demon.



Very cool book with a lame ending. Felt like one of the most honest character workings from Selby, and then slid into dumbsville. But a very complex, interesting character none-the-less.


Brubaker Authority.



Fun book. Cool reveal with bringing Bendix back. And it all felt pretty epic with the passage of years in the story. Always like it when a story takes place over an extended period of time. And like most of the work Dustin Nguyen does, especially Wildcats 2.0 or whatever they were calling it, but he's hit or miss and the art in this felt uneven. Awesome in places and flat in others. Some of his storytelling could be better. Overall, I dig his style though.


Eyes Wide Shut



Tried watching this again. Ridiculous movie. Hated it when I saw it the first time, and have slightly warmed to it mainly for the secret society stuff, the ludicrous acting, sound and music design, weird floating bodies censoring the sex and the overall unfounded impression that I get from this movie about Scientology. Also got a Shining vibe from the Kubrick cross-dissolves, especially in the middle of the tracking shots. Made me like the movie all that more.

These will be the last bumps I post from the upcoming CMF tour, as I'm finishing this stuff up. Shout out to Terry Downtain for some new music in all of this stuff. He wrote some great early 90s skate-rink goofiness. Ultimately, I got some fun stuff out of it all, but I'm excited as shit to move on.

I've also been working on some vignettes for Bervis the Bum, a character that we've been messing around with for a while. I can honestly say these push the boundaries of what's been done in comedy and am excited to finish them up and see where they go. I'll probably post clips or put together a trailer next.

We're still working on the audio and visual effects for "Public School", and I'm trying to get the audio fixed on "Remembering Why I Was Beaten to Death" and the extended cut of "The Agoraphobic". I want to submit these to a bunch of festivals, which I haven't done much with my older stuff. Definitely need to start getting my films seen around more.

I'm spending two weeks at a school in North Carolina, and then it's off to L.A. for a couple of months, which will afford me plenty of time to get all of this (and more) done. Maybe. I'm going back and reworking a feature script I wrote a while ago, and once I get it fixed up a bit I'm going to shoot the damn thing myself. Fuck waiting on a budget.