More Excursions, Four Eyed Monsters, and a Promise, dammit.
Wednesday, our group made an excursion to the Anthology Film Archives, and let me tell you, if I were a 16 or 35mm film, that's totally where I'd want to live. They lovingly and carefully preserve the films in as close to their original form as they can, and project them onto this gorgeous screen for New York art house patrons, and Midwestern Study Abroad groups, I guess. Then when they're done, they go into this lovely airconditioned vaults to live with all friends. It's a pretty sweet deal if you ask me. We were treated to a special showing of several of the films, including "A Movie" by Bruce Conner which featured some of the most innovative use of stock footage I'd ever seen. The way he cross cut between seemingly unrelated footage to create new narrative was alternatingly fun and fascinating. A sequence that stood out to me featured people on a submarine looking through a periscope, then a pin-up girl taking off her stockings, the submarine people reacting in a joyous fashion, then a very phallic torpedo being shot out followed by a mushroom cloud from an underwater nuclear test, which set off a chain of footage of people being hit by waves or falling off of things into the water. Very cool.
Thursday, a group of us went to go see Four-Eyed Monsters, a film made by two artists about their relationship. While the film itself was lovely and well done, the process of making it was much more interesting, because they worked outside of traditional distribution processes and built up most of the fanbase for their film by making video podcasts. To my knowledge, this is one of the first films to take that approach and be pretty successful - our screening was sold out- and I can bet that a lot of other independent filmmakers will take a cue from these good folks and build their fanbase with podcasts.
Like me! Well, eventually. I'm been itching to do some writing and some fiction work, but I haven't quite been able to discipline myself to do it yet. I'm working on stuff though, so stay tuned. I had been feeling a little off creatively during this trip, and it wasn't until a friend of mine asked me through AIM how my playwriting was going that I realized that I hadn't written ANYTHING since I got here, other than blog posts and articles about Conflux artists. Holy crap! That blows my mind. Part of it has been sheer physical exhaustion, but that's no excuse.
Coming soon: A goddamn fiction project.
In the meantime, enjoy a previous fiction project available for download to iTunes. I know it works on Firefox, if anyone has any technology issues with it, drop me a line.
Thursday, a group of us went to go see Four-Eyed Monsters, a film made by two artists about their relationship. While the film itself was lovely and well done, the process of making it was much more interesting, because they worked outside of traditional distribution processes and built up most of the fanbase for their film by making video podcasts. To my knowledge, this is one of the first films to take that approach and be pretty successful - our screening was sold out- and I can bet that a lot of other independent filmmakers will take a cue from these good folks and build their fanbase with podcasts.
Like me! Well, eventually. I'm been itching to do some writing and some fiction work, but I haven't quite been able to discipline myself to do it yet. I'm working on stuff though, so stay tuned. I had been feeling a little off creatively during this trip, and it wasn't until a friend of mine asked me through AIM how my playwriting was going that I realized that I hadn't written ANYTHING since I got here, other than blog posts and articles about Conflux artists. Holy crap! That blows my mind. Part of it has been sheer physical exhaustion, but that's no excuse.
Coming soon: A goddamn fiction project.
In the meantime, enjoy a previous fiction project available for download to iTunes. I know it works on Firefox, if anyone has any technology issues with it, drop me a line.
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