This is a long time in the making, but I am delighted to present to you a collection of 76 drawings, made during 1998 and 2007. This is a self-published volume through Blurb, selling there for 24.95. If it helps, only 3 dollars of that goes to me — printing 80 pages of images is not cheap. The up-side is that the book is fantastic — not just the content, but the actual book is very nice.
For those of you who don't like physical things, how about a pdf of the book for free? Ok. The dpi is screen resolution, not print, but you can look at the pretty pictures.
Enjoy it and please feel free to drop some feedback.
I dropped off last week, so I'll play catch-up tomorrow.
This is an old animation that Meg and I did way back in the day. Her concept and something that was done very quickly. Nonetheless, it still makes me laugh.
So a recent project has been to move most everything I have on video (VHS and DV) over to true digital bits — which explains these weekly posts of video projects. This one was shot in 2003, when I just had a camera with me and decided to shoot as I drove down Sunset in the rain.
No narrative, nothing but lights and darkness. The soundtrack is "Weak Become Heroes" by the Streets. It's actually what the original soundtrack was on the video, but since there are a couple of cuts, I just threw the track over the original sound. It's also apropos because I was still rocking the hell out of that album then; this was shot at the end of my love affair with it. (And by love affair, I mean I probably listened to it once or twice a week at least.)
I didn't do a ton of LA specific shooting while I lived there; this is one of the few pieces I have that puts me right back in the heart of that city. And yeah, sometimes I really miss it down there.
Ah, the last of the movies from my 519 class. This one is notable for several reasons:
1. it stars my freshman roommate, Richard Bloom, who lives in LA, working as an assistant and art dept coordinator. He did acting as an undergrad, so it was fun to re-connect with this little piece, 8 years after we lived together.
2. it is certainly the video I think of when I think of the art I made over these years. Weird, static, unbalanced, closeup shots. A surreal, improvised story that is larger than what we end up seeing in the film.
3. I reshot parts of it as the final project for the class, so two version exist. This is the re-edit, which is marginally better than the original.
So I missed posting some creative work last week. Totally my bad — it was all queued up and ready to go and my Friday-Monday got a bit sidetracked. More on that later.
To make up for it, I'm throwing up last week's movie plus this week's one at the same time. These are two more of the 4 from that USC class that 'stubble' came out of.
'Block' was the third film shot and I will be the firs to admit that it doesn't totally jibe the way I wanted it to. It fits, logically, into the work I was producing at the time — surreal with static shots, alternating between extreme close-ups and large voids of negative space. Narratively, it evokes a dream, though I wish it felt a bit more coherent.
The fourth movie is "The Makeout Queen." I had the title long before I had the film and, again, as has been the case in many of more ambitious stories, the execution fell short of the original script. In this case, it turned out to be far too difficult to find random people who were willing to kiss a stranger. Valerie also had a zit on her chin — I hadn't noticed and we seriously had to crit this in class. The ending rubbed my teacher the wrong way, but I think it was because he was hoping for more. (People thought I had put the credits in the middle of the movie and were all ready for 3 minutes more of some torrid affair. I much preferred to tease it, which turned out to disappoint in anyway.)
As was also the case by then, all the dialog is improvised. With both of these films — anything said onscreen is made up, anything said off-screen was scripted.
