"Ink & Water" : finally complete

After over a year and a half, our sort-of-a-music-video is finally complete! Ink & Water was made with no CG, just water, ink, and some creative lighting. Shot by Boa Simon on 35mm and on the RED, the project was edited by Nate Orloff to music by Brian Andrews, who wrote the score after being inspired by the footage we'd shot.

Turn up that bass and enjoy!

Le Zola and "Contentment"

Cinema Le Zola in Villeurbanne

Last weekend I had the privilege to join a number of other international filmmakers at the Villeurbanne Short Film Festival, in Lyon, France.

There were long shorts, short shorts, and Contentment played for the first time in front of an audience on the big screen. It looked great, and though it didn't win any prizes, the audience cheered me when I went up afterword for the interview, and told them how we made the film using equipment borrowed from a commercial we were shooting at the time. I have the feeling the audience was made up of mostly the rebel generation of filmmakers.

"Contentment" selected in France

Contentment has been selected for the 32nd Villeurbanne Short Film Festival! Villeurbanne is a suburb, part of the greater Lyon metropolitan area, so I'm excited to attend and check out the scene. I love film festivals.

The only (hilarious?) caveat is the more I correspond with the festival folk, the more they keep mentioning that I was selected for the "First Short Film" section. I have a sneaking suspicion this means the first short film you ever made. Well, it's not exactly the first I've ever made...more like the 25th. I wonder how that confusion happened. Hopefully I won't be publicly assaulted on the subject.

I also have to do subtitles in French. Now Contentment can be as pretentious as possible! What's more pretentious than French subtitles, amirite?

Huzzah to movies!

Boa and Jenny Do France - and 3 new projects

Glory upon glories, my great friends and cinema collaborators Boa Simon and Jenny Hou actually flew from LA to Lyon, France, where I'm currently living, to stay with me for two full goddamn weeks.

Well, we didn't waste the opportunity - we made it a working vacation! And out of it we got three pieces. All of these were shot with the three of us as cast and crew, on the Rebel T2i with a set of lenses, a tripod, and a handmade shoulder mount.

The first two are spec ads. One is for Velo'v, a bike service in Lyon where you can pick up a bicycle, ride around, and drop it off in another part of the city. All automated, very convenient. My storyboards looked something like this:

 

The idea is that it stays at the POV of the biker, changing backgrounds as he travels throughout his day. Boa, genius that he is, built a rig out of a steadicam vest:

The hat is my protection

Using this clever thing, we got exactly the angle I drew in the board. Then we rode all around Lyon, filming in various picturesque locations with Jenny:

In order to get the right angle, one must bike with
their ass out and chest up, like a moron

Passers-by were surprisingly unimpressed.

The cool part about this spot is it required very little, and I think the effect will be visually very interesting. It looks like we got a bicycle handle rig, when all we needed was me riding like a fool and a 12mm lens.

After Lyon, we took a five-day trip to Paris, up north. There we stayed with a friend of mine, and filmed a spec spot for Coke - a kind of spontaneous travelogue. We tried to capture little moments and hints of narrative as we simultaneously toured the city's sights.

Shooting out the train window

In Versailles

In a Parisian cafe

Getting up at 6am is worth it

We found this one conceptually very difficult to shoot. There are plenty of commercials out there that are abstract and "moody" rather than narrative (see previous post), but to actually execute it, when you're trained to shoot for narrative content, is tricky. We tried to grab small glances, smiles, gestures, and light, and we're hoping the free form can be crafted into something emotional.

The end result is that we have a ton of footage - which I'm handing off to Billy Peake, an editor and Chapman alum, who will make signal of the noise.

Our final project is - yes, you guessed it - the 5th episode of our famous and influential web show, Danger! Relax, Please! : "Baguette Brawl." It's French themed. In a way.

I play the villain. There's a knife in the bread.

That's a real brain. A brain is involved.

This one was actually the most challenging to shoot. It was rainy and cloudy, so we fought that, and also in the winter it doesn't stay light for very long during the day. The final challenge was the brain - it smelled awful. I still can't get brainstink out of my kitchen.

But my philosophy with DRP has always been to try to get the most out of the least - find interesting locations, props, and costumes, and make it just pop like a cartoon.

Watch "Baguette Brawl" right this minute! The other two, the ads, are forthcoming...

Keeping busy in France

I updated the Drawings page to include storyboards from a few films I've done, animations that I did (stop-motion and hand-drawn, crude but entertaining as hell) when I was 12 or so, and illustrations for an upcoming children's book series.

Next next week, my good friend and talented cinematographer Boa Simon and his producer girlfriend Jenny Hou are flying out to France to visit me. We're going to take the opportunity to film some stuff!

First up we have a commercial spot for Lyon's "Vélo'V" bicycle system, a sort of pick-it-up and drop-it-off-somewhere-else deal. Pretty neat, and I came up with a first-person POV ad we'll do that's simple and effective.

Next we're going to travel to Paris and do something atmospheric, ambient, and freeform, in some sense like the recent Levi's "Go Forth" ad campaign. We'll take advantage of Paris' lesser-known avenues and nooks, and capture something visually exciting and emotional.

And finally, I know nobody asked for it, but you know you want it - another episode of Danger! Relax, Please! will be coming soon. How can I resist? 

Working with my hands; getting plagiarized by BBC

I decided I wanted to build a model. So much of the work I do is on the computer that sometimes I get the need to work with my hands again. It's important. 

The picture above is a drawing I did of the good ship the Merry Mariner, an adventuring vessel that I invented for a kid's book I'm writing. A windmill-powered boat? Can't buy that model in the store, gotta do it myself! 

So I bought a thousand-pack box of popsicle sticks, a hot glue gun, and set to work.

Beginning stages...shirtless with cardboard

Cutting! Gluing!

Found the material for the windmill's sails in the trash

Painting! Red! White highlights!

So much red!

And she's done!

For scale

There you go, a scale model of the Merry Mariner, done from scratch. I can't tell you how much I'd love to make a stop-motion film with a model like this. But of course, it'd be 100 times bigger, and the sides would come off, and you'd see all the rooms and stuff inside...awesome.

In other news, a friend of mine sent me this link. To the left you'll eventually find a video ... a video which is eerily similar to my spot series for the Albuquerque Film Festival. 

Glowing ball of images unraveled at dusk by a gathering crowd? Seems a little familiar, doesn't it?

Did the BBC rip me off? Who knows?

New 'do

The site's got a new color scheme and new layout. Rough edges are still being smoothed - feel free to let me know if something looks crappy, or broken, or doesn't work.

Or just keep it to yourself. No one likes a complainer.

Meanwhile: