Another installment of the film-a-week-project. Colour 16mm. Close-up lenses duct-taped to the camera. surreal textures. dreamscape.

Lots of other projects in the works, and back to UVic in a week. Seems like there aren’t enough hours. Doing a residency at CineVic right now, working on the Steenbeck to finish off a short film about D’Arcy Island sponsored by the NFB’s Filmmaker’s Assistance Program. Spent the last few days (and the next few also) gearing up for a MeatDraw video that will be shot next week. Four minutes. One continuous shot. From earth to space and back spanning over 3 days. Quite an endeavour, but fun problem-solving. We built the asteroids, clouds and stars yesterday, next we’re modding a red wagon into a rocketship, and building satellites. Busy and exciting times.

It has been a busy summer trying to keep up with everything, but a few more weekly film exercises are getting finished up. This one is called “oxide” and is a snippit of colour 16mm film. I’ve been playing around with extension tubes and close-up lenses duct-taped to a Bolex. Some interesting surreal textures when you look at the world so closely. The soundtrack is courtesy of Mike Wolske.

My Bolex died. In the middle of a shoot. This is the last thing it recorded. I’m calling it “Swansong.”

My friend Gerald Saul, who has been making a film-a-week this year as well (and, unlike me, is keeping up with it) did a series of films called “How to be an Experimental Filmmaker”

I like the idea, so I made a list that accompanies this week’s film

How to be an Experimental Filmmaker

Step #1 – Use old, antiquated equipment

Step #2  – Get professionals to be your on-screen talent. Make sure they have flown in from another country

Step #3 – Forget to close the gate on the camera. Blame the old equipment. (see Step #1)

Step #4  Have the camera completely break down half-way through the shoot (see Step #1)

Step #5 – Tint and tone the blurry footage and release it on the internet

Step #6 – Pretend that the film ended up exactly as you had planned.

The ghostly image is Carly Berrett, an incredible modern dancer from Utah. We met during MediaNet’s Dance for the Camera Workshop a couple weeks ago. Lots of fun. Embarrassing that half of the footage didn’t work out.  

Fortunately, most of the other footage worked out and will be made into a different film, the film I had initially intended to do (without some of the parts.) Still a lot of post production to do on that, so in the meantime, here is the final film that ran through my Bolex. I find it mesmerizing.

Mike Wolske made the soundtrack, but I played around with it a bit.

An experiment with acrylic paints, india inks and drain cleaner on an old 16mm film

(I think there’s some dog hair in there too)

The soundtrack was made by Clifford Dunn in Seattle, who makes some crazy experimental soundscape stuff with a flute and processor (among other things, I’m sure)…Check out his website: http://www.clifforddunnmusic.com

This month at Open Space: The Deceleration Chamber.

The Deceleration Chamber is concerned with two entangled ideas: the elasticity of time—especially slow time—and how time is specifically experienced when one is away from familiar surroundings: on tour, traveling or on vacation. Encountering the unfamiliar, being lost or disorientated affects how time is perceived, how data is recorded and recollected, and how all of us choose the mode by which we measure, mark or experience the passage of time.

Artists Scott Amos, Frédérick Belzile, Scott Conarroe, Nathalie Daoust, and Daniel Tom explore differential time scales and refer to time not only as interval or measurement, but also as an active element in the construction of art. The Deceleration Chamber offers compelling time studies that directly and indirectly play off the habits, schedules and the erratic timetables of permanent and transitory populations.

It’s up until August 16th at 510 Fort St. in Victoria, from 10 to 5 Tuesday through Saturday.

With the help of Brian Macdonald and the the staff and volunteers at Open Space, I installed a 9 channel video installation for the show titled “Our Victoria.” This is a clip from the ninth channel. Colin Hander and Mike Wolske did the sound.

Here’s the little Blurb I wrote up about the piece.

Victoria is a city of postcard images, but the most impressive things never seem to make it to the printer. The Inner Harbour and the Parliament Buildings provide the background for millions of snapshots a year; They are the basis of visitors’ memories of our city. Although they are a part of our city, they are not the places that we frequent, the Victoria that we know and love. They are the parts that we show to others. The magical parts of the city we keep to ourselves.

When visiting other places, time passes differently, more slowly, you take notice of little details: the weathered bricks on a building, the intricacies of power lines, the reflections in windows. Everyday objects and places are rendered extraordinary by simply taking the time to observe them.

Our hometowns have similar delicate features, but we seldom notice. They are simply distractions that we pass by.

Our Victoria is a nine channel video installation, made to emulate old home movies. Although filmed in 2006, it looks as though it’s from past decades. The nine televisions are nine individual rolls of film, raw and unedited to emulate the frenetic nature of home movies and the raw memories they capture. It is an intimate look into the places that only the most adventurous visitors will see, the places that you won’t see in brochures, the places that have not yet been reduced to postcards.

Here it is folks. A new music video for Hank and Lily’s “Xanadu.” The song is from there newly-released album “North America.” Of course, it stars both Hank and Lily. I love this song!

They’re doing some touring this summer through Ontario and Alberta, and you can find the schedule on their MySpace page here. I could gush about how great Hank and Lily are, but instead I’ll just say – If you only see one show this summer, go see Hank and Lily. Seriously. Ask anyone who has ever seen the show; I wish I could describe it in words.

Here it is in action, the mechanical set that I built in the basement…too bad it’s only for a little bit of screen time, I’ll have to use it again for another film.

And we’ve hit the halfway point in the year, so this should be podcast #26…but it’s not. It’s only podcast #21. what can I say? It has been a lot of work…and I’ve still got some catching up to do. There are a couple pieces that I never posted, because I believe that there is nothing interesting about them. Maybe I’m my own worst critic, but I really think they are void of anything worthwhile, so I couldn’t bring myself to share them with the world.

And, on that note, here is podcast #21. It is called Primordial Soup – Part 2. Part 1 is currently in another town, having music composed for it. It’s called Primordial Soup because I threw a bunch of clear acrylic, ink, pencil crayon shavings, ashes, hairs, rust, and anything else I could find into a bucket with some chemically treated film…to see if any life would emerge from it. It had a rough time getting through the projector…and is now ruined. But there is some life.

Along the same lines as “Flypaper”, the last podcast. This time, I collected bits and pieces from around the garden, dried them out, broke them up, and taped them to a strip of 16mm film. The results aren’t as unique as flypaper, but I had to give it a try. The colours of a lot of the flower petals were lost in the drying process because I dried them under lights (I’m so impatient.)

Next time, I’ll collect a better variety of coloured flower petals, and make sure they’re thin enough to let light through.

Now I’m wondering what else I can tape to film. Unfortunately, if it’s not thin enough, it bulges when going through the gate, and the focus gets lost. Thinking I might do some frame-by frame transfer to 16mm to have a little more control. Might not have enough patience for that. We’ll see.

This film was inspired by Stan Brakhage.

This new film is for the “Seek Cover” show tonight at The Project. The idea behind Seek Cover is to create a new artwork (performance, painting, anything goes) based on an existing artwork. I made a film, inspired by Stan Brakhage’s “Mothlight.” I collected all of the dead bugs out of the windowsills in the house, and our neighbour’s house, dissected them, and taped them to strips of 16mm film. flys, bees, a spider, a moth, and a few giant mosquito-lookin’ things. I felt a little weird doing it, but the results are pretty cool. I think part of the charm of it is the texture created by the tape, and the air bubbles and fingerprints it trapped. I’m calling the piece “Flypaper.” In the spirit of Brakhage, I didn’t put a musical soundtrack to it, instead I just recorded the sound of the 16mm projector as I was digitizing it.

As the days get longer and the end of June approaches, I realize that I’m more-than-a-little-behind in the film-a-week project. Spent the last week doing JumpCuts for the Victoria Film Festival, and other projects have come up, burying my pet project. For now. I’m still working on it, and a whole bunch of other things: a new video for Hank and Lily that we’ll finish shooting next week and we’re in the planning stages of a new MeatDraw video as well. Getting prepared to shoot an NFB sponsored experimental short film on D’Arcy Island, and a video installation at Open Space in July. And then there’s the feature. We’ll talk about the feature later.

For now, here is the next installment of the film-a-week project.

Last year, I found a dinosaur on my doorstep. It turns out that a friend of mine found it and left it for me. I doesn’t use tapes, it just has a composite video out. I tested it, with no luck, so I left it in my closet. Recently, I fished it out to disassemble it for parts to use for the Hank and Lily video set, but before I could bring myself to take it apart, I decided to test it one more time. It works.

I’m shocked.

I’m fascinated by the way it reacts with light. different than film, different than DV. Interesting. So here’s a little test I did with it, intentionally out of focus, and blown out, with the video signal piped into my miniDV camera to record it.