1997
The Startling Conclusion
Student Film
We see a man, dark and blurry wearing a cowboy hat, smoking a cigarette with a big grin on his face. Cut between his look of triumph is the scene of a long haired man running through the forest, crashing through branches, visibly exhausted and lost. In a final moment of exertion he falls to his knees, and pulls out a postcard: it is of Vancouver; but the name 'Vancouver' has been crossed out in thick felt pen and the words 'PRAGUE' written beside it. We cut back once more to the smoking man, and the scene fades out.
Credits were an intentional blurred mess and began my self-indulgent love affair with credits: "transportation provided by Chevrolet", "catering by Wendy's", and other cryptic messages in silly fonts. It rounded out the snide attitude of a plot that was intended to make no sense while trying to trick people into thinking they were missing something.
1998
A Film By
Student Film
We start with a collage of various introductions, 'presents', welcomes, and film-embedded audio - before cutting to a static camera, focused on a dark room, with a man on a chair reading a book. This scene persists for a painfully long time; intentionally so. Four minutes after this begins, it ends much as it begins, but cuts quickly to a fast collage of animated snippets, black and white cowboy films, Butch Cassidy falling over, and a man in a uniform cheering from a crowd. Embedded film audio bursts out of nowhere from the lulling hum of the projector and the audience is caught off guard, with a montage of scenes from old animated films and live action westerns; it becomes obvious quickly that they are organized in a sequence, with each disparate scene referencing another disparate scene, cut together to make a semi-abstract narrative spanning several decades of old popular film footage, animated and non, generating its own mixed soundtrack from its own sound source and also from the exterior noises of the projector.
We cut back to the man in the room, with the film flipping upside down and in reverse, in red and then white; he then throws his book on the ground and walks out. The collage continues again, but with a more focused intent, with new characters(including, copyrights be damned, Mickey and Mighty Mouse), Buffalo Bill and other old cowboy heroes and pony shows punctuating train robberies by Butch Cassidy. Cartoon characters stand outside Butch Cassidy's saloon, Buffalo Bill takes on Mighty Mouse in a battle of subtitles, strange animated arguments between an old cartoon man and Laurel and Hardy ensue. Eventually these confusing scenes wrap themselves up into a 'goodbye' montage, where a slow farewell unfolds; and we cut back to the man with the book, a jumpcut backwards in time to him walking out of the room and outside to light up a cigarette.
Jump cuts are used gratuitously in the final scene as the camera switches between colour and black and white, to a half second behind the previous cut to a half second forward, playing with the notion of time displacement and technicolor. In this time he is silent, and we witness a strange near-filmification of the original 'boring' character as he becomes somewhat influenced by the manic montage that he had been pitted against.
This film was entirely about attention spans and the death of being able to read a book. In the face of television and film, and with the growing popularity of video games, a young person such as I was then could not hope to be able to sit down and focus on reading. The constant confusing assault of images from all directions made the notion of books and words impossible, the idea that one could train themselves to focus on them, and care about their quality, something nearly inconceivable.
When I showed this film to my film project class the teacher commented that it had "the best editing I've ever seen in a student film". Looking back on it, it does indeed possess a very attentive eye to editing, and a semi-coherent narrative pieced together from original footage and old popular film footage. At nine minutes long, it still exists only in film format as it could only be experienced; the film-embedded audio is integral to its oeuvre, as well as the concept of projector-box-as-beast-of-entertainment.
2001
Meeting Jesus
Student Film
A fade up on a simple quote: “Purgatory is a sort of cosmic clearing house….. where the entities and dispositions born of sin find fulfillment and regeneration. Without the existence of such a clearing house, the Spiritual atmosphere of the earth would have been completely poisoned long ago….” From a book called The Zelator by Mark Hedsel.
A car swerves along a winding road, into a tunnel, where the headlights of a truck and the blare of its horn fade into a scene on the other side, where the car slows to a stop outside a bar, the “Cantina de Jesus”. A character gets out of the car, looks around, and enters the bar.
Inside is a warm restaurant, empty save for one man in a Hawaiian sweatshirt and shorts, sporting dreadlocks, a Jesus on vacation if you will. “My car won't start,” the driver says to Jesus, and Jesus says “That's okay, another one's coming.” They raise a glass of tequila shots, toast and drink, and an el camino pulls up. The driver bids farewell to Jesus, gets in the El Camino, and the car drives off into the sunset as Mexican music crescendos; we fade to white.
This was the final 'demo reel' for my time at Vancouver Film School. The subject matter was meant to be amusing, semi-spiritual, though apparently it 'offended' a few students in my puritanical corner of the world(never mind the hopeless sexual frustrations that so many other student films revealed). My time at VFS was an odd one, and I cannot say for certain that it was all positive; however it took my art into a better direction in my opinion, that of digital artwork, which I believe works better for purposes of distribution and dissemination.
The goal is and should always be, though, to never fall prey to simply using these 'technologies' simply because they are the cause du jour. If you're interested in my 'career' digital artworks, they can be found under other categories on this site.
2002
Untitled
An old highschool colleague contacted me, and after catching up on our journeys since graduation, asked me if I wanted to collaborate in an interdisciplinary project; where he, studying his master's degree in an American university, would provide music and I would create a time-based piece to it.
Set against Bach's Sonata II in A minor, first movement, and performed by Richard Dorfer, it is important to note that this piece was intended as a live piece, building on some of the things I learned in 1998 from my abstract-narrative film piece “A Film By”. The actual film was a computer-generated rendering of a destroyed city, church, town, and we move the camera through this scene, slowly, with the music. It was performed live on may 10th, 2002, in front of a massive audience of 15 people.
This film brings together some ancient ideas – such as the silent film era of live performers beside a film screen, with a 21st century twist of using 3D software and the two authors collaborating strictly through the internet up until the point that we met in Kent, Ohio. The pressure to complete on time was intense, as I was dealing with a five and a half minute piece of music, and thus computer rendering, and having to storyboard, model, animate, and render this in less than five months – along with correspond with the musician and make sure we were on the same wavelength, and provide him with an animatic beforehand so he could practice his own pacing to the film, since he was doing a violin solo.
Indeed, many lessons were learned, and it marked the first film done without institutional pressure - in other words, even though he was technically a grad student, I could no longer label my material 'student film' and make excuses. But of course, I'm still learning.
2004
(new study)
