satan is my motor

Here's Brent as he, what is he doing? Wiring something? I'm excited for the install to be done like a kid who can't wait for recess- it is so beautiful outside! Also I finally finished all the circuits for the sculpture which was probably one of the most tedious film related things I've had to do to date...but it did allow me to go to this great store that was part hardware store, part model train depot part penny candy counter where they had this magnifying glass/needle nose clamp contraption to hold and solder tiny little motors for tiny little towns. I hope Brent goes back to making tiny little cartoons soon...until then, lighting the sculptures, plugging things in, finishing touches...!

machine head

A brief moment of panic occurred today when the motor of the cylinder machine sculpture suddenly came to a halt! This event led to panicked phone calls & a rush hour trip over the Bay Bridge into San Francisco ending in the warehouse machine shop of an amazing mechanical artist/engineer who quickly diagnosed the problem as a simple power source issue. Most likely the fuse blew out in the museum. Thank goodness this turned into a non-emergency that concluded in bourbon & cornflake ice cream and some time in the crazy studio space pictured above. But what was an actual event was the first ever screening for the press of Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then at the IFC Center in New York! Regular screenings will run from May 7th-13th, tickets will be available starting May 3rd! Yay!

rehearsing my choir

Slowly putting the chorus together.....

pipe dreams

We're in beautiful, not so sunny right now, Berkeley California! I've never been here and my presumptions about the food, the beautiful landscape and how much I would like it were definitely right on point! It is a wonderful place. The museum is pretty insanely wonderful too- someone described the space as a mix between the Guggenheim & the Whitney, spiraling upward with chunky concrete, like an M.C. Escher etch with platforms and stairs trailing into distances. We just found out that the anthropology museum across the street from the art museum has a giant collection of Edison wax cylinders which couldn't be more fitting for this show! 

This morning we drove around the back alleys & warehouses that sell every kind of tool, hardware or raw material you could possibly need searching for (a ridiculous amount of) copper pipe. Eventually we found it...in addition to finding a crazy outdoor sculpture tool warehouse welding studio (think the most amazing looking steam punk mini golf course you could imagine- steel dinosaurs, a copper buggy, a metal collaged clock tower) tucked away behind the plumbing supply store and one of the many lumberyards. Back in the museum now installing...and drinking the world's best coffee! California, I understand why you steal all my friends. 

electric youth

I know nothing about circuitry. When I learn things here and there they make sense but the general idea and end result of soldering a wire to another wire just seems like some sort of magical alchemy to me! So now I am copying a small circuit board for a film related sculpture...I do see why child labor is so appealing now, tiny little hands and sharp eyes would most likely be really, really great at this! Note: Nervousfilms does not support or condone child labor. (rubs at weary old eyes with weary old hands)

home is where the cat is

We finally left New York, a brief stop in rural Pennsylvania for film editing & sculpture building and then on to Berkeley California to install another Gravity inspired museum show! Coming home to an empty backyard feels weird. Even weirder is the fact that the part of our backyard that is missing is in another place. Here is one last shot of Leonard's transplanted house showing a glimpse of the gallery & a glimpse of Leonard's home...I just realized that this picture was taken almost in the exact spot where Brent & I met, I don't think I ever could have imagined that all of this would have resulted from that one little introduction!

sometimes old can be just as good as new

From what I've heard about Brent's first NY gallery show there was just a cacophony of sound overwhelming the entire space. At some point last year it was decided to try and harness the sound for a cavernous museum show which also makes a lot of sense given the work he has been making. His films have become very personal, the language & narration less of an attack and more in the tradition of storyteller positioned on the back porch begging you to learn from his years and to open your eyes as opposed to his earlier work that furiously wanted you to do the same. 

So, last year Brent drew these phonograph horns on sticks suspended from a ceiling and that was that! Tiny speakers have been embedded in antique phonograph horns positioning and directing the sound wherever Brent's films may play. The horns work so well it is amazing! Take that expensive laser speakers whose sound is able to drop off at an exact location and that I have seen every museum/gallery employee salivate over when saying the phrase "Let's talk about the sound." Here is a picture of one of the horns in use at the Edlin gallery show eerily hanging above the Gravity preview piece.

the orange glow of a strangers living room

 

What a long week!

my pillow is a threshold

Right now Brent is burning discs for the vignettes of Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then that will be playing in the gallery starting tomorrow. The shorts are pretty wonderful- they are mostly cut with footage that will appear in the feature film but also include some narration and even some images that are unique to these separate pieces. So, tomorrow people other than Brent & I (and the lovely people who read this here blog!) get a glimpse at the film we've been building out there in the woods of Pennsylvania we call home!

I'll put up some more shots of the installation after the opening but for now...here is  a picture of a wooden hinged "angel with listening machine" hovering above the set in the gallery. O, and yes. That IS the bed we've been sleeping on in the gallery all week.

weathervane chickens

Today a man walking by the gallery saw the film title and was enraged "Of course gravity was everywhere!" I don't know if he said the word preposterous but he should have especially since he was wearing suspenders. Suspenders were everywhere back then too. Obviously I am exhausted! I did the obligatory Brent run to the specialty lightbulb store in addition to befriending any and all local hardware store employees, caffeine vendors & purveyors of oil paints! So far the strangest part of putting the show together has been to see the pieces of the film set against a sterile white walled gallery when our original backdrop was a tree lined sky and homemade, pitch black curtains! I think the delicate weathervane is happy about his current windless predicament though...

chelsea girls

Install! Install! Install!  I convinced Brent not to sleep on the floor but he still  insisted on sleeping in the gallery. In fact we slept in Leonard's bed in the gallery with the set stars looking down on us and the starless NY sky peaking through the skylight above! Below is a footprint of Leonard's house I made when we were trying to figure out the logistics of the space. We've had to alter a bit here and there but for the most part it's looking pretty close to what used to live in the yard! 

there's no place like home

Today I join Brent in New York to try and help rebuild Leonard Woods house and try to convince him to stop sleeping on the gallery floor. It is pretty funny to think that Leonard built his house by hand, then it was torn down, then we rebuilt a version, and now we will be rebuilding that version over and over again. It is a strange methodical memorial I guess, like the original house, but in our case we are building to save not a person but a story (but I guess they are the same thing nowadays really...). Now that I think of it, Brent even built a life size version of Leonard's house out of paper before the one in the yard in order to film a small short that was expanded into Gravity. So many times has this house been rebuilt! The paper house set still lives in the barn! Here is a picture of the very first paper version of Brent's version of Leonard's house!

what position my position is in

Like most of Brent's films there is a narrator in Gravity. It's hard to say what position the narrator is in. Omniscient? First person? Third? I don't know. He watches, comments, questions, relates the actions & sometimes even the dialogue that is going on within the film and within the world at large. I know there's this thing called free indirect discourse which is sort of where a lot of Brent's narrators lie I think, a third person who talks for/as the characters at some points but is also watching & interpreting along with the reader/watcher. The camera takes on a lot of the actions of the narrator voice too. 

It moves like a character watching from all kinds of angles, looking in on what is happening which gets even more layered when thinking about Leonard's devotion to God, the way Leonard begged God to come down and intervene in his personal sadness. I wanted to bring out the narrator prescence even more so I decided to give him his own foley noise - a gentle glass tinged swoosh as he hovers around the screen. 

I remember when Brent started adding the narrator to the film and a friend of ours said "You know narration is stigmatized in film." I don't know if that's true or not but I do know that if it wasn't for The Stranger in The Big Lebowski I would never have known early on that The Dude was high in the running for laziest worldwide...narrator or no narrator, everyone tells a story in a different way I guess!

if you believe they put a man on the moon

I realize now that everytime we completed a scene for Gravity it became my new favorite scene completely displacing all of the other scenes that came before. Here is a film still I can't believe I haven't posted yet and that, during editing, I just rediscovered! I think it is from one of the first film shoots we did about a year ago featuring me and my giant wooden moon. I know, I know, the moon is everybody's....also, I apologize for the lack of good photos lately, I've been unprepared without a camera too often!

checking it twice

Giant wooden legs? Check. Giant white dress? Check. Lightbulb halo? Check. So begins loading a truck with the film set! The list goes on and on. I'm a big fan of lists ever since I went on a road trip to Tennessee and we accidentally lost my friend Todd's sleeping bag in the excitement which left him freezing in the car during most of our camping excursions except for the night when we pooled money together for a shag carpeted hotel room where the"Free Continental Breakfast" consisted of week old Krispy Kremes and where our beer kept disappearing from our room when we weren't around..? (rechecks list in fear) Anyway...truck one leaves tomorrow after some much needed sleep! Wooden piano? Check. Wooden stove? Check. Leonard's House? Check.

slow century

Some days it is comically frustrating to try and run a film studio in a barn in the woods. Like today for instance when the power kept going out. I'm using the past tense there with "kept" in hopes that the power going out is a thing of the past, in the same way that not having electricity is a thing of the past.  Brent & I are both running giant quicktimes off of giant hardrives editing and cursing each time the wheeze of dying power is heard. On a side note, we went to run some errands on account of the power being out and when pulling into our friend Jerry's driveway to borrow his truck we were greeted with this: a runaway cow! What year do I live in?

metal on metal

I love going to local places and buying things like, say, a huge water storage tank and asking questions like, "Will we be able to drill holes in it easily?" Making a film, and a lot of the art out here, has led us to taking normal, everyday things and turning them into something completely different. The only strange thing is trying to figure out what will work without sounding like a maniac to the person we are buying supplies from... I remember going to the local hardware store once and asking for the smallest screws they had. When they asked what they were for I answered "A puppet." Sometimes it goes over well, sometimes we just lie so as not to get caught up in explanations, other times people are eager to problem solve along with us...this brings us to today's adventure in steel plate buying!

We needed to get some steel plates for the wax cylinder  piece which led us to a local Iron Works shop. The place was an amazing metal working compound of sorts; giant brick warehouses surrounding a small lot with a patch of grass, massive prototype I beams welded into formations all over the place, portraits of custom curvy metal banisters lining the lobby, stacks of metal waiting to be molded or melted or cut. It was pretty amazing! I think it's what the inside of Richard Serra's head must look like! Luckily a friend of a friend worked there so he knew what we were up to right away:"Art!" he said smiling as he picked up the heavy metal plates and loaded them into our car. Whew, another awkward materials conversation avoided!

"...nothing rhymes with Bart!"

When I met Brent a few years back and he wooed me to the woods with the glitz & glamor of making a film (ha!) it was at a gallery opening in New York. It was at the now defunct Bellwether Gallery run by the progressively keen eye of Becky Smith. As an artist herself Becky's contemporary art curation was presented beautifully making each show look amazing not only because of the roster of unique talent she represented but also her own stylized production of each show! I didn't run around the art world circuit too much when I lived in New York but I always tried to see whatever it was she had on display. Which makes the fact I missed Brent's show there all the more fated!

Oddly Brent's new gallery, Edlin Gallery, moved on over to the space that used to house his old gallery! Edlin represents a strange array of outsider artists (untrained, self taught, weirdos in the woods types including the infamous Henry Darger) mixed with some highly skilled contemporary blood (including our good friend Mr. Chris Doyle whose current animation work is captivatingly amazing/immersive and whose photorealistic watercolors are unrivaled). Brent sort of inhabits both spheres I guess, a kind of self taught contemporary artist. Being an un-schooled artist/filmaker is definitely important to his work- he's never thinking of restrictions he just goes! Which is exactly how we went about making an entire film in our yard!

So, at the end of the week we move the whole main house from the set into a gallery in New York. O dear. The above poster is made from a film still of Gravity, a film still from the scene which was the culprit behind the animating contraption, pieces of which still haunt/obstruct the living space! The show opens April 17th, opening reception 6-9pm (stop by and say hello!) & runs thru June 5th, Edlin Gallery 134 Tenth Ave.

Imitation of Life

You might not believe me but I'm going to tell it like it is. I opened the door today and sitting there in the driveway was this:

I swear! At first I thought it was the neighbors chickens but after consulting internet.com it turns out it is most likely a duck egg! I guess nursing those ducks through the harsh winter and them making sound recording impossible for months with their maniacal quacking has finally paid off! I'm only posting about this because the character I play in the film, Mary Wood,  collects bird eggs. I seriously cant believe eggs are dropping out of birds and onto the set in such a useful way, it's almost like nature is trying to make up for all that wind that caused us so much trouble...! O, and I can't get through Easter without thinking of this childhood gem, no wonder I now live & work in an animation studio?

let's move to the country

I never think to write about the farmhouse because it has just sort of always been there. Brent's childhood home that was ruined in a fire years ago sits on the property- the big hole burned in the side only recently covered with plywood. I never think of it as something special until someone comes to visit and undoubtedly spends hours photographing the weird decay, the cobwebs, the broken windows, the cascading light. It has also become a place to build sets here at Nervousfilms which has also added to me forgetting it as it's own strange & beautiful place.

Brent's short Carlin was filmed almost entirely in the house, Tinkerer Used to Be a Trade sets still linger in two of the abandoned rooms (including a death bed scene attached to a wall so as to shoot head on but seemingly from high above and a rotating set divided into three small scenes depicting the interior of Thomas Edison's dying thoughts viewed through a hole in his head), I even filmed a short for Electric Literature in the space! Gravity also has a few shots in or around the farmhouse. The narrator of the film explains it is the house Mary grew up in. It's where her mother was born and died. It's the place she moves out of to enjoy her life with Leonard. There's so much wrapped up in the fictional world of that poor little house!

It's come in handy for set design too! One day we hope to fix it up and make it livable but first we must decide how to evict the GIGANTIC raccoon who has taken over the attic! I keep waiting for him to invite me over for tea he is so domesticated! Or maybe send me his reel...

the deconstructionist

The last wall of Leonard's  house was taken down today   I don't know how to punctuate that sentence? I am sad but relieved but happy but want to put it all back together? I think my dear friend Emily recently said it best about my whole filmaking experience, "You must be excited and panicked!" Which is definitely how I feel and, basically, how I've felt the last two years working on the film! With more to come! Anway, so right now our yard is littered with every single piece of the house waiting to be put onto a series of trucks next week (!) and driven to New York for a gallery show. Here is a picture titled "The Ground Under Leonard's House With Smashed Up- Engine Dead Car" alternately called "The Yard is Soon Going to Look Like What's Left of a World's Fair When All the Stuff Is Gone."