Pennsylvania Power and Light

A full day after the hurricane that wasn't...our power went out? Pennsylvania, always behind the times! It was a weird day of candles, kerosene lamps (which were originally purchased as Gravity props!), an Amish farmstead in the parking lot of a strip mall (no idea how to explain that one? It was literally in between a chain retailer and a pizza buffet!) and coffee rationing! Our woodsy studio was sort of at a halt given this situation (O, and the fact that the internet keeps going on and off too...! ) but I guess it forced us to take a much needed break from noise and animating!

Speaking of which, during recent animating adventures we were looking up images of swordfish for part of a scene Brent is drawing and I read that swordfish have adapted their eye muscles to heat their eyes and brain for better vision! What!? Who knew?! Heated eyes to see better? I wonder if they make heated glasses specifically for animators weary, frame ridden eyes....?


Also, a quick update on our upcoming whereabouts: Brent is visiting Penn State today (if you are up there you should go see him lecture, it is a beautiful campus and I'm sure the rivers are high and mighty with post hurricane rains!), on September 17th we will be participating in The Kitchen Block Party in NY where the fabulous venue hosts a kid-friendly street fair complete with food, music and crafts (our craft table is currently working hard on preperatory cutting and crafting right now! Hope to see you there!) and, lastly, this weekend we visit New England to usher in the nuptials of our friends Mark & Steph (an event that is sure to be full of filmic surprises being that Mark is the founder of Rooftop Films, an organization dear to my heart...so dear that Brent is actually marrying the two! What does one wear to officiate a wedding anyway...? A cape perhaps? Yes! A cape!). Ok, off to get things going- have a happy hurricane-less, electricity-filled day folks! O, and by the way, we were only inconvenienced by the storm but a lot of people, especially in Vermont and upstate New York, have suffered greatly from this natural disaster. Here are a few links on how to help out! Stay dry and safe everyone!

What's New Drew?

Our (oftentimes) bandmate Drew Henkels (who will be accompanying us on the upcoming show dates I just wrote about) is up to a lot lately! Apart from his work with us (which includes a near hilarious set up of everything musical: a harmonium, a gourd/thumb piano, some jingle bells, a guitar, a glockenspiel, a maracas, a water filled mason jar, a drum or two, what else Drew? I'm sure I am forgetting something? Theramin! I forgot the theramin!), Drew does everything from being the acting delivery boy man for the NY area print music scene calendar Showpaper while also performing at their rooftop benefit/potlucks (one of which is pictured here, Drew listening at bottom), he records his sweet yet intense albums in his dank basement, he does sound at the undeniably awesome Glasslands, he soundtracks some film work for great organizations, he constantly sketches up his dreams in his notebooks and, right now, he is looking for a drummer on top of all of this!

If you know of a drummer in the New York area who is looking to play some bedroom folk-punk wonderfulness send him along to Drew! His dedication to music making is looking for just the right person to help make his songs listenable outside of his head and your drumming collaboration is just what he needs! Spread the word!

The House Began to Pitch

Apparently, when Brent is recording a new soundtrack, stamping in the barn and causing general noisy havoc one might mistake an earthquake for him. Yup. An earthquake. In the barn. Insane. Also, that's right! Brent is working on a new soundtrack for a new feature length film! Anticipation is killing me! Until we get to that though, here are a few confirmed dates for our upcoming Gravity live show Fall mini-tour taking place in the east coast and scattering around the midwest in the upcoming months! A few cities I've never been to (Indianapolis! Bloomington!) and a few that I haven't been to in ages (Boston! Pittsburgh!)! Yay! More info to come soon, maybe even another show or two to add!

September 29- Pittsburgh Filmmakers, Pittsburgh, PA
September 30- Wexner Center, Columbus, OH
October 1- Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN
October 2- IU Cinema, Bloomington, IN
October 13- IFC Center, NYC
October 14- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts

I don't know if it is related to the earthquaking at all but...after listening to this recent podcast on the subject: please sign those petitions against fracking in your area if you live in a shale zone! Drilling holes in the rock beds we sit upon can't really be good, regardless of whether they did or did not cause our whole house to eeriely shake for seemingly endless minutes today...! Friend and animator Martha Colburn recently took up the anti-fracking cause and the highly informative documentary Gasland warned early on of the potential for disasterous effects it can have. I mean, who knows...it could just be the dreaded approach of 2012 (bring on the solar storms! and volcanoes! or whatever!) but, if it isn't, I'd like to try to keep the bedrock intact even moreso after this weird little warning from the earth...now, back to those (geological mimicking) drums Brent...and keep PA (pictured) quake free!

You Are So Grand and Golden! America!

So yesterday we went to our nation's capital! No not to protest the incoherent babblings of a presidential hopeful but to visit with the man, the myth the legend Brendan Canty! And to take advantage of his stellar film/music studio space hidden in the depths of Silver Springs (outside of space pictured above)! Brendan's studio, Trixie, releases not only his Burn to Shine series but tons of other music docs and commercials, in addition to using the space for record productions (the last time we were around Benjy Ferree was there singing his large churchy pop as Brendan mixed, tinkered and even played some drum tracks!) making it a sort of secret haven for artists who are well aware of the artistic awesomeness that has happened in these former industrial walls!

Brent wanted to do a few Gravity sound tweaks for a few American screenings so while he and Brendan slaved away over mics and programs I went to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum (possibly doing research for a short film I am working on? YES!) and walked past historical architecture, memorials and fate deciding institutions. Often I feel like the core of Gravity is a portrayal of our crumbling American dream, of the loss of freedom, wonder and thought that our nation was founded upon so walking around D.C. and feeling the palpable sense of pride and nationalism was kind of awkward... one can only hope that these patriotic pangs people feel can once again be justified through the eventual righting of this ship! On an amazing note though, I saw a really big diamond, some ground sloth skeletons and learned about how now we think living things developed in small carbon ponds as opposed to the huge oceans that I learned about in elementary school (with no mention of the co-existance of dinosaurs and humans!): America, slowly making progress...?! O, and America? Please don't let that lady become president...

Pictures of an Exhibition

The lovely folks over in lovely Louisville sent over this link of photographs from the Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then opening that we had a few months back in their fine city!

The event was absolutely amazing, packed with people and food and wonderful art at every moment that Magnus, the taker of these awesome photographs, really managed to capture! He is definitely an artist bringing his own vision into the event but portraying it in a moving documentary style that made me tear up a little bit (did you see that one of the baby in that link?!).

Good work Magnus! And good work to us too, it is so nice to see the film set come together after all of that back breaking work (literally being that during de-install a large piece of a set house facade fell on me, which I caught! only to be followed by another house frame that knocked the wind right out of me!)! Now...how to convince Brent to rebuild it in the yard?? Hmm....

Film Fests Are Fabulous!

I spend a lot of time writing about film festivals our film is in but...I should write about a few film fests/events I've come across in my travels that Gravity hasn't been a part of and that seem like pretty amazing enterprises! The first one I recently came across was The Quadrangle Film Fest that takes place in Kent in the U.K. This nonfiction film festival occurs in a series of barns in the countryside and features a small program of rare, interesting and in depth documentary films ranging from the classic (Les Blanks film Burden of Dreams that followed Herzog into the jungle during his trying filming of Fitz Carraldo), to the obscure (The Moon and the Sledgehammer, a doc about a rural British family cut off from the modern world, creating their own piece by piece- with steam engines!), to the controversial (The Good Woman of Bangkok, about the directors relationship with a Thai prostitute, exploring the wavering lines between sex and love, art and life). This idyllic setting seems perfect, I can't imagine a nicer place to watch these moving portraits of the world! Another film fest/outfit I just learned about in the U.K. is The Floating Cinema! Yes! That's right! A cinema on a boat that travels through the London canal system! This thing is made even more wonderful by the fact that they have free family screenings, open screenings to bring your own films to, and films that are culturally relevant (boo! canal pollution!) to boot! Movies Ahoy!

I have talked a ton about the True/False Film Fest but I haven't talked about their mini-sister event/fund raiser Boone Dawdle! Boone Dawdle is part bike tour, part picnic, part concert, part film screening and it seems wonderful (of course)! After meeting in town the whole audience treks, via bike, to a remote vineyard where movies are screened, performers sing and food & drink are plentiful- it sounds like such a nice summer day that just yesterday I was wishing I lived closer to Columbia, MO so I could volunteer for this lovely event! On a completely different, almost opposite note....as a teen I was initiated into the creepy crazy cinematic mayhem of midnight movies at a run down southern New Jersey multiplex theater where Cannibal Holocaust (Ew! Gross!) roared across the screen, brought to me by the bloody gore of Exhumed Films! Now operating out of the International House in Philadelphia, Exhumed showcases a lot of feature length schlock horror, B Movie classics and vintage previews for a lot of movies whose actors and actresses mostly came to or from porn. Their programs are an insane line up of insanity (it looks like they are keeping up with the cannibalism too with a screening of something called Cannibal Carnage this month!) that I don't know if (my adult self) would really advise going to but...they are definitely a nauseating experience any horror junkie will love!

There are plenty of other film fests all over the place that are championing the margins of cinema too including Rural Route Film Fest (featuring the best country themed cinema screened in and coming from all over the back-roads of the globe- including, most recently, on a rooftop farm in Brooklyn, right in my old hood!), the Bigfoot Film Festival (a local event that features Pennsylvania's love of the mythical hairy beast on celluloid! The PA BigFoot Society is a no kill organization you know...!) and the Black Maria Film Fest (named after Thomas Edison's film studio and composed of a TON of short films that tour around to notable Eastcoast art/film institutions & universities, a perfect outlet for huge exposure and interesting programming!).

Film fests are such a valuable resource for filmmakers and audiences, giving filmmakers a live audience and giving audiences a total film experience! It is a (secret) dream of mine to start a fest somewhere nearby in one of the many dilapidated theaters of PA or to even help program a fest at some point (hmm....anyone need a screener??? I am very, VERY good at watching movies!) but, for now, I will keep on reading about these awesome organizations that are projecting wonder across screens across the world! Here are just a few pics of various screens across the world that Gravity has played on over these past few years!

Podcasts or Internet Comes to The Barn!

Let's see....as I sit here watching Brent painstakingly animate, frame by frame, redrawing each WHOLE image over and over I keep finding myself dumbstruck! He is crazy! But, while this is going on we've been listening to the wonderful offerings of podcasts brought to us by the internet! Yes! That's right! When I moved here a few years ago we only had dial up internet service but now, after signing petitions and slowly watching ditches being dug and wires being buried, WE HAVE HIGH SPEED INTERNET!

The first order of podcasts we've been catching up on are from our two film friends Mike Plante and Marbelle. Mike Plante, the founder of Cinemad, has recently started offering up interviews he conducts with filmmakers on the web. The interview with Bobcat Goldthwait (yeah, THIS guy! But also the man behind the amazing recent feature film World's Greatest Dad that was so graphic and touching you wouldn't think it was made by the guy known for starring in a movie with a talking horse! Did that horse talk? I think it did? At least he wasn't the voice of the talking horse, that would be way worse....I did love that film as a kid though!) was pretty amazing! Mike's questions and interview style reveal what a film lover he is and how knowledgeable he is on the subject, and the subjects he is interviewing. Listening to Cinemad's podcasts you know that Mike loves what he does as much as the people he is interviewing love what they do, a rare and perfect combination!

As for Marbelle, who I got to meet in London (pics of our trip seen here) during our recent live show tour, his Directors Notes series is unbeatable! He has been at it for awhile (I think it said the most recent podcast was number 213?!) so his refined interviewing is precise and thoughtful, leading to a lot of filmmakers sort of storytelling their way through their process and development. Directors Notes features a lot of cutting edge filmmakers, many of whom are obscure or undiscovered, and gives them a platform to speak out on the thing they love to do (filmmaking!) and the things that make them the unique artists that they are. Giving these filmmakers a louder voice & a wider audience is an amazing, noble feat in a film world where I find a lot of people are hesitant to be the first one clapping! In fact, Directors Notes was one of the first places to interview Brent early on in his filmmaking career (and early on in the career of Directors Notes!)- double applause! Keep it up MarBelle! If London remains in one piece that is...

Please don't burn down London, look at how pretty it is...! So, what other film related podcasts are out there o wise internet beings who I am about to rejoin? INTERNET...ok, I already need to monitor my internet use abuse (I say through bloodshot, pixel weary eyes)!

Gravity Is Still Everywhere

Today I finished (another!) Gravity trailer as part of our Fall mini-US tour! Yes! We are hitting the road with the film again in late September and early October! Mostly Eastcoast and Midwest towns (with a slight chance of California and the Pacific Northwest if things can get in order)! Will keep you posted if the trailer ends up on the internet (it has some footage completed after the other trailers were made!) and will also keep you posted on our Fall whereabouts...especially since our Gravity live shows are soon to become even more rare as we embark on the next series of projects!

After sending the trailer off, after TONS of computer malfunctions, I went into the yard to see what is left of Gravity...seeing the set stacked into neat little piles almost makes me forget how unbelievably heavy the thing is! How we built it outside behind the barn in the coldest of winters! How we shoved it into two twenty-six foot long trucks and drove it across the country! How we had to fireproof the entire thing in order for the set to reside in the desert conditions of the Southwest! All the care and painting and staining and nailing that went into building and rebuilding over and over again! What a crazy history these little pieces of wood have! While admiring all of the hard work laying in pieces in the yard I did come across another little piece of Gravity production history: the cloudmaker! Or, should I say, a fishing rod with cotton snow (I remember it specifically being cotton snow since all other cotton fill had a shine to it, a quality that the packaged snow did not possess) attached to the end that I, sitting on the roof of Leonard's house in the freezing temperatures, moved frame by frame growing the cloud out of the wooden hand of our backyard embodiment of God as Brent stood on the ground taking picture after picture (part of the finished scene you can see a little in this trailer over here!).

I have a feeling the rest of my time in this barn will be filled with little unexpected moments of Gravity and I couldn't be more happy! Hope to share the happiness this Fall on our little tour! But, for now, working and swimming, swimming and working! And baby deer! Twin fawns! In the yard! Yay!

Museums & Mongreloids

Our good friend (and cinematographer for a few Gravity scenes) Jem Cohen is working on a new project (which I talked about earlier on this here blog)! I had asked him to send over some stills awhile back and, after returning from travels (both ours & his), he did! I added the images from Jem's much anticipated upcoming feature Museum Hours in the original post I wrote about his film. CANNOT WAIT!

Speaking of visionary filmmakers...in sad news it has been announced that the counterculture filmmaker George Kuchar has recently had a pretty intense bout with cancer. I was lucky enough to see him & his films with a small crowd of film folks in the capital of Pennsylvania one rainy day two years ago where Kuchar, with his sweet, gruff New York accent, narrated along the process of his short low budget films that expand the genre range (psychedelic-psycho-horror-B+ movie-gender empowering-spirited-meta-documentaries perhaps?). What a friggin' genius! What heartfelt beauty! What courageous humor! I don't really know how to properly explain or applaud Kuchar  and his overall greatness (and that of his twin brother Mike too) but I do know that the film community's thoughts are with him and I am so thankful that his ground breaking work will live on in cinematic history! Stay well George and thank you for paving the way for the rest of us!

Kinetoscopic Memories

I'm only now starting to catch up on all of the wonderful things that happened on the Gravity (mini) world tour that took place over the past few weeks! A tour that has left me with indelible memories (and a totally messed up sleep cycle, hehe...!). I totally forgot to mention this amazing exhibit we saw in conjunction with the New Horizons Film Festival. The exhibit was called Rub Your Eyes and featured the optical illusion/historical film antiquities collection of experimental filmmaker Werner Nekes (a comprehensive account on how he began collecting can be read here, highly recommended reading!). The main museum the collection was displayed in was a beautiful marble marvel, part of Wroclaw's BWA consortium of museums which have a pretty interesting agenda that seeks to move art outside of the art world, viewing it in a greater social context, an outlook that I think should be the main focus of most art institutions- and art for that matter...!

The collection itself was a constant corner turning shock: (please note: all links within descriptions are not indicative of the collection which was low lit and hard to photograph! I also wanted to use the links to move outside Nekes' collection and, keeping with the agenda of BWA, show other ways people are using these antiquated ideas outside of museums & on the web) the first hand cranked flip books, shadow puppet cards (pictured below), (probably the first ever) ASCII art dating from the 70s (a softspot for me in the computer art genre), anamorphoses (cylinders & cones!), zoetropes, large scale camera obscuras and so on all told the story of the development of the the moving image and the human eye! Seeing all of these things made the film festival feel like an extension of a long standing legacy, a legacy that New Horizons definitely propels forward through their promotion of cutting edge work and new cinematic voices! For so many reasons did this exhibit make sense....I almost wish it could be shown alongside Gravity at every screening as we keep the animated tradition alive while bringing in the newest in digital technology!

Cosmic Comics

I was able to see a few other films at the New Horizons film festival, even despite the game of buying tickets! Strangely, both of the other films I saw had animated sequences about the creation of the universe?! Both handled them differently of course but I found it a little unsettling to see two films approach this subject so overtly...what state is the world in that two different directors felt the need to discuss the very beginnings of things in order to understand the present? Are they looking for a universal rebirth? Or anticipating the end? A little bleak either way! But, I really appreciated both directors creating something otherwordly (or ultra worldly?) which is a thing the fiction film medium should always strive to do- push the limits of what film can be and explore, but still...a little unnerving to see one big bang after the other!

The first film I saw with this feature was Walk Away Renee, Jonathan Caouette's followup to his sort of auto-biopic film Tarnation (which I haven't seen! I know, I know, I need to see it!). This film focused on Jonathan's relationship with his mother Renee, a bi-polar force who I don't think anyone can ever really know, including herself... Centered on a road trip Caouette made with his mother from Texas to NY, the film artfully follows the two through the journey's ups, downs and moments of poetic intro/outro-spection. The film is dotted with fictional interludes revolving around new age enthusiasts, (the above mentioned) creation of the universe(s), quick paced image sequences and explanatory intertitles all intricately formed into a precise, visionary film. Even when some of the scenes seemed forced or disingenuous the editing, emotion and just plain love in this film shows signs of a true filmmaking master. I don't think I have, in recent years, left a theater excited for the future of a filmmaker to this extent!

The other film I saw with universal tendencies was Mundane History, the award winner of New Horizons 2010, and whose director, Anocha, Brent & I spent some time with while in Poland at this year's fest. Mundane History's creation/exploration of the greater universal area was just plain beautiful! The animated cosmic sequence was hazy and lovely and the overall slow style of filmmaking and narrative of family drama was made up for through a constant beauty and tension, including a few unexpectedly graphic scenes- all reminding of the inheritance of existance, however harsh that may be. The soundtrack was pretty propulsive too, led by the Asian bands Photo Sticker Machine and Furniture, creating a rock soundscape that the images could breezily float over. The film had a larger political subtext about primogeniture, freedom and loss with the dialectical opposite found in birth (and rebirth), subjects that I totally applaud the filmmaker for discussing given their touchy nature, especially in such a tense national climate (the film was given the rating of 20+ in the director's native Thailand, making it impossible for anyone under 20 to see, a censorship over content but a louder message for sure). Overall a beautiful film from a beautiful filmmaker who is sure to become indie film legend!

Speaking of macrocosms...while in Wroclaw Poland for the film festival Brent & I literally stumbled upon an insane miniature Christmas shrine! We were pulled into the huge, dark space (the looming dark building in the top photo) by a stained glass window when suddenly we ended up in a tiny little room where an old Polish woman pressed a button to reveal a mechanized, musical, blinking, holiday wonder! With such highlights as a smurf with red blinking eyes! Multiple animated pope figurines! Dancing ducks! Sawing bears! It goes on and on! Here are a few photos Brent & I took but they barely begin to explain the experience! A tiny, Christmas microcosm hidden on this crooked, winding street- this is most definitely my kind of universe!

Blue Rose Project

Stepping into Queen Mary's Garden really felt like swooping down the rabbithole after Alice! So disorienting (despite the cicles & grids of well manicured paths and lawns)! So fragrant! Just incredible! It also felt really good to sit outside for a bit after all of this time being on planes! In fact, I spent so much time on planes that I think I hve become a conessuier of inflight media & plane food! Whether it be a personal touch screen with tons of things to choose from or one screen with scattered subsequent tiny screens displaying one film, I ended up watching a ton of movies on all of my varied flights!

Some of these films included: The Godfather (finally!), the newest version of Jane Eyre (speaking of which did I ever post this insane thing about Jane Eyre? And Gravity? It's in the bottom scroll? WHA?! So odd!), a documentary on Vivienne Westwood (whose passionate political voice and general humor made her wonderful to watch as she rounded up reed thin models behind her runway, making them sign petitions to save rainforests or performed a play with a group of children, encouraging them to follow their hearts and minds through art), and (on the first leg of flights) a documentary on Isabella Rossellini (a fine, fine woman whose increasingly strong sense of self is encouraging as is her modeling/acting/singing, the men she has mused, her own filmmaking, her nursing of dogs for the blind...and just about everything else she does!). During my twenty-four hour layover in London which I mostly spent in the garden I even came across a strain of rose  named after Rossellini's mother, Ingrid Bergman! What a beautiful, cinematic way to end a day and a fitting close to my long, long journey! 

The Turbines of The Tate Modern

In the name of art....we went to the Tate Modern! I had heard so much about this British contemporary art space and the progressive work they tend to display (most recently Ai Wei Wei's porcelain sunflower seeds) that I really had no idea what to expect. Dragging the Gravity set around to museums has led to my immediate concern over ceiling height, a thing that is far from a problem at The Modern which is housed inside a gigantic former power plant! Upon entering I was greeted to the largest canvas of a space (the former home of the plants turbines!) that I have ever seen in a museum! The giant hall has housed a lot of my favorite pieces in recent years including this stunning piece (in which an artist made casts of boxes from those used to pack up her mother's house after her death,  a looming, sugarcube, iceburg-like mountain in the cavernous Turbine Hall) and also this piece  (a simulated version of weather and sun bringing to mind the need to future of our environmental condition). 

Each floor of The Modern was divided into a series of galleries complete with a scrawled timeline of art history, a thing I really liked, putting into perspective what kind of art begot the next and giving the viewer an  objective ability to view these works in terms of historical reaction or action. Each exhibit then went further, discussing the artists personal creation of the work (for example how Miro created grotesque folk-like images in the face of the Spanish civil war and Catalonian skirmishes, pictured) which really telescoped the whole spectrum of art in a way that validates it in a broader sense, making art an important part of human culture, life and progression- I don't think I have ever seen a museum frame work in such a meaningful way and I seriously appreciated it!

Some of my favorite work here was by Lucien Freud (whose paintings I had never seen in person and whose skewed perspective is undeniably striking), Francis Bacon (pictured at top, for you film folks, Bacon is a HUGE inspiration to David Lynch), the films of Jean Painleve (underwater nature documentaries whose artistry uses every aspect of film [music, motion, lighting, writing etc.] to the fullest! So gorgeous!), a spectacular Jenny Holzer (why do people feel the need to be so serious when looking at art? Holzer is so good at bitingly sarcastic/intensely ironic phrasing [even in her potent political outcries], it is ok to laugh young art lovers!)...and these were only a few of the countless artists (Twombly below!) I admired at this museum!

The Tate Modern really goes out of its way to remind people of why art is so important: art can literally change the world and its historical prescence is palpable in this epic display of inspiration! To make it even better, the museum is not only open to the public seven days a week (with great hours) it is also free (!!!) such a perfect, accessible cultural resource! Also, it just occurred to me, that the Tate Modern itself, being a former energy producing factory (a deeply political/historical symbol in todays world) can be viewed as just as important as the artwork that it holds, reclaiming a means of production & profit (both in space and in terms of the huge private contributions made toward exhibitions) for us masses in order to display another angle of human progress. Overall an awesome afternoon in a truly awesome place!