… skeletons in my closet (unfinished video)…

Click the image above to play the unfinished music video for the unfinished song “News” off of an unfinished album from several years ago!

[~45mb - LARGE and 3 minutes long, so let it stream for while before watching it.]

Well … October is that spooky time of year. I’ve decided to go digging through my closet for some skeletons.

Let’s see here … digging through closet … hmmmm … oooh … nope … too scary … heck no … ahhh maybe … noooo way … AHHH HAAA!!!

Perfect! Found one!

Here is an epic tale of an epic, undead project!

This story starts about nine years ago …

Towards the end of my band “Eureka Farm”, I lived outside of Palouse in what I commonly refer to as the “Chicken Coup”. You can see a shot of it briefly in my short film Time Lapse 1. I was shooting tons of Super 8 movies back then and I really wanted to do a detailed stop motion animation. I decided to start work on a video for the song “Quinsonnas”.

I designed and built myself a rear projection animation table and camera rig out of some wood and tripod parts. I story boarded out the film and shot most of the background plates for the rear projection around the Chicken Coup. “Eureka Farm” went to New York to play the CMJ festival and I shot the rest of the plates in the city.

I made dozens of little characters out of art board and designed my main character out of the same sturdy stuff and hinged him so that his limbs could move. I made several different heads with various expressions that I could slip in to change his mood.

The reality and the scope of the film left me experimenting for a long time. Super 8 film just wasn’t fast enough to pick up the light from the rear projected slides. On top of that, there was no real way to keep track of my work as I progressed through dozens, hundreds and thousands of frames. I would only get to see my work a few weeks after shipping it out to be developed. This was too heartbreaking so I shelved the project for many years.

In the meantime, I moved to Portland and wrote about an albums worth of material (that I never released). One of these songs fit nicely with the stop motion world I created for “Quinsonnas” and I started re-envisioning the piece in the context of the song “News”. Many of the elements remained.

I made the switch to video, which allowed me a real-time preview of what I was doing. If I messed up a move, I could instantly know and not waste hours of my life. I set out to redo the film. As I learned more about computers and film making, my friend Gideon introduced me to After Effects. I was skeptical at the time, but now it has to be my favorite piece of visual software. Thanks Gideon.

The segment above is as far as I ever got on the piece. The song was never finished. The movie was never finished. There are scenes that are not animated. There are scenes missing objects and characters!

After watching the film tonight I can officially declare it undead. I’m absolutely sure it will rise from the grave someday … in some form. It needs quite a bit of work (I’m lookin’ at you “Blam!!” that comes out of the doorway that looks like a bad internet font). It was also part of a larger story, so it isn’t complete on it’s own. I mean … there’s a whole scene dedicated to a chicken and a grasshopper that hasn’t been made yet!

… Combat video - 1st cut …

Combat - From the Album Bits by Arman Bohn from Distropolis on Vimeo.

Here is the first cut of the video for the song “Combat” off of my up coming record “Bits”. You can stream it in HD by clicking on the HD link in the video or:

Click here to stream it in HD on Vimeo!

To watch the video type in the password: combat

If you have anything short of a stellar internet conection … let it stream for a while before you watch it so it doesn’t get all stuttery.

I have made it password protected to limit people viewing it until I get the final version locked.

The lyrics are can be read here.

I have chronicled much of the creation of this music video on my blog here. Just do a search for “Combat”.

The music in this cut of the video is not the final version of the song. The guitar and vocals tracks are a blend of scratch tracks and primaries. The song will be remixed and mastered before it is released as well. There will be a subsequent version of this video that incorporates the album version of the song as soon as I get it finished.

I am providing this so that people following my progress on the blog can see what I’ve been up to.

Let me know what you think!

Humanidad Aterrorizado (1998)

My second film.

Shot on the same Yashica super8 camera as “The Long Winter”. The color effects were achieved by mounting a split color polarizer in front of the lens. I love the old Technicolor feel that it created in the footage.

The stop motion sequence was filmed in my mom’s basement. I was the cloaked figure, so my sister Auria was the camera operator for the shot. I must have done a terrible job of explaining how the shot was suppose to work so we had to shoot the dissolve sequence twice due to some communication breakdown. I was mad because I knew I was going to have to edit the film.

It was all shot in sequence based on images and ideas we came up with as we went. I constructed the robotic arm out of some Robotix of mine from when I was a kid. Auria ran the arm from off camera.

Jenny had to be wrapped from head to toe in tin foil and I think she ended up wanting to kill someone by the end of the day.

This pond was just down the hill from the chicken-coop that Adam and Auria were living in and Jenny and I eventually moved into. It was also very close to the barn from “The Long Winter”.

I edited the film by physically cutting each scene out, hanging it on a clothesline, and taping it back together

I tried various songs with the movie until one day I realized that it was the same length as the song “The Mule” off of the Eureka Farm album “The View”.

The final animation was created to use up the end of a roll of film. The music is by Raymond Scott.

~40mb … so let it stream for a bit before you start.

Double click the image below to play:

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