Ring! Ring! (2006)

Double Click the image above to watch the movie.
~90mb HUGE - let it stream for while before you try to play it.

This film was inspired by the doorbell in my first apartment in Portland, OR.

It took me a few years to complete this film. I storyboarded every shot in the film in 2004. I am not an illustrator so the storyboards were very basic to say the least.

After storyboarding the film, I framed up every shot and filmed the whole thing by myself with my cheap Panasonic miniDV camcorder and a remote control. This helped out in the end; I edited the rough footage together and ended up cutting a few scenes out.

Over the next year, I put an add on Craigslist to find a local woodworker to make one of the props for the film. Molly Enright answered the add and she helped construct the music making device. By the time she finished it and I put it through some tests, I decided I needed to make some modifications to it.

This is what I ended up with.

In 2005, I rented a DVX-100B and set out to shoot the film in a week with Jonah Sutherland as my DP and Liz as my assistant.

We ended up spend a day figuring out how to use the camera, and then lost another day due to an accident on the set (a glass jug filled with water exploded on the set). We ended up shooting for about three and a half days. Three and a half looong days.

The first machine in the film was a combination of a leftover keyboard from my Lowery organ and an old typewriter that I’ve had since I was a little kid. Some of the parts on the second machine came from my older brother’s saxophone (I sawed it apart with a hacksaw), a back-scratcher and a player piano. It took three of us to animate the second machine (me, Liz and my buddy Dave).

The soundtrack was created using sliced chromatic cello samples. I recorded a cellist playing every note, over and over in a variety of styles. I later cut out the notes I wanted and formed the melodies and themes for the movies from the original chromatic performance. I would like to re-package these samples as a VSTi someday for other people to use.

The color work was done, in many cases, by roto-scoping out certain objects and areas and “painting in” the color I wanted. I think that process took the most time out of any part of making the film. It was part of my plan from the start to have a muted color pallet that looked similar to the hand tinted films from a hundred years ago.

It was a long time in the making, but I learned quite a bit in the process.

The Pagliaccios: At Home (2004)

Double Click the image above to play:
~100mb (10 min.) Let it stream for a while before you try to play it…

This film was a weekend family project of mine. It was the second movie I shot on digital (actually half DV and half Super 8). It was put together in a weekend and shot with the intent of sending to my sister Auria who was living abroad in Italy at the time.

I remember staying up late with my mom and my nephew Avery and working out the outline for the whole thing. We laughed pretty hard. It was a challenge to find all of the costume and make-up supplies in the middle of summer around Palouse … but we managed to put together what we needed.

It stars my nephews Jared and Avery, my mom Tina, my sister Shandra, her husband James and me. My friend Dave is a special guest star as “Uncle Sad Clown”. His wife Heather was a camera operator for one shot. We filmed it in my mom’s house “as is” without altering any of the native decorations.

It looks pretty rough to me now of course … heck - it looked rough to me then. Integrating the Super 8 with the DV was difficult at the time. I had the footage telecined locally in Portland and up in Seattle with varying degrees of success. I ended up just transferring it myself with using a method of my own devising (projecting a tiny image and macro shooting it with my DV camera).

The film still makes me laugh, so I hope people can enjoy it for what it is. Keep in mind it should NOT be watched by children!

I Love a Parade (1996/2004)

The year: 1996
The town: Bellingham, WA

One of my earliest film acting gigs.

My friend and housemate, esteemed director William Weiss, wanted to shoot a short film on 16mm. He got a permit so that we could block off a street and have a “parade”. It was in the dead of winter and damn cold. You can see my nose turn progressively redder.

The original movie was integrated with a live action performance. Every time my character walked off screen, I would walk onto the stage and vice versa. There was an element of crowd interaction and live theater that is obviously not present in the final film.

Mr. Weiss re-edited the film a few years back, and added the soundtrack and titles. Here it is in all its 16mm glory.

Directed by William Weiss

~15 mb

Double click the image below to play:

[ Javascript required to view QuickTime movie, please turn it on and refresh this page ]

(I miss that sweater)

Palouse Days (1998)

~70mb — HUGE — Let it stream for a while (like 5 minutes).

Double click the image below to play:

From the vault.

I shot most of this in my home town of Palouse in 1998 on a Minolta 401XL super 8 camera. It was the last year that Palouse hosted a demolition derby on Palouse Days due to competition from the Lewiston Valley (damn you Lewiston!!!!!).

I’m not sure why they still call it Palouse Days - it’s only one day.

I remember being in the parade as a kid in the 80’s. It seemed like there was about a hundred of us back then … ok maybe 50 … or 25. Now there are usually two kids in the parade and it just don’t look so good …

The Shriners are still involved and the town ussually hires some Eastern European biker stunt group or something to try and do something different. I’m sure the pancakes are still as bad as ever at 6:30am down at the Community Center. One year, our family decided not to wake up early and go to the own breakfast. That was fine until some unnamed person got on the town PA system and started screaming at us to get out of bed and get downtown to breakfast.

The color effects were all done with filters in front of the lens. It was edited with a film splicer, some tape and a clothesline about the same time I did Humanidad Aterrorizado.

When I would project the film, I would always use side two of the Hatari soundtrack composed by Henri Mancini. When I transferred the film to digital, I had to put it on there for good.

Time Lapse 1 (1999)

My first collection of time lapse films shot on Super 8. I shot most of it around Palouse and the chicken coop. The section with the cactus was filmed in Arizona on the Eureka Farm tour in 1999.

It was shot on my Minolta XL401 with its built in interval timer.

Before I had the Minolta, I had to use a custom made interval timer rigged up for me by Dr. Jimmy, Bellingham’s resident electronics guru at the time. I worked for him one summer, testing a huge pile of vacuum tubes with an ancient tube tester.

The music is another permutation pattern that looks like this.

It has a repeating percussion line under each phrase which isn’t involved in the permutation. It contains four elements similar to the one I used on Mazama, but in a different order.

So here is Time Lapse 1.

~25mb

Double click the image below to play:

Planet Earth: Our Response (2007)

“1950’s Earth Responds to the Galactic Census Bureau”

This film started as an idea I had in Bellingham in 1998 while experimenting with Super 8 film making and collecting old educational films. I remember discussing it with Tyson Theroux (aka Space Robot … aka The Diabolical Dr. Klaw) at the Horseshoe Cafe. I didn’t have enough 16mm stock footage to pull it off and I didn’t feel like I could get the Super 8 and 16mm film to match.

I wasn’t able to complete the film until I had access to the Internet Archive and all of its public domain footage. I started collecting and categorizing footage in 2005 and ended up using close to 100 different films. I finished writing the narration and shooting my own footage in 2007.

Gideon Klindt produced a convincing alien probe for the effects shots and I composited them in using After Effects. Gideon also stars in the film as the research scientist in the biosuit.

I posted on the Portland Craigslist to find a 1950’s car and Herb Shaw was kind enough to let me use his old Packard for the shoot.

~100mb HUGE! and 10 min long - I suggest streaming for several minutes before watching.

Double Click the image below to play:

Mazama (2005/2008)

Way back in the year 2005, on the way to attend the wedding of my good friend Chuck and his soon to be wife Stephanie, I shot a series of time lapse movies.

The wedding was in the Cascades near Mazama and Winthrop Washington. The scenery was great … late summer.

Liz and I were just starting our tubin’ phase so some of the mountain rivers and lakes looked pretty good!

I dug up the footage and made a soundtrack for it today. The music was created using a non-repeating permutation pattern like this:

Each number 1-4 stands for a musical phrase. The permutation allows for all combinations of the pattern without repetiton. Sweet … I’m a nerd.

I also bought my last physics textbook today:

Here is the movie “Mazama”.

Because it is a timelapse film, the file size is huge in order to retain the quality. Let it download for a while before you start it.

~28mb

Double Click the image below to play: