Robot/Nature (1998)

Here’s another early super8 movie. The first half was shot as a stop motion experiment in my living room. The fire is one of those chemical logs you get at the supermarket. It was all shot a single frame at a time before I knew about frame doubling (when you shoot two frames for every shot instead of one to save your time and sanity).

That strange object that dissappears before the robot was a electronic toy ray gun I had since I was six. I need to find that thing - it made some great sounds.

For the second half, Chuck and I went out to a park in Bellingham and looked for creatures to film. The snake was a plus. Watch for the bug that gets run over by the slug.

The film is really scratched up - it adds to the effect I guess. When I got the footage back from Kodak, I ran it through a new (and untested) projector. It chewed the film up. I threw the projector in the trash and kept the bulb.

After shooting the film, the little robot guy lived on the dashboard of the car I was driving at the time. It was a Chevette named “The Black Ghost II” and it look like this:

(not my picture)

I loved that car. It was the son of the original “Black Ghost” and was the best car I ever got for $300. It eventually died of a broken heart and bad clutch.

The music in the first part of the film is from this record:

I played this record every day in first grade.

The second piece of music is from David Bowman’s vortex trip in 2001.

So check out this wild and crazy animated adventure.

~23mb

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The Long Winter (1998)

My first film.

Shot on Super8 B&W film in sequence (no editing). The camera was a Yashica:

I wanted to make a horror movie with a beginning, middle and an end. We had a costume … and a giant turkey leg.

The soundtrack came from a cassette we found in the barn in which the first shot takes place. When I would screen the film for my friends back then, I would have to drag out the projector and press play on a tape deck when the movie started. My how the times have changed.

It was in this barn, two years later in the year 2000, that my band Eureka Farm called it a day.

Later that year, my friend Dave and I composed a thirty minute collection of music entitled “Picturebook” in the barn. It was performed only once - in Moscow Idaho - in conjunction with a slide show of original work/found slides.

(I am credited in the film as “Richard Levi”)

~20mb

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