Here's the performance version of the latest music video I've been working on. The Official Music Video will drop on May 1st. You'll notice that there's something curious and dreamy about the movement in this video. This is because we shot the video at 60fps and then slowed it down in post. And, yes, this means that we had to speed up the song in order to compensate for the lip movement of the poor artists, who had to sing their song at double time. Nevertheless, I think it turned out cool and even better in the Official Video, so stay tuned for that.
I found random video clips on my hard drive, and took the most interesting bits from each clip and strung them together to make a pseudo-documentary of how I was spending my life in 2010.
I tried setting an arbitrary rule for myself, where the clips I used could only last for exactly one second, however a couple videos were too good to cut short.
In case any one out there has been wondering what I've been up to. I've been working hard at keeping Struck Down Entertainment afloat (http://www.struckdownentertainment.com) doing music videos and the like, as well as working for a local TV show, "The Kiosk Presents" (http://thekioskpresents.com).
As the horizon drank the last of the sunlight, Winter casually sauntered into town, like a portly guest late to the party. It settled down into the town's unkempt lawns and streets like they were an old familiar chair, and with relief exhaled, sending the last of Autumn's dried leaves from their branches. Even though Winter was a little tardy, it had telegraphed ahead with plenty of cool rain, which now froze into a glassy membrane covering the town.
The dried leaves scuttled along the frozen streets, passing by houses with warm orange windows that smelled of baking, dark houses whose occupants were off on a beach somewhere, and a little gray house that stared pensively out into the street.
The house looked as though it were putting great effort into solving a problem posed long ago, and wasn't closing in on a solution anytime soon. It's windows were perfectly square spectacles that saw everything, and if this little gray house could ask a question it would be, "Does omniscience make every question a foolish question or an understandable question?"
To the side of the house a bare oak tree scratched the roof, like a crooked and curious hand. It had been scratching the same spot for so long the roof had become damaged. Shingles were curled and broken, exposing the weathered cracks beneath. A small pool of water gathered in one of the nooks and leaked through the cracks and into the house.
Inside the skull of this pensive little house the rainwater beat away at a dulled pea-sized dent in the floor. Across the room sat a little clock without a face, or rather, its face had been replaced by a magazine cutout of one of those revolving targets you see at the circus; the kind where they strap a pretty girl to the front and throw knives at her. And, with each tick the table rotated.
The dripping rain water and tick-tocking of the clock echoed like a miniature game of ping-pong taking place at Deer Cave. Stuck in the middle was an old man in an easy chair. He looked comfortable and serious.
The face of the old man was as old men's faces are, wrinkled and grizzled with stubble. Each wrinkle a brush stroke of emotion from the man's past. Every single laugh line and brow furrowing its own stroke and accounted for.
His eyes, dry and a faded blue, were neatly nestled into several layers of wrinkles, and the old man's crows feet looked to have been applied by an actual crow and a heavy one at that. The foot prints of this fat little crow continued in a listless stroll across the old man's countenance.
The knuckles on his right hand were swollen. This was a man who undoubtedly worked with his hands earlier in his life. Patterns of scars in various sizes shed light on other stories about what sort of work this was.
Here's the second trailer to the latest project I've been working on. It's a dvd/choose-your-own-adventure game/movie, where you experience the story through the choices you make. Once it's done I'll either post it online (if that's possible) or send copies out to interested parties. In the meantime, there is a beta copy of the game and if anyone is interested contact me (struckdownent(at)gmail.com with your mailing address and I'll ship you out a copy.
Started working for a local TV show and really haven't had much time to update. This is an old entry that I meant to get around to a while back. It's just some promo stills from the Love Machine music video shoot (below, center of photograph: Tone, my First A.D. Couldn't have made it through this shoot without him). ( More pics after the jump )
Right. So I've been a little busy lately. The latest music video I directed, along with my creative director, MG, was picked up and aired on MTV Logo (and should be rerunning for the rest of the week on PopLab). It premieres online later today, but I'm showing it to you guys first (only by a couple of hours, I know, but I had to wait til it aired for legal reasons). Anyways, here it is, let me know what you think.
One year later, after rummaging around in someone else's desk, and what have I learned? What lesson was gleaned from this experience? We choose a lot in our lives (or at least we think we do), what we wear (at least when we're older), what we eat, what music we listen to, but we don't always choose what we'll come in contact with, what we will inherit. Although, I never felt like anything in the desk was a personal inheritance nor could it belong to anyone else. I actually felt like it belonged to the desk in a way, as though it were some sort of modern day tomb. Perhaps I couldn't make sense of it all on my own, which is why I thought to share it. Something like this is abstract and rarely satisfying. While we know where most of the pieces came from and where they ended up, and even kinda how they ended up there, there's still a lack of closure. And it is that lack of closure in this, and other things like it, that what haunt me. It opens up a window into the potential futures of all of our stuff, what we found worth keeping and worth holding onto. And it shows the reality of how all the pieces of our legacy will become scattered and simply end up on the side of the road or in some fools blog.
"When a tiger dies, it leaves its skin behind. When a person dies, he leaves his name behind." -Chinese Proverb
One of the music videos I directed, RUN, for artist, Billy Drease Williams, is being featured at the 9th Annual WNY Black Film Festival. So, that's exciting.
Recently I acted in and edited together a short film, which will be up in time for Valentine's day. Below is a still from the movie, which will give you an idea of what kind of movie to expect (spoiler alert: It's a zombie flick...go figure). You can check out its predecessor, Davis, here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fycg9ArC1j0
Everyone's a writer. This includes Peter Riley, author of the unpublished novel, Universes. He's 65 and lives in an apartment in London, Ontario... And why don't I let him tell you....
"In 1986 I realized I had enough savings to devote two or three years to writing a novel, which I wanted to do above all things. I completed 500 pages by 1988, took them to a writer-in-residence at the Windsor Public Library and found myself agreeing with her that while the novel showed promise, it was poor stuff. I returned to work at the Windsor newspaper."
"Five and a half years later, in 1994 (the year I turned 50), I left my job again to return to writing. This time I pulled out all the stops, and produced the novel that appears on this website... I finished it in August, 1999."
"I tried and failed to sell it by sending submissions to publishers and agents. I was jobless, and wretched, for the next couple of years, but found a part-time job with the London Free Press in London, Ontario, in 2002. Four years later I was “downsized,” and in the intervening years I have been adjusting to the odd notion of being retired. I tried again, and failed again, to get the novel published in 2007-8."
"I’m not writing fiction, because it’s very hard work, and it would feel futile as long as I’m unable to publish my first novel. My aim still is to get it into print, and that is the primary reason for this website, the rather obscure hope that this might find me a legitimate publisher. I’m also pleased to put it online so you can read it."
Predicting the end of the world is a mugs game, which is why the rest of us leave it to the more... hm... studied folk, like Mr. Harold Camping. Now before I get on my elevated steed of righteous mockery, I should probably point out that Mr. Camping has a degree in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, meaning that he's smarter than I am.
Not only is he smarter than I am, but he's more skilled in mathematics than the average criticizing bum. And I'm more than sure that it was these very skills in mathematics that crunched the numbers that gave us: DOOMSDAY May 21st, 2011
Before I go on, I'd like to clarify that I'm not here to criticize Mr. Harold Camping for making silly predictions. Plenty of other people have jumped on that one already. What I am here to criticize Mr. Camping for is his complete disregard for the practice of Civil Engineer in making such a prediction.
If I'm not mistaken, a Civil Engineer "practices...the application of planning, designing, constructing, maintaining, and operating infrastructures while protecting the public and environmental health..." (as copied from Wikipedia, special thanks to Jimmy Wales).
Does predicting DOOMSDAY scenarios sound like "protecting the public and environmental health" to you? Of course not! People panic. People get anxious. People do other lazy and predictable things in the face of sudden extinction.
What I would like to see, and what the public deserve from Mr. Camping, is a statement describing how he will engineer his particular DOOMSDAY so it doesn't cause any sudden uncontrollable, widespread financial or commercial apprehension provoking hasty action and unthinking behavior, and therefore fit into the guidelines he, as a Civil Engineer, has a duty to follow.
“One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Currently, we are counting down to the World's 7 billionth member, which is huge (sidenote: that is not necessarily a joke about 1.2 billion of those members being overweight). What's even more exciting is that that member is likely to arrive in 2011. However, that member will be virtually anonymous amidst the 138 million other new members also arriving in 2011.
Hey! I've been reading statistics! Congratulations! What's my point?
Earth is like furniture from Ikea, which itself can be found on Earth. So does that mean that little Ikeas can be found on Ikea furniture?
No. That's crazy.
I meant, in the sense that it seems like it's made for you, but occasionally you'll find it unsuitable for the purposes you've assigned it. Or, more importantly, its assembly comes with only so many resources and sometimes those crucial resources, like a screw or something, get wasted, or lost, or aren't even included. Then, despite the fact that it looks really cool, it has become 70% useless.
So, in your 28th year you reach your 10,000th day (unless you know something about physics the rest of us don't). There are approx. 15,000 days until the end of oil, 60,000 til the end of gas. Yes, I'm just quoting statistics, but you can't ignore the fact that Earth has a limited number of those little plastic pegs required to assemble that formica desk.
A limited number of non-renewable resources isn't anything new to point a finger at. Neither is the fact that the "Puzzle of Earth", whether its escaping it or figuring out how to continue surviving on it, becomes increasingly difficult the more its resources are used, which itself is something impossible to get around. And we'll be handing this puzzle to the 7 billioners along with the rest of the future.
Perhaps Earth being a puzzle was a fact we stumbled across a little too late. However, there's still hope. Hope that maybe the graph for solving the Earth puzzle will look like a vertical asymptote, where the chances of solving the puzzle, even with its ever increasing difficulty due to the decline of Earth's resources, will approach, but never reach zero.
"Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed." -Samuel Johnson
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