i shot this video last fall during the production of a new episode of classic star trek called "the child." peter west assisted me with shooting and editing.
i spent a week in rockport, maine last summer at the maine media workshops. above is a short exercise i directed. we had two hours to come up with the story, choose a location, light and shoot. it was fun to screen this at the end-of-week showcase. it got good audience response. it had a beach boys "good vibrations" soundtrack, but i nixed it here. mara laine came up with the story idea--to use books titles as a dialog--which was great, and i came up with the idea to use the bookstore ladder as a dolly as well as the device that connects the two characters. jim mcgathey directed the lighting and championed the use of "kino on the floor", which i didn't like at first but i have to hand it to him, it works! he also stars. george lamboy set the lights and kept us all in order! i'm afraid i can't remember the name of the actress (apologies).
i'm in new orleans shooting interviews for a friend, tim wolff, who is directing a film, "the sons of tennessee williams". it's about gay social clubs, the men who pioneered them in the 1960s and 70s and the men who sustain them today. gay men in new orleans took a unique path to carve out rights for themselves. they produced fantastic costume balls that provided a non-confrontational, but edgy, interface between straight and gay culture that tested and ultimately prevailed over anti-gay laws.
a great video by eva sollberger about our annual halloween parade in white river junction. it's part of a series eva makes called "stuck in vermont".
here i am in my second episode, seated 2nd from the left.
my friend peter west came along to check out the production for a few days. we're going to be flying to new orleans next week to help friend tim wolff shoot his documentary about gay krewes. i'll be there with peter for a week.
excuse me. i am still here. but, boy, have i not had time to write! advice: never plan three intense projects for one summer with the hopes that two of them won't happen. like people who don't like cats and always have cats jumping on them, they will all happen. and all will require your undivided attention, just like a cat.
i got new glasses. i got a macbook. together, these resulted in this picture.
dreamland's got lights! a generous donor gave me about 30 lights for the dreamland performance space/soundstage today. they're old, but in great condition, generally, and should allow me to set up a lighting grid sooner than later with the ability to light small performances decently. i think i ought to be able to use these for film production too, but they lack barn doors and filter holders and are set up to clamp onto pipe rather than c-stands. very excited!
me as a security guard (from barbara luna's website)
i briefly mentioned earlier that i am working on new star trek episodes with a dedicated group of fans. i mentioned one afternoon to an acquaintance that i'd like to do some sci-fi shorts and she told me about the production of new star trek episodes in upstate new york, about two hours from white river. so, i emailed james, the actor who plays kirk and who is the force behind the new episodes, who forwarded my message onto a guy named "sarge" and voila, i was engaged to volunteer. i couldn't wait to see the sets!
i arrived well into the shoot because i had other obligations, namely taking the production lighting course at the maine media workshop. so, i arrived well prepared to jump into studio production. but, i didn't expect to be put in front of the camera, which is what happened within minutes of my arrival. better yet, i got to act with one of the original star trek actresses, barbara luna, who played kirk's girlfriend in the episode "Mirror Mirror". she taught me how to fall when phasered.
i will be returning to the set in a couple weeks to assist in shooting "pick-ups", shots that are needed but didn't get shot during the principal photography. and i will be returning for another episode's production in october.
you can watch the new episodes here: www.startrekphase2.com
peter and i whipped this up a couple weeks ago. he just quit smoking. rated R for language and sexual content.
i've been loosely following the presidential campaign. yesterday i read that mccain's latest televison ad says the following: "Beautiful words cannot not make our lives better." i thought, well, that's it in a nutshell: if a politician believes that language, the foundation of so much of our culture, and the precursor to almost all action, especially political action, has no potential to better our lives, then how does one make better? it's painfully clear, thanks to the current administration, that ugly and deceitful words lead to ugly action, for which we have paid and will be paying, in blood, sweat and tears, for decades, and for the betterment of who? i believe it's difficult, if not impossible, to write beautiful words without beautiful thought. beautiful action is the result of beautiful thought. our lives are manifestly and directly made better by the beautiful: thought, words and action, an intimately linked trio. i'll be voting for the candidate whose words suggest he's thinking beautifully. sorry john.
i just returned from a couple weeks of filmmaking. the first week was a workshop at the maine media workshops where matt seigel, cinematographer, led fourteen of us on a most excellent journey exploring the world of location lighting for film and video. we explored about ten different locations around rockport and camden, maine, where the media workshops are located, lit and shot film and video at six of them. the learning curve was steep for all of us in the workshop, i think, but i came out of it feeling like i'd been through half of film school. matt is a great teacher and i know because right after the class i found myself on the set of a fan-produced star trek episode in upstate new york where i not only discovered everything matt taught us in the workshop came true on set but also got to act with star trek original series actress barbara luna who played marlena moreau, kirk's girlfriend, in the episode, "mirror mirror." it was a great follow up to the workshop because i felt awfully proud when the director of photography told me to "get a 650, drop a single into it with a party red" and i knew what he was talking about. the episode in which i appear (for about five seconds) will be delivered on the internet next year.
i've been learning my new hi-def camera. this is a short little movie i made from shots i took yesterday, taken without the intention on making a movie, but cut together pretty nicely i thought. the subject: things that are still juxtaposed with things that move, with a brief into and outro from main street museum curator, david ford, who graciously divulged his inspiration just before heading off to a hartford historical society meeting on his bicycle (that shot got cut i'm afraid, though it was nice). i'm using a 35mm lens adapter which allows me to mount my nikon SLR lenses on my video camera. it makes for wonderful shallow depth of field and a look that usually doesn't come from a video camera. while i think the movie falls apart about halfway through, my intention was to run all the way through the production process to see how it worked, from shooting, to editing, to color correcting, to sound editing and finally compressing for the web, a process that took me through five different pieces of software. i'm happy with the result. it even sounds good on crappy little speakers!
with all the hype and fear about energy lately, it's interesting to take an objective look at it. i found this chart, produced by the government. it sheds some interesting light on our current energy use (2004). the most astounding fact is that of all the energy we consume, only 38% of it gets used, the rest is wasted. for instance, of the power an electrical plant produces, only 31% is useful energy, the rest is lost in the system. compare this to nature, specifically plants, which use photosynthesis to capture the sun's energy. they do this at near 100% efficiency, wasting almost nothing, and they contribute to the ecosystem. the human habit of consuming fossil fuels contributes little beneficial to the environment (excess heat, excess carbon dioxide, chemical waste, poor air quality, etc). vehicles are particularly dismal at around 20% efficient (the other 80% is lost to friction, so perhaps in the winter they're a bit more "useful" because the heat generated by the friction is used to warm the passenger compartment!). clearly, if we're all going to survive without immense decreases in quality of life, we have to become more efficient. the easiest way is not to participate in activities that use lots of energy, and the second easiest way is to, if one has to use energy, use it efficiently. incandescent light bulbs are among the most energy inefficient devices in existence, between 2% and 13% depending on the bulb. just a tiny fraction of the energy consumed by a light bulb produces visible light! the rest of the energy produces heat. when you consider that the electricity reaching one's home is just 31% of the energy consumed and multiply that by an incadescent bulb's efficiency of 8.5% on average, we get an overall efficiency of just 2.6%. that's 3800% less efficient than your average house plant, which happens to be the most efficient energy "appliance" in your house.
i had a fun birthday a couple days ago, spread out over a weekend, in white river junction and at faerie camp destiny. my friend jon showed up in ghoulish attire for our green screen shoot that gabriel and jade arranged. otherwise, life is very busy for me right now. i really need to clean my office. it has reached levels of chaos unparalleled!
i got a new video camera. the first thing i did with it was turn it on, point it out the window, and then went and had my signature breakfast: two eggs over easy, home fries, dry english muffin with peanut butter, coffee. when i got back this is what happened. if you imagine a whistling wind in the background you'll just about have the day.
as things seem to happen in my life, a seachange is in process. my architecture work is coming to a close while my film work is starting to bustle. this feels very very good to me. i sometimes wonder if i haven't approached architecture in the same way the george bush seems to have approached the white house: as a response to a difficult past event...a poor reason to approach anything. architecture school was extremely challenging for me and i suppose, in retrospect, i've always wanted to prove to myself that i could "do it" because in school i got the definite impression that i couldn't do it. in general, school seemed to communicate that message to me. what i find curious is that whenever i've tried to "do" architecture, i find myself in film. it happened as a kid, in high school, in college and in grad school. i would endeavor to create architectural projects and find myself dreaming in pictures. a common criticism of my architectural work was that it dealt in pictures, not architecture. i came away from those crits often wondering if i understood what architecture was at all. i do tend to think of buildings sequentially... you enter here, you go there, you see that, you do this... and i tend to like architecture that presents sequences of spaces, processions and especially cities (i liked urban planning a lot). the aspect of architecture that i dislike, viscerally, is all the regulation around it, the bureaucracy that attends most building projects, which, though i may be applying my own neurosis to this, seem to say, "you are bad for even thinking of this." it feels very much like my experience of church, actually, which involved a lot of rules that made no sense to me.
i can't claim that filmmaking is any better, especially in a studio format, where there are terrible pressures to make money, be successful, be glamorous, and climb the ladder. but, my sense is that as an independent, there is much more freedom (in architecture too, but the places you can practice without oversight are dwindling). i've been watching a lot of john waters films and i am heartened by the outrageousness and compassion his films present, despite their surface vulgarity, which i find hilarious and shocking, still! and, now, a teenage fantasy of mine is coming true: i will get to visit the starship enterprise and participate in the making of a star trek episode. this trumps all architectural possibilities! it turns out that not far from where i live there is a full-scale copy of the original star trek sets that are being used to create new original series episodes. it's astonishing to see how well the sets are reproduced, and i can't wait to see what a completely community driven production is like.
oh, and if you need a cinematographer, i've got a swanky new camera that takes gorgeous movies. ask me for references!
i'm so danged excited about making films and i'm learning so much. i found a great website, lynda.com that has extensive instructional videos about all of apple's movie production software. it's been a great way to learn for me. i like watching. i've never been much of a manual kind of guy. i like to jump and get going. i've also been researching movie making equipment. more and more, movie making is done inside a computer and the camera is becoming a capture device that provides files to the computer. the essentials are still the same, but rather than have to spend lots of money on big sets, it's now possible with your average mac or PC, to build fantastic worlds and place actors into them realistically (see prior post). i've always wanted to make some sci-fi films, and it looks like i will be able to, spectacularly!
