... not a new route, but joined by an old friend.... good times in early fall... Robby took pictures, I'll post them once he send.
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Showing posts with label pals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pals. Show all posts
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
... Stone Fox on the interweb....
So, back in college, when I still entertained the thought that I would one day be a great filmmaker, I used to make stuff....
My friend Zayna and I ran the campus tv station, TVMcGill, which by the way, is awesome to this day (due to my legacy, i'm sure)
Anyway, we use to misappropriate the resources to create our own projects... and this one time, we made a music video for a friends band, by editing it for three straight days during the run up to finals in our last year of school. Holed up in the student union for 72 hours we thought we were creating genius. we were actually creating this:
Now, about five years later, I found it on an afternoon of youtube googling phrases from my personal histopry to see what comes up.... I have absolutely no idea how it got there... as the master miniDV and Beta tapes are somewhere in a box in my apartment collecting dust with my books by Kant and Derrida. But I am happy it did.
Maybe not so my viral internet fame can begin, but definitely because watching it brought back the memories of making it, and those were some of the best days in all the ones I have spent toiling away in the movie industry.
And so I thought I might provide a little how to guide on how to make a horrible music video and guarantee a locked in love for filmmaking and future internet embarassment
DO: Create a dummy production company and change your cell phone answering machine to reflect it, thus giving you a home base to secure corporate sponsorship, thus ensuring you do not run up your parents credit card to make your masterpiece
DO NOT: Answer your cell after you have started drinking at night, or before you aare fully awake the next morning, inspiring your sponsor contact to ask "are you really a professional producer? are you a student?" and causing you to have to do a lot of grovelling and finance most of the video with the credit card your parents don't know about (yet)
DO: Figure out your concept and storyboards early, stick to it and follow through.
DO NOT: come up with a narrative that no one is EVER going to understand like... say... I don't know... a guy who wakes up on the roof in a kiddy pool and can't remember where he was or what he was doing the previous evening, causing him to recall it in flashbacks as he walk the streets of Montreal, only to realize that he had stolen the band's mojo and all the flashbacks were actually the aforementioned band chasing him through the streets, and when he finally puts it altogether he just happens to have mentioned the bands practice space, where they are currently practicing in pajamas, causing yet another chase down the block..... Trust me, you will get it, it won't be clear to anyone else.
DO: Prepare as much of the wardrobe, makeup, props, locations, extras, etc in advance
DO NOT: back down from any last minute challenges or changes. Some that we dealt with here were:
-you aren't actually allowed to shoot in the montreal metro, which we did... so it was my job to distract any and all approaching subway cops while the band shot with the DP. I played stupid lost anglophone about 15 times, french subway cops are mean
-The purple footie pajamas for one of the band members were too bright through the camera, we threw them in a mud puddle, then into a drier at the local laundromat, and they were good to go
-we had NO shots of the dickies clothes or logo when they finally came through with the funds on our last day of shooting... we just went back and reshot some dickie's beauty shots... corporate selling out was ingrained in us early
-we couldn't actually get our hands on a smoke machine to create a "smoke rising from an open bag" to signify the bands mojo... instead we had friends take turns hauling down smokes and breathing out the plumes through a hose we inserted througha hole in the bottom of a knapsack.... we killed a lot of brain cells for our art
DO: Always keep food and snacks on hand to keep everyone happy during the day
DO NOT: Let your main talent get loaded and show up 15 minutes before his call time... The coffee and breakfast burritos you have on hand will sober him up and entice him enough to shoot, but you will end up having to make him look that haggard and hungover for the rest of the shoot
DO: do this... its a once in a lifetime opportunity to be this self-indulgent and have this much fun with almost no consequences....
DO NOT: take yourself to seriously.... in the end, the only thing that will happen is a few hundred people seeing it on youtube a half-decade later, just have fun with it.
My friend Zayna and I ran the campus tv station, TVMcGill, which by the way, is awesome to this day (due to my legacy, i'm sure)
Anyway, we use to misappropriate the resources to create our own projects... and this one time, we made a music video for a friends band, by editing it for three straight days during the run up to finals in our last year of school. Holed up in the student union for 72 hours we thought we were creating genius. we were actually creating this:
Now, about five years later, I found it on an afternoon of youtube googling phrases from my personal histopry to see what comes up.... I have absolutely no idea how it got there... as the master miniDV and Beta tapes are somewhere in a box in my apartment collecting dust with my books by Kant and Derrida. But I am happy it did.
Maybe not so my viral internet fame can begin, but definitely because watching it brought back the memories of making it, and those were some of the best days in all the ones I have spent toiling away in the movie industry.
And so I thought I might provide a little how to guide on how to make a horrible music video and guarantee a locked in love for filmmaking and future internet embarassment
DO: Create a dummy production company and change your cell phone answering machine to reflect it, thus giving you a home base to secure corporate sponsorship, thus ensuring you do not run up your parents credit card to make your masterpiece
DO NOT: Answer your cell after you have started drinking at night, or before you aare fully awake the next morning, inspiring your sponsor contact to ask "are you really a professional producer? are you a student?" and causing you to have to do a lot of grovelling and finance most of the video with the credit card your parents don't know about (yet)
DO: Figure out your concept and storyboards early, stick to it and follow through.
DO NOT: come up with a narrative that no one is EVER going to understand like... say... I don't know... a guy who wakes up on the roof in a kiddy pool and can't remember where he was or what he was doing the previous evening, causing him to recall it in flashbacks as he walk the streets of Montreal, only to realize that he had stolen the band's mojo and all the flashbacks were actually the aforementioned band chasing him through the streets, and when he finally puts it altogether he just happens to have mentioned the bands practice space, where they are currently practicing in pajamas, causing yet another chase down the block..... Trust me, you will get it, it won't be clear to anyone else.
DO: Prepare as much of the wardrobe, makeup, props, locations, extras, etc in advance
DO NOT: back down from any last minute challenges or changes. Some that we dealt with here were:
-you aren't actually allowed to shoot in the montreal metro, which we did... so it was my job to distract any and all approaching subway cops while the band shot with the DP. I played stupid lost anglophone about 15 times, french subway cops are mean
-The purple footie pajamas for one of the band members were too bright through the camera, we threw them in a mud puddle, then into a drier at the local laundromat, and they were good to go
-we had NO shots of the dickies clothes or logo when they finally came through with the funds on our last day of shooting... we just went back and reshot some dickie's beauty shots... corporate selling out was ingrained in us early
-we couldn't actually get our hands on a smoke machine to create a "smoke rising from an open bag" to signify the bands mojo... instead we had friends take turns hauling down smokes and breathing out the plumes through a hose we inserted througha hole in the bottom of a knapsack.... we killed a lot of brain cells for our art
DO: Always keep food and snacks on hand to keep everyone happy during the day
DO NOT: Let your main talent get loaded and show up 15 minutes before his call time... The coffee and breakfast burritos you have on hand will sober him up and entice him enough to shoot, but you will end up having to make him look that haggard and hungover for the rest of the shoot
DO: do this... its a once in a lifetime opportunity to be this self-indulgent and have this much fun with almost no consequences....
DO NOT: take yourself to seriously.... in the end, the only thing that will happen is a few hundred people seeing it on youtube a half-decade later, just have fun with it.
Monday, July 9, 2007
...officially the best link I have ever been sent on a monday morning....
....sent to me by a friend who, arguably, has gotten me into more trouble than most anyone else.... and the only thing that could make me laugh on a swelteringly humid monday morning on a night after no sleep due to extreme heat, and a weekend where ... ahem.... outside forces... made me make probably a bit of a fool of myself in front of a boy i like....
....THIS is pure internet gold....
....THIS is pure internet gold....
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
... i am using you....
.... just in case you were wondering... i am only friends with people i think are AWESOME... and this is because they lead me to more awesome people....
....this process has been sped up exponentially by the advent of facebook (and I am not commenting on it as a social phenomenon, i leave that to EVERYONE else.... like they weren't expecting it, after myspace, youtube, google... shocker people like the internet to find things... bigger shock, we like to find ourselves on it)
.... anyway I found this guy on this guys's page....
His name is Izik Levy and he is an amazing glass artist.... I love glass art...
seriously this will be a topic for a future post... but lets just say. Glass speaks to me... and Izik Levy's is saying "I AM SOOOOO COOL"...
....then i went to his website... it kicks ASS!...
...go there... immediately... or else
....this process has been sped up exponentially by the advent of facebook (and I am not commenting on it as a social phenomenon, i leave that to EVERYONE else.... like they weren't expecting it, after myspace, youtube, google... shocker people like the internet to find things... bigger shock, we like to find ourselves on it)
.... anyway I found this guy on this guys's page....
His name is Izik Levy and he is an amazing glass artist.... I love glass art...
seriously this will be a topic for a future post... but lets just say. Glass speaks to me... and Izik Levy's is saying "I AM SOOOOO COOL"...
....then i went to his website... it kicks ASS!...
...go there... immediately... or else
Monday, March 12, 2007
Postsecret
I am assuming that by now everyone knows about postsecret..... It is one of my favourite sites on the internet.... I think that I have checked it (at least) once a week for the past two years. I even went out and bought the first book (and am waiting for the second, once you read it once it's fun to look at but not the same, I wanna only get it once I can't take not having it anymore.
Just in case you don't know about postsecret, a quick overview is that a whole bunch of years ago a guy decided to go to his local library in Maryland and slip cards into a tonne of the books (i think he started with a thousand cards) asking people to take a 4x6 card and create a postcard with their secret on it. It could be ANYTHING. And he expected to maybe get a couple back. Within weeks he was getting thousands of secrets from all over the world. People were so excited to get their deepest darkests off their chests, safely, creatively, anonymously, that word travelled by mouth, email, letter, radio, telelvision and, now, thousands of secrets reach maryland each and every week.
I love that you can tell your secrets to someone who doesn't know you. I love, even more, that you can read other people's secrets and not know who they are, even though you know whats at the heart of them.
I hate, however, when they post people's responses to the cards. I mean, the whole point of the frickin thing is that EVERYONE has a response to EVERY card. I don't wanna know what people are thinking about something.
But today I have a comment. I am not sending it to Maryland.... I am putting it here. This is pretty much my postcard anyway. The snapshot of my twisted brain.... Today I saw this card and i couldn't help but wish that i had sent it(or that I could draw). I have no idea why that person wrote it, or what they meant by it. It could be interpreted so many ways. But I love it, because my crazy friends are the ones I love the most. They understand my crazy..... and don't make a big fucking deal of it. We are all their for eachothers' insanity. We help where we can, but more, we understand when help is not required. Just presence.
So to all my Crazies..... I love you to bits.... Thanks for being nuts.... It keeps me sane
Just in case you don't know about postsecret, a quick overview is that a whole bunch of years ago a guy decided to go to his local library in Maryland and slip cards into a tonne of the books (i think he started with a thousand cards) asking people to take a 4x6 card and create a postcard with their secret on it. It could be ANYTHING. And he expected to maybe get a couple back. Within weeks he was getting thousands of secrets from all over the world. People were so excited to get their deepest darkests off their chests, safely, creatively, anonymously, that word travelled by mouth, email, letter, radio, telelvision and, now, thousands of secrets reach maryland each and every week.
I love that you can tell your secrets to someone who doesn't know you. I love, even more, that you can read other people's secrets and not know who they are, even though you know whats at the heart of them.
I hate, however, when they post people's responses to the cards. I mean, the whole point of the frickin thing is that EVERYONE has a response to EVERY card. I don't wanna know what people are thinking about something.
But today I have a comment. I am not sending it to Maryland.... I am putting it here. This is pretty much my postcard anyway. The snapshot of my twisted brain.... Today I saw this card and i couldn't help but wish that i had sent it(or that I could draw). I have no idea why that person wrote it, or what they meant by it. It could be interpreted so many ways. But I love it, because my crazy friends are the ones I love the most. They understand my crazy..... and don't make a big fucking deal of it. We are all their for eachothers' insanity. We help where we can, but more, we understand when help is not required. Just presence.
So to all my Crazies..... I love you to bits.... Thanks for being nuts.... It keeps me sane
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