Congratulations, to me — #Granfalloon, 2022 Pushcart Prize Nominee! #honored as this is my all-time favorite short story anthology. This is one that I am a constant reader of (including as many back issues as I can gather. Being nominated by Granfalloon is indeed a career highlight. My short story, LustMord was a labor of true love – Theremin’s, electro-convulsive therapy, and revolutionaries vs. Nazis. Just the kind of thing I like to read and write. http://pushcartprize.com
Category: strange
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Working on the next Grant Guignol stop motion film allows me to integrate 3d and StopMo elements as I define my world(s). The B/W aesthetic is one that I cherish – so I shall remain monochromatic – with all of the inherent bumps, judders and stutters of antique animation. I like the ‘art brut’ primitive approach making no attempt to emulate reality-for-reality’s sake.
Today I worked on compositing, digital world creation, CG integration and came up with a style I am happy with.
Complete with tears, scratches, rips and bumps, I adore these little handmade worlds – even if they are sad sometimes (and more than difficult to create). It’s hard work making these films and my big, fat fingers often get in the way.
But I’m learning – and enjoying myself – and this is a great reward for the time spent.
I’m glad I have the time to make these tests as it helps inform my greater work and helps me create the story as I go. My skills (or lack thereof) are tested, i can check my proof of concepts and see what works before I actually begin some of the more taxing work. Integrating CGI with StopMo is something that high-end houses like Laika do so well – and in my own smaller (much smaller) way, I shall use smoke, dust, debris and the like to enhance these little ‘guignols.’
The backgrounds here are rendered in Clone 6 and this proof-of-concept pass allows me to see how well the CG holds up. Overall, I’m quite happy. If I don’t draw too much attention to it, I think the low-rez Iclone models should be fine for Backgrounds and Deep BGs.
Using foreground elements in 3D compositing passes also added to the verisimilitude (and once I add larger elements like trucks, fire and other materials). it should hold up for the 5 seconds or so that I need. I hope.
So, this week it’s time to make my scooter and character really move, and introduce my hero to the love of his post apocalyptic life. I can’t wait. If you are interested in seeing my work to date on this project, you can check out this private link here.
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Here’s an advance look at my next Grant Guignol Stop Motion Project. This year is all about doing art that matters to me and developing my StopMo chops. #diyordie
I’ve been very fortunate with my recent stop motion film, “Gloomy Sunday” has already been accepted into a major international film festival (more details once I can release them) so I am continuing to develop my body of work (which was always in the plan) this semester. Here you can see my main character, a poor government worker relegated to an isolated military outpost who passes the time listening to music and watching TV while pining ‘for the fields’, as Monty Python used to say. Like GS, the idea here is to open myself to free form association and find the story as it develops. I am debating going full color on this one – as I shall be integrating full 3d backgrounds and CGI digital composites throughout. My hero rides a moped – see photo below – that allows me to get my green screens out and get all ‘rear screen projection’ on this piece.
As you can see, this is another dirty, drab and handmade world (all by me, naturally) although I am indebted to CCC alumnus Cassie Grawes who left me the shell of her set from her thesis film to use as I may. So, I adapt, add-to, manipulate and paint splatter to find my world. I know that this film is also about love – or more specifically about love lost – and it shall not use dialogue. I do believe that visual storytelling is the key to my successful cinema and I shall continue to adopt that position here.
Music will figure prominently and, as I am currently on a retro Big Band Swing kick, can only imagine it shall be something forlorn (and possibly reed-based) once I find my metier. I’m learning to hold the reins lightly in this process so I’m not counting anything out.
I’m figuring the work will take me more than GS due to the complexity and the style of work I shall be doing. With CG integration, driving sequences, real walk cycles and other detailed work, this will be a much harder stop motion endeavor. If GS was my formal introduction to the stop motion world, this film will be more of a thesis event for me to consider. I shall post more as I go.
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As a working artist, I am always looking for new ways to interpret the environment that surrounds me in Chicago. I use film, digital media, animation, live action and a host of mediums (including watercolor, collage, straight and manipulated photography) to make sense of what I see. I don’t see the world you might.
My world is darker, with a whimsical sense of play. I always wanted to live in an Edward Gorey play and the way I can imagine this is by creating my own strange and beautiful art. I bend, spindle and mutilate words, images and art to find my own way of seeing. I’m not interested in reality. I’m much more fascinated by my own interpretation of reality.
An old “No Parking” sign warning cars not to load becomes a study in abstraction and tone. By filtering, manipulating and removing what the words mean, I am able to concentrate on form, structure and typography as an art itself. There is a wonderful website, Art Of The Title, that I recommend to go much further down the rabbit hole on this topic.
Chicagoland is a land of doors and windows left over from decades past. As fast as they put up modern skyscrapers, I try to find ways to preserve my understanding of its past. This is not your Chicagoland nor the world once designed and constructed by the original artists and laborers. This is my magical, whimsical world where anything can happen. Who lives behind this window? Where does that door lead? What monsters, madmen or maidens cohabit and cavort in strange symmetry behind these shutters? What do the glyphs, sigils and enchainments scrawled on doorways mean? How are these blessings and curses tied to the old history of the unseen by most?
I live in a world of mystery, magic and manipulation. It is a lovely place to create art. #manipulateyourworld
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One of the true joys of modern media are the variety of ways we can create outside the camera. I love shooting film and pixels – but I am also a fool for collage, poetry and pictographs that combine text and imagery in new and unique ways.
As a visual artist, I embrace all forms of creative media and will use any tool available to share stories, ideas, themes and insights. I recently discovered the Lark App which allows me to make the art poems you see here. Think of it like fridge magnets for the 21st century. I would spend many hours working with this kind of tool in the past pushing words around on my fridge at home.
What’s lovely about this kind of experimentation is that it doesn’t have to make sense to anyone other than myself and I can share or hide as my heart desires. Tone poems and experimental cinema have taught me the value of this practice and as a working artist, the joy of play is one of my greatest tools. I cherish the opportunity to look beyond the obvious and juxtapose my thoughts, words and pictures in endless jumbles and installations. The sky is wide open and I have nowhere to go but up. -
As a genre filmmaker I look to my films as a way to smuggle in social commentary and my own personal/ political agendas with every picture. Under the guise of popular (and sometimes excessive genre entertainment), I smuggle in subtext that adds to the deeper meaning of the film.
The ROBOCOP:Prime Directives miniseries that I made for Syfy is more than just the Alex Murphy/ Robocop story. My writers and I wanted to create a Rags-to-Riches tale – but it was also imperative (for me) to make this about my relationship with my estranged older son. Like most teenagers, he was struggling with his relationship with the world and his ongoing understanding of who I was. This eight hour miniseries ended up being my wish fulfillment film of father and son united in a common cause.
As I started to work outside of Hollywood, the themes and subtext of my work continued to be smuggled into seemingly ‘innocent’ genre films. One had only to look beneath the surface to see what these films were really about.
The Defiled – a horror zombie plague film about single parenthood and child rearing. What is the new ‘normal’ when it comes to family?
Fall Away – a musical hate crime manifesto that champions an unlikely predator as the hero. How well do we know the people who claim to be truly virtuous?
F@ckload Of Scotch Tape – a film noir musical. Glee meets Fightclub revolving around father and son relationships. How do the sins of the father stain their children?
Sweet Leaf – Rock and roll robbery reliving my wild teenage years and the undying love of friendship. What is the true nature of friendship and family?
Arkham Sanitarium: Soul Eater and The Cropsey Tapes are both about the ‘Kardashian Kulture’ that inundates today’s media marketplace. What is the price of fame? How far will you go for an upvote or click?
Unlike the moralizing early exploitation cinema that I teach about, a message, lesson or political agenda was often inserted or blatantly promoted in these early genre pictures as an excuse to titillate and shock early audiences. Audiences came for the education but really stayed for the bloody child birth footage, geek show material and deranged behavior on display. Today the paradigm is clearly reversed with the more sensational aspects openly advertised with a message or lesson soft-shoed within if included at all. Greater depth and personal resonance within genre storytelling allows for much stronger cinema and makes for greater audience engagement. The more I draw from my own personal experience the stronger the message – even if it is coated in gallons of blood and the trappings of genre.
What aspects of your life or your political viewpoint can be smuggled into your genre cinema to make a greater impact? How can your anger, heartache or personal horror translate into engaging and unique filmmaking? What can you say about the world at large and your response to it while navigating the murky backwaters of exploitation art cinema?
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Caught up with Jim Jarmusch’s ode to vampires and grunge rock and roll, “Only Lovers Left Alive.” Such sweet melancholia. JJ continues to make his cinema in a personal, evocative and beautiful way and ‘Lovers’ is no exception.
Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton play married ages-old vampires living separate lives who come back together in desolate Detroit to help him with his ongoing depression. Conflict ensues as Swinton’s undead sister comes to visit and she chows down on Tom’s local ‘zombie’ – his euphemism for us poor morals. They depart for Tangiers to reconnect with a dying friend and are reverted back to noshing on two local lovers. I’ve tried to be as spoiler free as possible on this synopsis – and on paper, the film sounds awfully light – but Jarmusch is so much more than just the words on the page. Jarmusch’s work has a dreamlike other world quality that liberates us from this mundane life and provides a inky, dreamlike, slow motion eternal night that unfolds like sweet black hash. It’s apt that the film brings us to Tangiers and the exotic night culture that still permeates this legendary hallucinogenic haven. You can get contact stoned from the opening frames of the film with the sated vampires orgasmic by their drug-influenced blood drinking and Asbinthe-styled fugue ritual. It is a world that Jarmusch seems imminently comfortable in. Star Tilda Swinton stated after the film’s release: “Jim is pretty much nocturnal, so the nightscape is pretty much his palette. There’s something about things glowing in the darkness that feels to me really Jim Jarmusch. He’s a rock star.” [1]
In keeping with the slow motion and ultra-trippy dark visuals, Jarmusch’s ode to melancholia and love eternal is aptly supported by his own musical group’s electric soundscapes. As SQÜRL JJ and company step into sonic fuzz, Eno-inspired ambience territory and combine a host of Middle Eastern influences with spacey Lou Reed ‘Metal Machine Music’ for a heady, romantic and poetic collage rarely heard in our contemporary cinema. Dutch lute player Jozef van Wissem compositions were integral to the aural landscapes as created by SQÜRL. Stated Van Wissem, “I know the way [Jarmusch] makes his films is kind of like a musician. He has music in his head when he’s writing a script so it’s more informed by a tonal thing than it is by anything else … I feel that I’m sort of political. Jim’s film is anti-contemporary-society. And the lute goes against all technology and against all computers and against all the shit you don’t need. [2]. In this world, analog rules and digital is a dirty word.
In today’s motion picture world, few films truly celebrate the outsider-chic night culture that this film does with its attention to detail. Jarmusch is an artist first and it is apparent in the clean, eloquent staging, period set design (although set in what appears to be a contemporary time, everything on display has a patina of dust and more than a sense of DIY artist usage) extravagant costuming and loving attention paid to the musical details. The guitars and tech are not just any old film props but actual vintage working rock n roll objects d’art. The clothes, burnished in soft leathery, buttered tones, are lovingly distressed and trez-appropriate throughout (and don’t get me started about their hair, Hiddleton’s car or the books of poetry they read). From the vintage sunglasses to the dank clubs of Detroit through to the back alleys of Tangier, this is a film where the details are a large part of the atmosphere and the world it conjures. If filmmakers are our modern-day Magickians (and I’m firmly convinced they are), Jarmusch is a true master conjurer evoking a warm cinematic spell designed to embrace you in his arms and hold you as you slip under his deep enchantment. Lie back and let the world fall away in the warm water bath that is this heartfelt tribute to love eternal, our passions and the need to keep our hearts and our work alive. Like the music it presents in the film, one can allow the wash of such measured performances to trace one in an endless Möbius strip that is life eternal. One must never stop. One must continue to survive. If only for the sake of art itself.
For auteurs such as Jarmusch, it’s getting harder and harder to get films such as these made. As Jarmusch explains, “it’s getting more and more difficult for films that are a little unusual, or not predictable, or don’t satisfy people’s expectations of something.[3]
Budgeted at $7MM with a box office worldwide return of $7.8MM, this Palme D’or Nomination for 2013, is a shining example of fine art genre cinema that transcends cultural boundaries, lengthy funding journeys (over seven years in the asking) and multiple international timezones in its creation. Critically well-received, artistically significant and aesthetically complete, it represents that the Auteur is alive and well in America today. Even if he has to go to Germany to get the money and abandon his homeland for support leaving the cinematic wasteland that is Detroit in Hollywood’s less than capable hands. Only Auteurs are left alive in todays alternative fine art cinema.
[1] Jonathan Romney (22 February 2014). “Jim Jarmusch: how the film world’s maverick stayed true to his roots”. The Guardian. Retrieved 9 December, 2014
[2] Steve Dollar (11 April 2014). “Jozef van Wissem wants to make the lute ‘sexy again,’ and Jim Jarmusch is helping him”. The Washington Post. Retrieved 9 December, 2014.
[3] Andrew Pulver (25 May 2013). “Cannes 2013: Only Lovers Left Alive a seven-year trek says Jim Jarmusch”. The Guardian. Retrieved 9 December, 2014.
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Just finished writing up my thoughts for the day and I realized I had missed a golden opportunity to tell you about Martin’s new Kickstarter imitative.
Check it out HERE
“Genius idea” – Nemesis to go live journal
“Martin Atkins is running probably the best Kickstarter campaign ever…..hilariously brilliant!” Jagoff
“Not just your average Kickstarter campaign.” – Indie Ambassador
Martin is a heretic of the highest order. He makes noise wherever he goes and shakes the trees. He scares people. Is bold, defiant, daft, funny and brilliant. Wherever MA goes, a hundred new converts pick up a guitar, or a deck and make it happen for themselves. Because they need to.
The world needs more Martin Atkins. He gives it away FOR FREE so that others can learn and do it for themselves. He’s a revolutionary and my role model in a lot of ways. I just need to be as courageous as Martin. One day I shall be –
From Martin:
I like that Tour:Smart has made a difference – but I’ve been asked a LOT over the last few years on the road – why not create another book that starts at the very beginning of an artists journey?
Over the last few years I’ve been working on making Band:Smart as good as I can get it ( in its 71st revision) it addresses all aspects of being an artist, from starting out all the way through creating the entity (whatever it is); through the first shows, the writing, the recording, the packaging, the merchandising, the problems, the labels – why / why not, the people, the ups, the downs, and the ins and the outs (that wasn’t a sex reference until I made this comment) kind of like a d.i.y. bible, a d-i-why-ble?
The establishment, the labels, academia, the old school, the old guard, the what-evers……fuck ‘em – and there’s the most important fuck of all.
Whatever it takes……
So, check out his site, his campaigns, pass on the word and the noise. Get the fuck out of bed and start something for yourself.