People on Youtube laugh a lot at this clip, but what I noticed is that Orson is on the 102nd set up according to the slate (scene 102 take 3). Clearly they must have muscled through a lot of commercials in one day and probably a sip of wine for each take… we’re talking hundreds of sips. What’s amazing is that Orson is still coherent at all and that he still sounds so wonderful and musical. He even slips in a little Irish brogue in a la Lady from Shanghai. What he had to do for money. I guess it could be worse.
Orson Welles once said that he spent about ninety nine percent of his time in search of money and one percent actually making films. He said, it was a terrible way to spend a life and he should have stayed in the theater where it was easier to put on a show. But after getting to play with the world’s greatest toy train set, how could he go back? Saying I should’ve stayed in the theater is like saying I never should have married that girl. What good does it do? I loved her, I love her still…..but she ruined my life. What kind of a life is it, always chasing money?
Orson figures pretty heavily (no pun intended) in the Moby Dick Animations. Here are some note drawings on what I’m going to animate in the first part of the week.
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This is a vlog pondering the future of cinema in an internet world. It is more or less an excuse to hear Joni sing about Canada and experiment with some fragments of Moby Dick project. Since the project is taking so long (I’m at about 280 pages and frames… so I’m only a bout a third of the way through) I wanted to vlog a sort of stock for what will be the making of video. I’m acutually remixing from the i-movie of “I Drew Pictures” Vid. The “success” of that cllip got me thinking about why that vid touched a nerve and what that might say about future cinema: my own and the cinema at large. I don’t want the blog to slip into sounding like Caheirs de Wired… and I’m no where near as clever as Truffaut and Goddard and the rest of those French boys, but I have been thinking about internet films (or whatever it is that I do which in my semiotic days we would have just called text… or maybe linked text? I guess they call it New Media and leave it at that… maybe even because its so vague).
I spent some time on Youtube the other day where people can get a million hits with just talking head vids… getting by on personality alone. Some of it is funny,or interesting, or weird, but it got me thinking that at some point internet cinema is going to have to (or it’s going to do it anyway) grow up. By this I mean there’s going to have to be a business plan and a revenue stream if content is ever going to get beyond people acting silly and yammering about mostly other people’s videos. It’s going to have to tell complex stories. It’s going to have to have fiction and by this I mean actors and STORY and by this I mean writers. It’s going to have to move beyond the talking head and become cinema. Lately I’ve been thinking about cinema, which is to say in the same breath: Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about money. In order to do more than just sit in a room talking to yourself, I mean the minute you start dealing with actors and decent sound and a location, you need a few bucks in your pocket. How will the new media creator get paid in an age beyond mechanical reproduction? What is the market for new media art in the age of digital means of production and reproduction? Clearly I haven’t a clue, but I’m hoping people will leave comments and help me to think about some of these questions.
the Library project based vid Butterfly (A collab of A. Saunders, Raszka and Me) made the the daily reel top ten last week and since I’m below water working on Moby Dick, I thought I’d repost it along with a new Book Collab from Caroline VK of The Library project. The infinite butter.
Here’s a song from the the Royal Wylds . I went to their gig at Mercury Loung in NYC to shoot a different song, but they wanted $250 to shoot video in the club (non negotiable), so I says, “What about stills?”
and they says, “Stills? no problem.”
So why not shoot the video with stills? I thought.
I had the time lapse from a Brooklyn gig sitting around anyways and it’s like two hour long sets boiled down to two minutes and five seconds… time lapse for a song about time.
A new music experiment and a new book start by Me-jade for the Library. This post seemed to grow out of the fact that Butterfly made it onto the daily reel’s top ten (finally got around to submitting it)… so I’ve been looking at that piece and thinking about the love story.
Avoiding animating… it turns out I hate animating.. at least in my present state of uber funk. Yesterday’s book cover collab got me thinking about eyes and mouths and ears and all the paintings around me. This little vid is interesting to me because it is the first piece of music I’ve ever made. I used Garage band, which is annoying because you have to play a keyboard with your mouse for input, but is amazing because it gives you a whole buch of tracks to layer over. Like I’m not a dillitante in enough fields yet, now I have to take on music composition? Somebody throw me out a fucking window already. I added a small drawing by Brian Razka that I’ve been wanting to post for a while. It works nicely to link the whole run of images together with the Finish of Brain’s start for The Library project.
Was up to four last night scanning pages for the Moby Dick animated book thing. It’s coming along fairly nicely. I should probably be goading you into bidding on the scrolls, but I trust you’ll do that on your own. Here’sa self portrait I’ve been working on for several months… probably will change again, but there’s something to be said for preserving various stages of things. There’s an earlier incarnation:here.
The auction on the scrolls is going to end on Thursday… so get your bids in. The video has been seen over twenty thousand times on Vimeo… moving a lot of people in ways they often can’t seem to describe or comprehend, but feel compelled to comment upon anyway. I must say it’s puzzling to me… now if I could only pay my bills, I’d be delighted. SO BID.
Meanwhile I’m tearing up pages of Moby Dick to build some sort of hairbrained animation…something to do with eyes and fish. The word billow is the first word I pointed to on the page I’m up to (The Sermon).
This is an abstract I’ve been working on while doing the scrolls (along with a couple of paintings that probably aren’t finished, or maybe never will be). It’s been wild watching the outpouring of affection for the little crowd video on Vimeo. There is no doubt that I set out to make something that people might enjoy, but it’s always surprising when people actually seem to enjoy it…. a regular crowd pleaser.
The audience has inserted itself into the piece now… claiming certain characers at certain frame counts as “ME”… and weirdly, they are usually right! Also, I finally got a negative comment… restoring some sense of balance (negative comments of course weigh more than positive… or is it that they are further out from the fulcrum?).
This was interesting in a lot of different ways… the most obvious here is how do you describe a horizontal scroll on a vertical scroll. That’s one of the many conflicting impuses embodied in this crowd… all born out of monkeybook and being surrounded by a physical audience… who is my audience?… I think I’ll draw them and perform infront of the drawing. Today’s post also asks the guestion (more than most), which here is the real work of art? The drawing, or the film of the drawing, or the whole thing together on the blog, or what?
The scroll seemed to turn into some reverse time engineered self portrait. When writing in a Chinese bound book, you more or less have to start at the ending and work your way back to the beginning, which begs the question which is which? I’d like to make some more of these (I’m going to post a second experiment soon), so I’ve decided to offer this one for sale so I can buy more books and pay the storage people so all the rest of my art doesn’t get thrown out. Let’s say the starting bid is $150… book goes to the highest bidder by next week the 14th. Contact me. Larger image of the whole scroll: here
The faces have begun to morph into scenes…something to do with trying to get the architectural rendering of the Oxford Library to work as a portrait yesterday I think.
Deflating like a red balloon after the show Wednesday… cleaning the apratment, doing laundry, staring at the wall…that kind of thing. Fortunately, some beautiful stuff was posted at The Library, so I thought I’d share and practice using the new Word Press authoring software…which is driving me a bit battty in the strange little ways it is different from Moveable Type… not that you care,but…. Anways from top to bottom: Inca Pan, THINKMULE + JOHNCASEY Collab,THINKMULE + Charles Wilkin Collab, and two from Tanjun.
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