I am very fortunate to have been included in the Supernova Silent Screen festival hosted by the Denver Digerati in, well, Denver. I made a specially cropped version of Brood X just for this festival. And then added music and some other scenes, which is the version I’ve linked to in this sentence.
Brood X will be shown on screen 6. From their website:
A brand new screen in 2021, the 15th and Champa location is a super high pixel pitch, non-standard format that is close to street level, making it highly visible to anyone passing by. Denver Digerati is very excited to inaugurate this dynamic LED as part of our Silent Screen program in 2021.
https://denverdigerati.org/silent-screen-2021
I won’t make it out there to see this in person, but the organizers were kind enough to send some pics and footage of this week’s screen test.
I’m very grateful to be a part of this! I hope someone in Denver gets a kick out of this video.
I completed a new animation today, which commemorates this summer of cicadas. I wrote the soundtrack music, and filmed this one in record time, given the amount of work and puppets involved.
On Wednesday at 5:30PM EST, the Film Center at JHU-MICA will present Born in Baltimore on Facebook. It’s free to attend, and looks like a lot of great photography and film.
Born in Baltimore celebrates new voices in cinema and photographic arts. Filmmakers and photographers of all ages whose work is of, from, and about Baltimore are invited to submit. The Festival seeks images, sounds, and textures that are uniquely Baltimore; the music, the faces, the stories of our city and its citizens, past and present, young and old, native and newly arrived.
For 2021’s virtual festival, Born in Baltimore welcomes submissions from across the globe, reflecting on Baltimore subject matter and themes, and on shared current challenges: stories and images of city life and city neighborhoods; and images that explore distance, proximity, community, loss, resilience, and innovation.
Born in Baltimore is a production of Baltimore Youth Film Arts, an affiliate program of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. It is made possible by the financial support of Johns Hopkins and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
https://www.borninbaltimore.org/
UPDATE
The Benefits of Radiation received both the Audience Favorite and Judges Awards! Wow!
I started working on a project I’m calling PLASTICLAND. I am continuing to tell stories with my action figures.
While staying at my girlfriend’s house a few months back, I took a long walk. I found a blue plastic toy abandoned by the side of the road. I think that it was part of an infant’s car play-set. I was struck by both the loneliness of the seemingly useless object, and also the possibilities it offered. I decided to bring it home. One less chunk of plastic polluting our environment, right? It became the set for these little stories.
I made the following camera tests over two after work filming sessions in my backyard. I used my iPhone to capture the shots in Dragonframe. It worked well enough, and I love the portability of the phone. I’m having trouble exporting a quicktime file in Dragonframe, however. It’s choppy and slow. H.264/ACC works fine, so I suppose that will have to work for now. Dragonframe support said:
MP4 is much more compressed, and suited for playback. If you are outputting a really large (dimensionally, like 4K) Animation Codec movie, it might not play back in real time. That format is more intended to be used as an intermediary for editing.
For fun, I edited the two takes together. I’m approaching each scene as though my younger self were sitting in his childhood backyard playing with these objects. That’s really my only narrative principle. I made storyboards as a kid showing how I would animated scenes with my stuff, had I a working camera and film. I’m finding this as satisfying now as I would have as a boy. My intention is to use this footage as projection material for playing music. There’s a lot of boiling in this – my hands and other things.
As a bonus, Brood X has arrived. My yard is full with emerging cicadas. One fellow made an appearance in a few shots. They haven’t started singing yet. I can’t wait to record them. Here’s a bonus video I made for Instagram:
It has been a very windy week in the neighborhood. I’ve been compelled to record the wind with my phone, and finally decided to animate something in an Altoids tin. This is a quick one. I wanted to do a camera test and play with the layers and light. I say it was a quick one, but it took a week to get this, after several false starts and abandoned takes.
Thanks for looking at this. I plan to do more elaborate attempts next.
