Diamond on Vinyl Teaser

Here's JR Hughto's first peek of his new fiction film Diamond on Vinyl - how's that for a great title. Congrats to JR and his crew, I can't wait to see the final product. http://vimeo.com/31115227

Homemade Cyanotype 4x5, The Kitchen

Here's my second try at exposing a homemade 4x5 cyanotype negative, this time looking into the kitchen. It's a seventy hour exposure, plus or minus, at 5.6 on 135mm lens. The blue one is the negative, the black and white is after it's been scanned, inverted, and flipped. It's surprising to see how much information is revealed in the positive image.

Homemade 4x5 Cyanotype Negative

This came out way better than I thought was possible. This is a forty hour exposure taken out my front window with a 4x5 Crown Graphic camera on a homemade cyanotype negative. The blue image is the cyanotype, it's a really old chemical photo process that you can mix by hand and spread on to a substrate - in this case card stock paper. I scanned the blue neg then desaturated and flipped to a positive in Photoshop and was shocked by how much detail it produced.

Oct/Nov Screenings

There's lots of good news coming in from Washington D.C. about the possibility of new legislation to address the status and living conditions of foreign laborers on US military bases abroad. Thanks to a connection from Sarah Stillman who wrote a great piece for the New Yorker magazine last summer INDENTURED is in the hands of a highly motivated attorney who's working hard to make things happen in Congress. Feels great to have finally broken through and found the right place, scratch that, person for the film. It looked bleak for a long stretch. In the meantime, I'm in touch with some workers in Afghanistan via facebook who are getting shafted by a Turkish company on a US war contract there. There aren't too many options but I'm trying to cook something up to help these guys out. On the other end, Bush League will screen at a special event at Rutgers University, New Brunswick campus Nov 17th at 7pm. This is a exciting opportunity to present the film to college students and faculty from several departments. I'm really looking forward to this one.

Bush League screening at Rutgers and INDENTURED news

Bush League will screen 7pm Friday October 14th at Rutger's, New Brunswick (Voorhees Hall #105) in the "Best of" section of the NJIFF Fall edition. NJ + Bush League forever. Heart heart heart. In other news, INDENTURED, my short film about labor abuse on US bases in Iraq screened last week at the US Pentagon during a workshop on human trafficking. Attorney Sam McCahon presented the film to Pentagon staff, which is amazing because this is truly who the film was made for - hence all the text in the film. I'm trying to guide them right to the bureaucratic waters though the problem is really one of human rights and decency.

Good Copy Bad Copy, free feature doc film

I just came across this Danish doc film about copyright, mashups, remix etc on blip TV and thought it was great. GirlTalk, Danger Mouse, Pirate Bay founders - they're all there but what I was really looking for was something about the Nigerian film industry and distribution. Their model seems to be becoming THE model in some respects, esp for us small fries. The movie is a feature length and it's free, the link: God Copy Bad Copy

Twitter feeds about Malawi in anticipation of Aug 17th protests

I'm re-posting from Dr. Kim Yi Dionne's blog: For those interested in following events in Malawi associated with demonstrations against government slated to begin on August 17, here is a list of Twitter feeds from Malawi and the abroad:

Malawi: Widespread Protests

Malawians took to the streets en masse this week to protest poor governance, I'm following Dr. Kim Yi Dionne's blog HERE for updates. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wwLWithlFpI

INDENTURED is now on-line

I was prompted to go ahead and put INDENTURED online after reading Sarah Stillman's piece The Invisible Army in the New Yorker magazine. From the article (June 6, 2011 edition): The expansion of private-security contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan is well known. But armed security personnel account for only about sixteen per cent of the over-all contracting force. The vast majority—more than sixty per cent of the total in Iraq—aren’t hired guns but hired hands. These workers, primarily from South Asia and Africa, often live in barbed-wire compounds on U.S. bases, eat at meagre chow halls [...] A large number are employed by fly-by-night subcontractors who are financed by the American taxpayer but who often operate outside the law.

It's an important article that I hope you'll take a few minutes to read.

Below is the film that I made on the same subject and sent to my representation over eighteen months ago (Rep Davis, Senators Feinstein and Boxer). I'm still waiting for a reply - any reply - from all three offices. Might be time to write some more letters.

If you or anyone you know has any suggestions on who to send this film to, either as a link or a DVD please write to me at cysfilm@gmail.com. The on-line version is linkable and embeddable - please don't hesitate to share it, blog it or email it to your representation in D.C.

The film (10 min):

http://vimeo.com/13404671

 

Bush League wins Best Doc Feature at 2011 NJIFF

Thanks to everyone who made it out to the NJIFF in New Brunswick last week. What a great trip. The screening went great, and the movie won. How bout that!

Lads discuss cinema after the screening.

A New Yorker hugs the filmmaker. The filmmaker wears a hat.

A community screening at Mrs Riley's Public House in Califon NJ, first time anyone has eaten pop corn and watched a movie I made.

Irish Car Bombs were ordered after the screening. Followed by darts, slander and pork rolls.

We visited Jake's (guy in the movie) 4th grade class in Camden. Hans gave a lesson on the ocean.

And Paul taught them to play the guitar.

That was a fun one.

Bush League will screen next at the Columbia Gorge Film Fest in Vancouver, Washington in mid August. More news to come.

The Mark of Cain: Feature Doc on Youtube

The Mark of Cain is a feature length doc about Russian prison tattoos that's now on Youtube in its entirety (73 min, below). The tattoos are the filmmaker's in to examine the Russian prison system, which is truly terrifying. Once I hit play, I couldn't stop watching this film - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9JDJdaMs-Y

The fictional cousin to The Mark of Cain is Eastern Promises directed by David Cronenberg, which is about a British midwife's interactions with the Russian Mafia in London. I love this movie. Cronenberg has a unique skill when it comes to depicting violence to the human body, which has to come from all his years in horror. I think many people of my generation think of Tarantino as the handy man of entertaining on-screen violence (based on the ear scene in Reservoir Dogs alone) but I think Cronenberg's eerie mix of bluntness and understatement trumps Tarantino's pop sensibilities by a long shot. Not that I don't like a little pop.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBcIoq4w7TY

Sawdust City at Los Angeles Film Festival

Sawdust City, the first feature by my old CalArts classmate David Nordstrom will be screening next month at the Los Angeles Film Festival. A big congratulations to Dave N. and everyone who worked on the film - it's very good and I wish them great success. http://vimeo.com/23191355

Dave just launched a Kickstarter project this week to get the film in good shape for the start of it's public life.

From Dave:

The slightly less good news is that we need a final push to get us over the hill to where we need to be. Thanks to the increasing quality of affordable equipment, our own hard-won no-budget filmmaking, and your own inestimable help, we've managed to craft a great little film.  However, it's going up on big screens, on big systems, alongside bigger films and we need to look and sound our best. Let's give this man and his film a Kickstart cause filmmaking is just too damn hard to do alone.

Camera Obscura

Light travels in straight lines - the backyard reflected off my closet doors. For the self portrait I put the camera on the ten second timer and ran like hell.

ISO 6400, exposed for 30 seconds, f2.8

Manda Bala: doc film now on Netflix

Manda Bala means "send a bullet" in Portuguese. It's available via DVD on Netflix and is really worth a watch. For the die hard doc fans you'll notice director Jason Kohn's thank you in the credits to Errol Morris who he used to work for as a researcher. This also helped answer the question I kept asking myself over and over, which was, " how the hell did he make this?" His techniques are not the standard fair. It makes way more sense knowing he's been breathing the same air as Morris. Freakazoids. Who shoots anamorphic 16mm for s doc film anyway? Awesome. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbff7PBDUP8