The Downtown Film Festival Los Angeles has made my latest short film, Yellow Plastic Raygun, part of their official selection!  So if you are in Los Angeles on Saturday, September 11, 2010 and you want to see an evening of short films, come by the Civic Center Theater at First and Main Street right across from the City Hall building.  The shorts program starts at 10:00 pm.  Here’s a link to the festival schedule.

I am very happy about this.  I like the idea of a film festival right here at home where I can go and hang around with some other insane filmmakers.  It should be an interesting Saturday night.

Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

You can watch in resolutions of 360p, 480p, 720p HD, and 1080p HD. I think the best compromise for quality and loading speed is the 480p resolution. You can also watch it in HD on Vimeo.  Visit my YouTube channel for more films.

I may do a part two of this film. For now, this is the film in full.

The film is science fiction because it concerns the use of memory images for time travel. The powerful imagery of the singular event – the horrific event – is etched forever in the mind, yet it becomes fluid and its influences cannot be entirely trusted. What led up to the singular powerful event? What course was set following it? In what way would the entire world be different if the event had been avoided or not seen? Not recorded? If, as scientists say, the fundamental particles of existence change location or cease to exist when observed or not observed, then what about events in memory? Or events simply residing in the past?

If one asks ‘why are we here?’ Well, I think the answer is obvious. We are here to remember things. We are memory.

It’s difficult to see a star clearly if one looks straight at it. Looking just off to the side can clarify the star in one’s perception. Going back in time to recover something lost is very much the same. One is sometimes forbidden to look directly at the object sought. One must keep one’s gazed shifted slightly or risk losing the memory entirely. This principal has been understood for a long time.

So putting one’s eye on something like a yellow plastic raygun, or a car, for example, might in fact sharpen one’s vision and allow an accidental recovery or a transfer to take place.

Odd thoughts? Yes, well maybe so. Very much like the thoughts that run through one’s mind before sleep completely obliterates consciousness.

The film uses a mash-up of archival footage, drawings, digital painting, new video and video I shot many years ago. The imagery is very layered and attempts to duplicate the way images move through my mind as I circle around my ultimate objective which is sometimes nearly unknown. There are a multitude of connections and meanings to be drawn from the sequence of images. Some meanings might be very obvious, others would be almost impossible to predict.

The first set of images is here.

Alpha City Double

Dream Road

Crosswalker

The Way Back Home

Tap That

Love Lights

Going Deep

Bang the Thing

Any Kind of Spaceship

Incoming

Traffic Flow

Wave Rider

Planetary Intersection

War Drive

Hairpin

Whatever You Do, Don’t Look Back

Telefog

Gun Sight

Vision Rays

Mourning Sun