Brazilian artist Claudio Ethos works on his first Los Angeles art piece. I happened upon him down on Main Street and thought he was a worker about to paint over a painting of a face. I started shooting and after several minutes realized that he was the artist.

This is part 1 of my next film. It stands alone as of now however.

With one brief exception, everything in color was shot in Los Angeles over the past several months. The music is by Kevin MacLeod who offers his incredible compositions through http://www.incompetech.com.

The dark, gritty elements of film noir, especially that of the Los Angeles brand, inform everything in this piece. Various personas or aspects of the personality fight for identification even while running for cover. One part of the mind kills off or suppresses another, wants to be dominant and unknown at the same time. Unconscious forces create images that reflect one another, contradict, and foreshadow.

Secrecy, identity, escape, art as crime, art as trouble, the anonymous creator who controls events, the protection of the delicate and easily destroyed creative impulse, the conflict between experimental and narrative film, the inescapable instinct toward narrative. These are some of the themes I am at least touching upon.

It’s a sort of psychotic noir film. The noir of dreams.

I like to work with a basic overwhelming drive toward an atmosphere or elusive set of central images and an undefined goal. I then submerge and produce images driven by immediate instinct. I also search for existing images by using a very fast, reflexive search method that only allows certain specific things to flare into view, selected purely by instinctive means. I trust that these impulsive decisions will be guided and informed by an unconscious will which is totally submerged in the film’s atmosphere or world. I treat the images that I have filmed and the images that I find elsewhere in exactly the same way. They are all part of the archival pile that must be sifted. It’s simply an act of recognition at this point. A filmmaker can scan a 90 minute film in super fast forward for 2 minutes and land on specific images that will have direct application to a project. I think it is this super-fast scanning of lengthy archival material that is a new development in filmmaking. It can only be achieved through digital means. No one was ever able to work this way in an analog medium.

There is an element of the William S. Burroughs cutup method at work here. But it actually goes further because it forces the artist to do the cutup with his or her mind, not any mechanical or arbitrary means. The cutup method becomes an act of will that is very close to unconscious. I find that incredible and unforeseen connections can only be made unconsciously. They do not happen with advance planning or scripting. In some respects, one must be an actor in one’s own creation. One must be both creator and subject.

Filmed in Los Angeles December 2010 – February 2011
Canon 60D DSLR camera

Music by Kevin MacLeod at http://www.incompetech.com

Digital B&W archival footage from the Prelinger Archives at the Internet Archive – http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger and from the public domain feature collection at http://www.archive.org. However, some B&W footage is projected from 16mm directly into certain scenes.

Well I’m just very pleased about this.  The Downtown Film Festival Los Angeles has given my film, Yellow Plastic Raygun, the award for Best Experimental Film.  I was having quite a nice week attending various parties and screenings at the festival.  Its use of multiple locations in the heart of downtown Los Angeles gives one a real sense of taking part in the life of the city and being involved with something that’s helping to foster the exploding art and film scene in downtown.  Most of the short films were screened in the new Civic Center Theater at the intersection of First and Main Streets, in the shadow of the famous City Hall tower that has appeared in so many crime shows and film noir classics.  I attended the screening of my own film this past Saturday evening and was amazed at seeing it large since I had put so much work into it on small monitors.  What’s great about the Downtown Film Festival is that it shows a wide range of filmmaking styles, crew sizes and budgets.  They show films made with lots of production resources right alongside films made by individual artists working with inexpensive HD cameras and even cell phone cameras.  I am very proud to have won this and I look forward to more great festivals in downtown Los Angeles from the people who put this together.

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.

Well I’m just very pleased about this. The Downtown Film Festival Los Angeles has given my film, Yellow Plastic Raygun, the award for Best Experimental Film. I was having quite a nice week attending various parties and screenings at the festival. Its use of multiple locations in the heart of downtown Los Angeles gives one a real sense of taking part in the life of the city and being involved with something that’s helping to foster the exploding art and film scene in downtown. Most of the short films were screened in the new Civic Center Theater at the intersection of First and Main Streets, in the shadow of the famous City Hall tower that has appeared in so many crime shows and film noir classics. I attended the screening of my own film this past Saturday evening and was amazed at seeing it large since I had put so much work into it on small monitors. What’s great about the Downtown Film Festival is that it shows a wide range of filmmaking styles, crew sizes and budgets. They show films made with lots of production resources right alongside films made by individual artists working with inexpensive HD cameras and even cell phone cameras. I am very proud to have won this and I look forward to more great festivals in downtown Los Angeles from the people who put this together.

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.

Images exported from my upcoming Yellow Plastic Raygun.  Sometimes the picture isn’t in the main frame; it’s in between.

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

For Only Your Eyes.  These images are from my upcoming Yellow Plastic Raygun.  Distilling single frame images is almost as much fun as making the film.  What kind of a film does it seem like?

Traffic Flow

Wave Rider

Planetary Intersection

War Drive

Hairpin

Whatever You Do, Don’t Look Back

Telefog

Gun Sight

Vision Rays

Mourning Sun