House Fuck

In 2008, I took my first film class with Thomas Comerford, and at the end of the semester I photographed this, my first seriously considered 16mm film. You can see (and read about) the raw footage in my original blog post.

In the following years, I worked on this film in almost every film class at SAIC. I used this movie to learn A/B rolling, working with ProTools, making an optical soundtrack, and contact printing a married final print.

House Fuck is a 16mm lust letter to the textures of antiquity, the sensation of home, and the sounds of my radiator. House Fuck is about touching surfaces. House Fuck is an erotic encounter with personal space. The full film runs 5.5 minutes long, and is not represented in its entirety here. If you really really want to see the whole thing, send me an email and swear to me you understand the difference between watching a film on Vimeo and watching it in a theater setting on celluloid and maybe I'll give you the secret password (you pervert).

•••

My friend Andy Roche invited me to be a visiting artist in his current class at DePaul. I showed four films and talked at length about my relationship to those works and my thoughts on film in general. Andy said some very nice things about me and his students were attentive and polite; I had a great time.



In other news, my friend Nicki Yowell is putting together a multiplatform, multimedia art book project thing that is cool and that you should know about. It's called Lightness & Darkness, there's a benefit party this Saturday, and their Kickstarter needs help as well. Art friends! Art friends!

Release the Chromazoid

 

Chromazoid has been printed. Chromazoid has a new website. Chromazoid is having a release party in Chicago this Saturday. It's at Happy Dog Gallery, the same place that hosts Brain Frame, and it will be lots, and lots, and lots of fun. I drew this flyer.

(7pm, bands start at 8pm, Saturday January 21st, 1542 N Milwaukee, 2nd floor, $7 or more if you're feeling generous - proceeds go to cover the cost of printing Chromazoid #1, and to help start the ball rolling on Chromazoid #2.)

The Mystic

Way back when, in the last months of 2009, I completed my greatest in-camera technical feat to date: The Mystic, a 100ft roll of color negative film that passed through my Bolex six times, bi-packed with sequins, shot through a matte box, painstakingly frame counted: basically the culmination of every intricate and tiresome film technique I had learned during the previous months, and a narrative (sort of) to boot. My original blog entry details these processes. But as proud as I was of the project's (almost complete) success, I knew that it needed something more.

In the ensuing years, I realized that what really bothered me about the original Mystic was its length. Each 'shot,' while carefully timed to an exacting plan, would flit by without the chance to sink in. I needed the film to take the time to overwhelm and hypnotize the viewer, the same way that the mystic hypnotizes himself. I decided to extend each sequence almost threefold, sometimes more, and I began to think about a soundtrack that would mimic the irregular strobe of the sequin, and assist in mesmerizing its audience.

The difficulty lay in extending the film without making it obvious that I was repeating frames over and over each other. I watched my workprint on a Steenbeck, making careful notes about which frame began and ended each shot, when the film was fogged or intense scratches ran through (jumping back and forth from fogged frames to black ones would be obviously unnatural, so I had to repeat within and around each faded section) and then diagrammed a complex, randomized route from which to create a new internegative, using the Oxberry optical printer at school.

Before I could make my internegative, however, I had to do a couple of other things. I wanted to add credits to the movie, make my own name more readable (the end of the film attributes one frame to each letter of my name) and fix the scenes in which Aj only appears on one side of the mystic's crystal ball. To do this, I photographed cut out letters onto HiCon using the animation stand, and colored two single frames with sharpie to use as bipacked mattes on the Oxberry (in order to rephotograph only one Aj into the scenes from which he was lacking). I took my titles, my mattes, and my workprint, and spent two whole days in the hot, hot, dark room that housed my beloved optical printer. The first time, I messed it up, so I had to do this process twice.

After I completed my successful internegative, I transferred it to make the video to which I synched my soundtrack. I collected laugh tracks, audience sounds, and applause from the BBC sound effects library and all over the internet, and cut them up in Pro Tools, rearranging and repeating them in much the same way that I repeated the frames of The Mystic. I gathered a different set of laughs for each shot, so that it sounds different when you're in his head than when you're watching the two of them. The tone over the flashing sequences was Ross's idea, and one I am incredibly grateful for. The clapping rhythm over the "I SEE" section was a happy accident, but it's one of my favorite parts of the film. I really like how it drives the film into epileptic overstimulation. I kind of think this is a movie about television.

The clip above is only a piece of the finished film, which is just under eight minutes. I'm only giving you an excerpt because I want to submit this movie to festivals and sometimes they're weird about it being online too. I also think, as most analog filmmakers do, that to really watch this piece you've got to see it on celluloid in some approximation of a theater setting. That being said, if you really, really want to see the whole thing and you can swear to me on your life that you understand the compromised viewing environment that is Vimeo, shoot me an email and maybe I'll give you the secret link.

Mr. Square at the Pit of Despair

 

When I heard that some of the crew that formerly produced The Skeleton News were starting up a new publication called The Land Line, I was totally pumped. When Grant asked me to make a comic for it, I was even more pumped. I saw this as an opportunity to try out some new things, namely: a more classic cartoony style, and a more complex, stylized one-page layout. Having previously completed Go Down, and riding high on the fumes of conceptual color comics, the fact that this comic would be printed in black and white on newsprint demanded that I find more in that limitation than mere limitation.

I read this comic at a benefit for The Landline. I used the opportunity to work through an analysis of the layers contained within Mr. Square which, at first glance, is pretty inscrutable. Here's a video of me doing the same thing, but alone and in poor resolution. (Analysis starts at 4:30, if you don't want to hear me doing silly voices.)

UPDATE: I can't believe I messed this up, and I'm even more upset that I'm losing so much math nerd cred over this, but check it out: a line is the easiest way to define one dimension, and a plane is the easiest way to define two dimensions. My puns are all wrong, and I'm really sorry.

Speaking of The Landline, they've got a Kickstarter up to cover the cost of printing issue 1 (which looks, as you can see, awesome) and to keep the whole production going. It's free, it's free of ads, it's beautiful and remarkable and full of high-quality, funny, sexy, interesting, gross things. They've almost reached their goal, but they need more help! Please consider donating, and if you're in Chicago, pick one up if you see one, because these babies are golden.

House Portrait

My friend Carolyn (and her siblings) commissioned me to draw this picture of their childhood home. It was a New Year's Eve gift for their mother, who is moving out of this house next month.

Compiled

This is really exciting. I've been meaning to complete this compilation for two years, since I produced the cover for these comics in Offset class. This is really my first full size comic book, and most definitely the first thing I've been proud enough of and confident enough in to send off to publishers, for example, or drop at Quimby's. That's right, I finally have comics at Quimby's.

This book contains five comics and one prose piece. Four of the comics are available in full to read on my blog; the fifth comic is not online, will never be online, and yeah, if you want to read you have to get the book. The written story is the version of They Glistened that I read at Brain Frame 3.

You can see me talk about and flip through Compiled in the video above; here are some closer images of the cover design.

ELSEWHERE: My mother interviewed me about Tumblr! I didn't know she was going to put the audio online, I just thought she was using it to take notes. Oh well, I guess the sounds of me eating and knocking over things in the background aren't that noticeable.

Brain Frame 4

The beat goes on, as they say. This collaborative poster was created by Grant Reynolds and myself, in a record amount of time.

Brain Frame 4, the first Brain Frame in the Year of Our Lord Apocalypse, will be a doozy. The multi-talented, faceted, tasking, and faced readers include:

Ben Bertin
Beth Hetland
Eric Rivera
Laura Szumowski
Jeremy Tinder
and myself.

This is the last time I'll be reading at Brain Frame for a while. I'm particularly excited about the comics I'll be performing (a newer, fancier version of Copulate, and Go Down). Additionally, we will have fresh, new copies of Chromazoid #1 available for sale.

Here's the video of me reading They Glistened at Brain Frame 3:

Trubble Club

So there's this group of comics artist in Chicago called Trubble Club. They meet every week to make jam comics: one person draws a panel, another draws the next, so on and so on. The participants are all talented, productive individuals with whom anyone would be honored to associate. When I first started making comics in Chicago, Trubble Club was the coolest thing and a symbol of local success. My friends and I joked about starting a rival jam comics group, and placed jealous bets on who would be invited to the Club first.

So, last month my friend Grant Reynolds invited me to join. The freshman infatuation with Trubble Club had worn off, and I'm friends with a lot of the folks who participate, so it wasn't really a big deal (but it was kind of a big deal - or at least it still felt like one). Anyway, I've been attending for the past several weeks. Today Jeremy Tinder posted some new TC comics, and you can see my work in one of them:

That last panel says "SQUELCH" and I drew it.

Ya'll should check out Trubble Club's website and get excited about the upcoming (recently completed) Trubble Club Full Color Comics Spectacular Issue 5. I have one panel in it, and it's really, really dirty. (Disclaimer: that is not actually the title for the collected TC comics, I just made it up.)

Untitled (Times For)

Ross and I had been joking about making an homage to the elusive, rigorous, and very very serious avant-garde filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos for ages. Markopoulos, who died in 1992, took all of his prints out of circulation in the United States in 1967, in order to create an 80-hour opus (structured in 'cycles') that screens partially (as it is completed) once every four years in the middle of nowhere in Greece.

Markopoulos's 1967 film Himself as Herself is [from the Harvard Archives] "based loosely on Balzac's Séraphita. The film consists of a shimmering, nearly plotless evocation of gender identity in flux, and it contains some of Markopoulos’s most haunting, densely interlaced images." It is also a particular favorite, and the film that Ross and I always dreamed of ripping off.

So, then I was asked to take part in the Chicago 8 Film Festival's 'Bride of Super 8' screening. Participants receive one roll of Super 8 Ektachrome. They shoot anything they want, editing in camera if at all, and return the roll undeveloped to the festival. Everyone sees their film for the first time on the night of the screening.

The films at these screenings generally fall into one of two categories: home-movie footage of dogs and camping trips, or general abstract fucking around. I thought it would be extra funny to present an incomparably overambitious film in the same context.

We planned out every scene and shot sequence in Untitled before beginning the shoot, and it took us five days (spread out over three weeks) to complete the roll. Each scene took hours to set up and get dressed for. The second scene (rolling on/with the carpet) was especially tricky, because we weren't sure if the camera movement we worked out would translate in the finished piece. That motion is copied (then repeated) from a single edit in Himself as Herself, when the whole film goes upside down for a moment. The staircase sequence is a reference to the moment in Himself as Herself when the main character, wearing this weird veil and representing both his masculine and feminine aspects, meets himself through cross-cut editing on the platform of a lush staircase. That's why Ross and I are in drag after that sequence, because we've crossed over the gender binary.

Because this entire film was shot in camera, and we wanted to make it without help, one can imagine the logistics that went into each take - I'd shoot a couple frames of Ross, we'd switch, he'd shoot, switch, etc. This was particularly trying during the staircase scene, since we single framed two seconds (36 frames) and had to have our fingers touch in the finished sequence; there's a penny taped to the wall high up behind us, and each time, before opening the shutter, the cameraperson would direct the actor in precise placement of their finger over this penny in the eye of the camera. This and the drag sequence were shot in my apartment building lobby. I'd like to thank my neighbors for humoring us.

At the end (when we become one, and, conversely, when we are seen together in a shot for the first time) we put the camera on a wheelchair, tied ropes to the legs, and looped them around poles in my basement. This was our way of fashioning a dolly that would require no additional hands, and maintaining the integrity of our 'pure' filmmaking experience.

Brain Frame 3

I am very proud to announce the third installment of BRAIN FRAME! It's happening a week from this Thursday (that being the 10th of November) at 8pm, at 1542 N Milwaukee (on the second floor). Myself included, there will be five readers:

Krystal DiFronzo
Bret Koontz
Ian McDuffie
Grant Reynolds

It will be sooooo fuuuuuun! I'm serious. Look how excited I am, I'm so excited that I was too lazy to scan in the small version of the flyers, and took a backwards picture of myself holding them instead:

The poster is a collaboration between Ben Bertin and myself. If you can't tell, that's a turkey stuck in the throat of the snake (the snake that's winding through a face skin, a muscle mask, and a skull, and barfing out its brain up at the top there). The snake just ate the whole turkey because it's almost Thanksgiving. You might even say that the snake has Thanksgiving on the brain.

The big version of the poster is actually a seven-color-separation. Each layer (CMY, RGB, K) was printed separately. It's vomitous. When Ben and I finished the drawing, we propped it up on a table in my house and played some metal music, as a test. We nodded our heads and stroked our chins, mumbling "Yes, yes."

If you're on Facebook, there's a page for Brain Frame now. And, um, you should probably 'like' it.
 
If you attend BF3, you'll see me as a scientist, reading a field report (from the future!) about the squishsacks, complete with alien tissue samples and funny glasses. I'm going first, so get there on time. Here's the documentation, thanks to Jenna Caravello, of my performance at BF2. I'm reading Night City in character as Llama Man. I wrote monologues for him to insert into the narrative of the comic, and later realized that it's the first time I've given him a voice. It was louder than this video makes it seem. You get the idea.


Lyra Hill reads Night City from Lyra Hill on Vimeo.