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…for I have plenty of movies to share. Yes, these are all VHS tapes, gathered during the dark ages before the DVD rose to prominence and guided us all with its shimmering light – which, of course, died out the moment that Blu Ray took over. But anyway, here are a few of my movies, plus some oddball random crap. See any favorites?
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This scene is part of an extended song/beat poem/performance art piece known simply as “Chicken Nugget.” I wish I had the audio to go with it!
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Soooo many fun pictures from today! This was the last big shoot for “8 Wheels of Death.” This was the shoot where I was performing all of my lines. Big fun, and we were attacked many times by numerous bloody not-dead people. It was huge B-grade fantasticness: corn syrup, rubber limbs, cauliflower (ugh that stunk!), and a pink Hello Kitty Super Soaker full of 5-year-old Pabst Blue Ribbon. YES! Can’t wait to see what it looks like all put together!
I can’t put all of that up, however, as my rule is one picture, kind of forcing me to learn how to edit things down and figure out what to keep and what to get rid of. Here’s one I particularly like. We were rehearsing a shot where Baldy was getting his head stomped into mush by the sheriff. Nice makeup, right? There was a throwdown right before this where the sheriff gave him a fun little flip onto the floor.
Oh, crap! I forgot! There’s a teaser trailer that they just released on this! Ahhh! I’ve been meaning to put it up here for days now, and it totally slipped my mind! The teaser was done right after the car shoot, so none of the stuff from today went into it, but there’s some cool roller girl action, and the car makes an appearance or three (you can see the inside of it when Lola attacks Chad, plus the dash when the dice are swinging from the rear view mirror). So here’s the teaser for you as well:
...Yeah, just, uh, move that thing! And that other thing!
Monday was the big car scene shoot for “8 Wheels of Death,” the zombie movie I’m in. Before I became one of the cast, however, I volunteered the use of my and my brother’s Chevelle for use in a scene. After having had to reschedule the shoot once due to fears of rain, we finally got it all together on Monday night. My brother was a hero, taking a half day off of work and trucking the car down there while I left work and immediately headed south to meet with him at the shoot.
Here some of the crew decided camera and mic placement for a key scene in which someone gets killed. Good times, right? I know! They even got some fake blood on the dashboard! And, there was a shot where an admission ticket had to be used, and they had left the prop at home. My brother said, “There are tickets on the dashboard,” as that’s where we often “keep” drag tickets after a racing event. They used one of them, and now I have a fake-blood-stained ticket as a souvenir of the whole thing. You gotta love that.
It was fun. It was big fun! I can’t wait until the actual acting shoot that’s coming up in a little over a week!
It really was a funny one. Guess you had to be there.
I went to the second shooting for the zombie extravaganza, “8 Wheels of Death” today. This is Lola, Zombie #1. As the first one infected, she is ultimately responsible for the rest of the roller arena killing each other (for the most part, anyway. A few of us live.). The crowd was getting some stage direction from Chris, and zombie material is really just ripe fodder for jokes. Moments later, Lola was chowing down on the skate-clad leg. Good times, people. Good times.
The ghostly human embodiment of Poe's Raven shows up as a depressed writer is attempting suicide and extolls the virtues of life, art, and also calls her an idiot.
I went to a theatre production tonight. My friend wrote this play, and tonight was the second showing of it as part of Indy’s Fringe Festival, an event that offers more than 270 live theatre performances in 10 days, plus fine arts, film festival, street performers, and a ton of other awesome stuff.
The play is titled “Nevermore,” and consists of a confrontation between a hopelessly depressed and suicidal writer and the human-formed ghost of Poe’s Raven from the famous poem. It was kind of scary in a this-is-some-deep-and-real-shit kind of way, but there was some dark humor thrown in for good measure, and I do like the dark humor. I appreciated the examination of how pain can both inhibit and help the creative process, and the idea that both bad feelings and good ones come from the same place, and you can’t expect to have one without the other, that if there is despair, well, there has to be joy coming along at some point. At least that’s what I got out of it. Above you can see the Raven giving our poor writer some sage, dark views on life, death, and creativity. I’ll not spoil the end for you, as it’s still playing the rest of this week. Strong stuff, though!
It was a pretty awesome way to spend an hour. I’d emailed her several times about it in the past few weeks, and she’d been hard at work on it. It was great seeing someone’s efforts come to fruition, especially a play where it’s all live and you have to literally throw your whole self into it as people have their concentration focused on you – that’s pretty cool stuff. I was genuinely happy and envious for her to have realized her goal.
On the photo side, this was a tough shoot. I was very glad they allowed me to take pictures, as it was a cool subject, but the lighting, of course, was pretty crummy, and I had to dial the film speed way up, and still I could only shoot at about an 1/8 of a second. To stop much motion you really need to shoot at 1/60 of a second, so I was shooting very slowly. It was hard to get shots, and I missed many dramatic ones, because the actors were moving when this happened. I couldn’t even stop the motion of an eyeblink at this slow of a shutter speed. Still, I think I pulled out a few okay photos. Nice bit of practice.
I would have liked to have been involved in this somehow. These things are going on around me, and aside from watching some of my friends partake in them, these art events, I don’t have any personal involvement. It’s frustrating. I don’t know how or what to do to become a part of something like this. Maybe next year. Maybe then I’ll have something of my own to present for the visual arts portion of the show.
Finally up under its own power again!
Last night I got the Chevelle running again, but there wasn’t much time to drive it, as the weather turned sour very soon after I got it out of the garage. The back window leaks like a sieve, and I don’t like tearing everything out to dry it off when this happens, so it wasn’t until tonight, when I was *supposed* to do the filming for “8 Wheels of Death” that I got to drive it another little bit.
What? The filming? The filming I’ve been working toward all week? Yeah, that didn’t happen. The forecast was for 50% or better chance of thunderstorms all day, so I didn’t take the car to work so that I could drive it straight to the shoot, which is some distance away. However, by about 10am all rain had stopped, all the clouds blew over, and it looked great. I wouldn’t be able to make the shoot if I had to go home and get the car first, though, so it was a loss when we canceled it early that morning. Figures, don’t it?
Anyway, I decided to go to my photo club meeting instead, which was awesome, and I decided to drive the Chevelle there, which was also awesome. What this meant, however, was that there was precious little time left in the day (uh, night) by the time I got done at the meeting, so what you have here is the Chevelle sitting in my driveway after I got home from the meeting. It’s a little cool, though, isn’t it? It ran great tonight for the little bit that I drove it, and for that I am stupendously grateful!!!
Tomorrow I hope to return to more interesting and well-conceived photos. Until then, I hope you at least find some of this stuff amusing. Maybe?
Romeo and Juliet at the Disco. Dig it!
I am finally, FINALLY able to update the blog after being deluged with other projects and activities for a week now! Here’s the first of the images.
Being in the photography club that I joined definitely has its perks. We have an organizer that puts together these amazing field trips where we get access to areas and events that normal humans would never be allowed near with lenses and megapixels. This, for instance is a shot (one of over 600!) that I took at the dress rehearsal for “Romeo and Juliet at the Disco.” It’s even more uber-fab and groovy than it sounds! And the death scene? Still sad, still tragic, still engrossing. I’d love to go back and just watch it without taking photos. Perhaps later I’ll come back with a few other images. You should have seen all the costumes! It was intense – lights and color and roller skates and bellbottoms and sequins and afros. Un-friggin-believable.
Plenty of writers have already gone to press/web with writeups and synopsese of Hughes and his career. For more background, you can read articles such as this one, and I won’t try to outdo those or simply repeat them. I’ll simply say that John Hughes was responsible for work that made me laugh my friggin’ ass off and feel pretty good about life during some years where I otherwise spent far too much time looking for ways to be miserable. Thanks, John, for the reminder of just how much there is to enjoy out of life.
And this blog entry is just about the most priceless thing I could ever think of to uncover on this subject. It’s about a young girl who took the time to write to John back in the Breakfast Club days and wound up with a friend. Read it. It’s an outstanding example of how reaching out can have an enriching effect on our lives. If someone inspires you, be it a parent, an artist, a sibling, a friend, a photographer, a musican – let them know. You may never hear anything back from them, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t make ripples on the water.