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Search engine optimization

09.29.06 @ 5:20PM Tags

Internet searches that resulted in a visit to this site:

“filmschool or no filmschool”
“without film school”
“film school complaint”
“evaluation of the movie the 40 year old virgin”
“crash was a bad movie”
“paul haggis sucks”
“short shorts”
“really short shorts”
“andre iguodala computer background”
“freakonomics shithead”
“does your chain hang low”
“1191″
“ass shaking for money”
“screen sex”
“people having sex in school”
“is there any porn websites that show people actual having sex”
“what does human resources mean”
“i love it when you call me big pappa”

Of course, now that I’ve specifically written about the above phrases, I’ll get even more searches for them. Perhaps I can become the internet authority on “ass shaking for money.” Ass shaking for money. Ass shaking for money. Ass shaking for money.

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Wicked Harmonies

09.19.06 @ 12:19AM Tags : bencampbell, damianwashington, musicvideo, reel, wickedharmonies

Here’s a student project I shot and edited sophomore year at Middlebury College. It’s a music video for an off-the-wall, hilarious, energetic song recorded by my freakishly gifted freshman year roommate, Ben Campbell. The talented and versatile Damian Washington (another dorm-mate of mine) makes an appearance in the video; you’ll be seeing a lot more of him soon.

Re-watching the video six years removed, I think it still looks remarkably good, considering when/why/how it was made (the indoor scenes don’t look so hot, but they were shot as desperate last-middle filler because the weather was being uncooperative–not exactly uncommon in Vermont). Conceptually the video is nothing special, but hey… I was 19.

And now, for no one’s benefit other than my own, some memories of the video:

Equipment: I used the school’s Sony VX-1000 (the camera that kicked off the whole DV revolution, really), a friend’s CD boombox, and 8 “D” batteries (which cost me $41, comprising 100% of the video’s budget). I digitized the footage using a home-built PC through an analog video cable (sure, the VX had firewire, but I didn’t), and edited it using Adobe Premiere 5.1 and a friend’s red TV from Japan (yes, you read that right: the TV itself was inexplicably red). All the effects were done in Premiere.

Awards, fanfare, honorariums: 2000 was a different time for nonprofessional video; DV cameras were not yet widely available, online video was really just a concept at the time, and broadband itself didn’t have nearly the penetration it does now. A site named FirstEye (now-defunct), vying to be an early YouTube (which wouldn’t launch for another five years), started a contest for user-submitted, eye-catching short videos. The Grand Prize was a Sony VX-2000 camera, worth about $3500. When I found out about the contest, I uploaded Wicked Harmonies; three months later, I received an email saying the judges had awarded me the grand prize. I’ve since flipped the camera on eBay for a newer model several times over, but if it hadn’t been for that initial award… a lot of things would probably be different.

Even more memories!

–There are a couple parts where Ben is obviously lip-syncing. I kept shouting at him, “actually sing! It looks fake when you don’t!”

–Reduced Phat was a production “company” I started in high school. Damian shouts it out in the song.

–I didn’t know the school’s Bogen tripods could actually go lower than thigh-height, which is why all my low-angle shots in the video are filmed from about three feet off the ground.

–Ben, hippie that he was, didn’t have a lot of clothes. The gray hoodie he wore for much of the video was, in fact, mine; mysteriously, it later disappeared.

–For both the recording of the song and the video, Ben borrowed my bass guitar (and, being a southpaw, skillfully played it upside-down); unfortunately, while trying to climb on top of the structure to shoot the triplicate scene, he slipped (hippies don’t wear shoes) and fell right on top of Your Mom. Your Mom was the name of my bass, a moniker given expressly so one could say, “I’m playing/stroking/slapping Your Mom.” Yes, that kind of stuff made me laugh… and still does.

–The jump cuts during the indoor dancing scene, halfway through the video, are there because I had to cut out a student opening a hallway door and walking right in front of Ben and co. while we were filming. In fact, if you look closely, the door is closed for the first half of the scene and open for the latter; whoever heard of multiple takes?

–At the first screening of student video projects at Middlebury, Wicked Harmonies received a standing ovation from a packed house; the audience at the second screening, more sparse and mellow, didn’t show it the same enthusiasm. My girlfriend at the time attended the second screening; I remember walking away from the whole experience thinking, damn, I wish she would have been there for that first one.

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Notes from Armond White's "An Auteur Study of Hype Williams"

09.7.06 @ 2:01PM Tags

About a month ago (yes, I’m still cleaning out my backlog of half-finished posts), I attended the Lincoln Center’s Scanners video series event, Believe the Hype: An Auteur Study of Hype Williams, “The Best Who Ever Did It”, with tongue firmly in cheek, notebook poised to capture the plethora of absurd quotes that would surely fly, given such a ridiculous premise.

However, the presenter, New York Press film critic Armond White, managed to merely suggest ridiculous propositions, without really supplying ample evidence to back any of them up; this made the night disappointingly light on softball quotes. Also disappointing was White’s selection of videos from Hype’s considerable body of work (considerable in quantity if not quality), although he appropriately showed Ma$e’s Feel So Good, which will almost surely be remembered as the Auteur’s piece de resistance.

Compared to today’s rap clime, “Feel So Good” recalls a happier era of hip-hop, when it was actually fun to have money and cars; rappers wore shiny suits and even danced in their videos (now all they do is this, which is apparently defined as “the same two-step with a little twist”). Warnings for this 50 Cent video (“Disco Inferno”) include: nudity, lesbian kissing, wearing of bejeweled medallions, excessive ass-shaking, excessive ass-shaking while twin bottles of champagne are actually poured onto said ass, thugging, general objectification of women, general objectification of everything, some guy making a peace sign which may or may not be a reference to his ability to perform cunnilingus, body shots (referring both to the method of partaking alcohol, as well as the camera’s object of interest), obvious silicon, miscegenation, some girl making a peace sign over 50′s mouth which is kind of inexplicable, slow-motion, endangerment of the cameraman via shaking body parts, mistiming of aforementioned twin champagne bottles pouring on shaking ass so that one bottle runs out and is held awkwardly upended while the other continues to pour, crotch-grabbing, more ass-shaking.

Back to Mr. White’s presentation, where the show was stolen by none other than the king of behind-the-times synthesizer beats himself, Irv Gotti, who got up to give his requisite props to Hype halfway through the presentation, only to turn and ask Mr. White, “what’s your name again?”

The critic, belittled, on his own dais.

Ultimately, Mr. White did toss out a few zingers, in the form of far-fetched references to utterly dissimilar artists:

“Recent work has featured Williams’ newest innovation–the radically reimagined split-screen montage. Or: Eisenstein goes Bop.”

“Williams has won acclaim as both the Irving Penn and the Romare Bearden of music video.”

“Georgia O’Keefe has nothing on Hype Williams.”

To get his point across, perhaps Mr. White would have been better off quoting a high school classmate of mine, who attended Hype’s feature film Belly under the influence of any number of illegal substances, and related to me the following evaluation: “Hype Williams can direct like a motherfucker.”

I’m not sure exactly how a motherfucker directs, but it’s probably a lot like Hype Williams.