Project Updates & Upcoming Screenings
A Newsletter Post
I love following artists’ newsletters where they maintain updates about projects they are working on, upcoming releases of their work, and other workflow issues, and one of my main interests in following the Substack community was to find newsletters like those.
I’ve always thought to myself “When I have shit going on I’mma do a newsletter like that!” And then last night while I was going over my calendar, which I don’t normally do but has recently become required just by the sheer amount of stuff happening, I grokked that I can at last write a news & updates newsletter post.
This actually pairs well with my previous post about creative time. It’s one thing to lament the desire to do the things you want to do, but it’s worth backing up with actually doing things to show for it.
Things I’m Showing:
FilmShop Presents After Hours
THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 29 // TV EYE NYC (1647 WEIRFIELD ST, RIDGEWOOD, NY 11385) // 7:30pm
An experimental short film I produced about four years ago, Robinson Met Krasna: Electricity is showing again at FilmShop Presents in Ridgewood this Thursday along with two blocks of newly produced and second run FilmShop member’s work. All the movies run about 3-4 minutes and serve the theme “After Hours.” Music, dancing, and bar service will accompany the screenings.
Robinson Met Krasna is an ongoing series of ambient narration films that surround the adventures and observations of two time travelers modeled off Chris Marker’s San Soleil and Patrick Keillor’s Robinson Trilogy. Other voices and forces of nature intervene in the narrative, such as in “Electricity”, where a sleeping city awakes to find mysterious strangers that shouldn’t belong occupying it.
I’m thinking of moving all of my Robinson Met Krasna shorts over to Substack and Vimeo, so keep an eye out here for updates.
STSC Symposium: “Beach”
Sat, October 1, 2022 // Soaring Twenties Social Club’s Substack
I spent the weekend polishing up my video submission to the STSC Symposium: Beach that’s releasing Oct 1st. Not gonna lie: I like this new video a lot. I’m going to work out a film festival budget and plan for it, which I normally don’t do for purpose-delivered videos.
It’s dropping here this Wednesday at 2pm ET, but be sure to follow up on the STSC Symposium release because then you can see it in context to the other writers and creatives of the Soaring Twenties Social Club’s collaboration.
ReelWorks Film Festival
Sun, October 2, 2022, 3:00 PM – 7:00 PM // SVA Theatre 333 West 23rd Street New York, NY 10011
I was a student mentor for ReelWorks over the past few months, mentoring a talented young man named Shan who is finished with his short film Keychain and presenting it as part of the ReelWorks showcase this coming Sunday.
Keychain follows a teenager named Kai who returns to a school he moved away from suddenly a few years ago. Shy and reserved, Kai nevertheless has to confront the estrangement he feels with his friend Alex, who keeps giving him the cold shoulder.
It’s been a lot of fun seeing this short film come together and it’s great that I’ll be able to see it projected along with other student shorts. If you’re in the area you should consider coming and providing support. These kids are talented and deserve a receptive audience. They’ve certainly heard enough encouragement from the program leaders and mentors.
The Macabre Faire Film Festival
Sunday 10/2 4:00pm block // The Capitol Theatre, 110 West Main Street, Lebanon, TN, 37087
A narrative horror short film I wrote and co-produced called In the Bowels of the Building is showing at The Macabre Faire Film Festival in Lebanon, Tennessee at 4pm this Sunday.
In the Bowels of the Building is the first short film of a planned horror anthology currently called The BLDG: Five Stories of Horror. The theme of the anthology is premised around a haunted NYC resident tower where different short films take place on different stories. However as the project has developed we’re looking more into the idea of ‘real estate horror stories’ in general.
Fun fact about Bowels, the director, Nikolai, and I did the color grading together, and kept trying to add a dirty texture quality that was hard to pull off with the tools we had. So we looked up a tutorial on how to add ‘Clarity’ the way you can edit photos in Lightroom, which doesn’t exist for video because it’s processing intensive and usually creates flickering / jittery results.
The technique we found was to duplicate the entire nested video sequence and play with blend modes and opacity to add more or less detail-level contrast to the image. The result was video footage with richer detail in the shadows and blacks that I’ve only ever seen in film and photos.
I bring this up here because I’ve been waiting to use that technique on a relevant project again and you’ll see it on my upcoming STSC Symposium: Beach video.
12th Annual Queens World Film Festival
NOVEMBER 1 - 6, 2022
A narrative horror short film I wrote and co-produced called In the Bowels of the Building is showing at Queens World Film Festival at the historic Kaufman Astoria Studios:
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 5th
Trepidation: Seven films that will make you tremble.
9:15 pm – 11:15 pm
KAS Zukor • 35th St. • Long Island City, NY 11106
www.kaufmanastoria.com
I have to check in with my collaborators but this may very well be the final screening of Bowels’ festival run before we move to release it in some way and develop the next project.
This is a really exciting film festival to be in. It’s happening right in my neighborhood and I actually have opportunities and events to network and promote the film, which is hard to do if you’re not physically present. I’ve had films in about a dozen or so film festivals over the past year and a half, and the ones that really ended up paying off in terms of satisfaction and engagement were the ones where I could be involved with the festival itself.
Things I’m Working On:
The Queens World Film Festival is happening practically right in my backyard, so I’m currently organizing my calendar around events related to it.
Additionally: