Movement Vid.–Hip hop and rap

It was fortuitous luck that I was able to enlist such great talent for this video!
The rapper in the vid. chased me down after he saw me directing a film shoot. He gave me his tracks; later I listened, was inspired and asked him if I could direct a video.
The actress is a philosophy major we met the day of the shoot. She was coming out of the library and I asked her if she wanted to be in a hip hop video. This is her first acting gig. She is very charismatic and the camera loves her.

Oh and the technical stuff… we dreamt it up and did it. It’s a song about leaving a mark so we played with the chalk board and dry erase board and used it like a green screen. Sped up the writing to match the music; turned the artist into several versions of himself: teacher and multiple students; created a graphic for a backdrop… etc. etc. lots of movement and all.

Proposal for human movement video

It’s gonna be a hip-hop video. Question is, who the artist will be. This cat JET has a cool track I’d like to use him in but it’s hard to convince him to make an hour trip to shoot under a graffiti bridge. Although I like his track I’d rather not shoot in the sterile locations he’s proposed. So I think I’ll probably use a snip from one of my tracks, or there is a new one I’m working on that is no where near finished, but is around two minutes. So I may throw it together. Like I said, I’d like to shoot under a bridge with graffiti. I’d like to use some green screen effects, and I’d like to garbage matte.

It’s epic don’t blink said no one ever….

5×5's

This is the narrative of society influencing a third party individual to influence an individual, who in the end casts off society’s mustache achieving freedom. The second video uses the mustache as a symbol of individual identity– the opposite of the first video.

Propaganda–Folk Music Sucks

It’s meant to be tongue-in-cheek. Obviously the message is contradictory. “I hate folk music” is from a quote (see if you can figure out who) and “Uncle John” is from the Grateful Dead song. But for the record, this is now an album in progress. So, the intention was to go with the whole brown bag theme, but a beautiful mistake made it all psychedelic, and it took a different turn. That is the adventure of art. A moment can change everything. And one moment did when the “wrong” button was clicked. “Folk music sucks.”

Propaganda Proposition

This one will work well for propaganda. It only needs some transformation, especially in the lettering, to make it grand. Perhaps a red circle or outline surrounding the photo. playing with it will reveal some of it’s mysteries. But the idea behind it is a tongue-in-cheek propaganda. Even though it says “I hate folk”, it says it is a folk album. Still, it is certain to be polarizing. Already when folk lovers see it they say “folk that” and immediately begin to defend folk music. They don’t even seem to notice that it says it’s a folk album.

Identity

Greetings From the “Lords”; it’s really sunny here & all…

Last Vintage

Surreal Self-Portrait

I did this backwards. But real art is non-linear.
This is what amazes me about art.

How do you throw a bunch of juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated elements together like shards of glass off the Empire State and they somehow land with some kind of order? Chaos theory? Snowflakes? What do you think?

Here’s what I mean.

I lay out these images: two of me singing, an oil painting––sort of a selfie of me as an old Chief, or the Indian in my head––, and a poster of my band the “Lords”, which is a study in chaos theory all by itself that should be called Occupy Book.

Then after I lay out those elements I step back and go: “Hmm… what a crazy mess! I should lay a photo of an erratic scribble doodle I made over the whole thing… that should tie it (the room) together”. LOL. And the wild thing is, really to my surprise, it does! I mean if you really look at it.

I didn’t shift any of the images around, and my scribble-doodle seems to be a prophesy etched in time; a map foretelling the day that the other elements would lilt into place! The contour of the arm, the mountains, the linear triangles forming the mic stand, the Chief’s regalia and on and on. Am I spelling it out too much? Do you see it? Do I need more therapy? Do you need to read more William Blake? Or is it a complicated binary sequence
incorporating all of the above questions? To me, art only produces questions. This self-portrait is certainly a multi-media full of question marks. But to me it’s clear that intention produces results when we let go of the outcome.

Did I accomplish my selfie proposal goals? Heck yeah I did! I mean, it was so esoteric, anyhow, that how could I miss?

––“Multi-medias are invariably sad comedies”