Background

By the time I was rich enough to be able to afford my own video camera, I had been making silent Super-8 films for a little over a decade. I felt constrained by the three-minute-twenty-second reel length, the lack of sound, and the anxious waiting while the drugstore developed the film. I needed a video camera - if only to satisfy my dreams of filming more than six hours of footage - on one tape - and being able to watch the finished work of art - that same day.

The first film we made was of course a slasher film. Gorefest was made shortly after midnight on New Years 1993, this cautionary tale of chainsaw wielding maniacs who slay the members of a prayer circle is narrated by then Vice President Al Gore.

A few months later we made Sightings: The Ganja Incident. As is noted in the text:

We were bored on a Sunday afternoon, so we went into an empty field with a football, some empty cans, and an old shoe. Based on a true story.

If you watch those last two shorts, you will see that they were obviously modified outside the camera. Jump forward a few years and I'm living in Seattle. I bought a Power Macintosh 6115 - unique at the time in that it had composite audio/video input/output. Loaded it up with Adobe Premiere and began to experiment with digital video editing.

I then posted these little QuickTime movies to my world wide web home page - which is what you called them in 1995 - for friends and family to download.

Anyway, so I'm sitting on a heap of old Super-8 and some Video-8 footage, I began to digitize and re-edit many of my old works. I added titles, sound effects, music tracks, rotoscoped gushing blood, et cetera. I did this to Gorefest and Sightings of course, and also Pinecone which was based in part on some footage John and I shot one lazy Sunday in Baton Rouge years earlier. Basically:

A man finds a pinecone which tells him in the voice of Ronald Reagan to run over people with his Volkswagen Beetle.

I'm not sure what to make of The Baby Killers - subtitled "A True Ordinary Day in United States of America" - a film that took the form of a film as if made by a Japanese filmmaker looking back at the violence in American society. With the beat jazz, stereotypical pop music, and nonsensical subtitles there is a social commentary buried in there somewhere.

I made several other films during this period including Meeting Elvis Costello (too cringe inducing to post) and I Love L.A. - another attempt at a music video - this time based on the Randy Newman song.

Screenings & Festivals