Filming is done

I finished filming Fantasma. That was a lot of work. I need to take a nap now. and relax with some japanese death poetry.

my robe
grows heavy
with the scent of blossoms

the sun goes down
behind the mountain peaks
and bells ring

spring has come-
a nameless mountain
wrapped in mist

Fantasma Stills

So the last weekend of shooting is upon us. I've spent about 12 hours a day for a week in the soundstage making/decorating the set. My friend morgan came and helped make all the trees, meg's been making a full cast of costumes, and I individually cut, painted, stapled and hot-glued all the leaves onto the trees. And you know what IT WAS WORTH IT. LOOK AT THESE PRODUCTION PHOTOS.  

Walt and Lillian played by Caspian and Agnes

Texting and Starbucks between takes

Franc arrives to set in a well-timed heavenly snow.

film education

After spending 4 years in a film program that I've been frustrated by I came up with this.


This school needs to be a creative atmosphere.
suggestions for how to achieve this:

1) Humble attitudes should be promoted from the teachers to the students. No more elitism because of the small size of the program.

2) Teachers should be passionate about helping young people discover themselves as artists and have come up with techniques to encourage personal investigation of artistic ethics/style.

3) Teachers need to spend more time developing lesson plans,  critiques thought up on the spot and witty comments are not enough any more. Killing time with endless reviews should not be part of the class.

4)Teachers need to inspire hope in the students. When a teacher makes bitter jokes about the industry it scares the students and makes them more competitive. Teachers should be working to show students that if they really believe in what they're doing, then that is what matters. If the student doesn't believe in their work then the teachers need to have a way to help them push themselves creatively to find something that does work.

5)Teachers need to spend more time explaining how to work within the scope of a small budget. Students should not be awarded for making a more complicated and expensive film, but one that was carefully created to creatively use resources.

6) Don't gloss over technical information. Cinematography class needs to be taught in a way that can be understood. There needs to be more training in editing that is mandatory. Students are overwhelmed by uploading footage, codecs, and transcoding, this needs to be addressed in depth.


Maybe I'll print this out and give it to the teachers at my review.

inspiration for your life/art

Name of the movie?

currently trying to come up with a good name for the new movie. I was considering, a long time ago, naming it Walt. But that's not good. Fantasia is my favorite disney movie, and since this movie is the re-working of Disney mythology a possible idea is to name it a spoof of Fantasia. Perhaps Fantasma. or Phasmatis. I dunno, still gotta while to think about this one.

Other stuff that rules:

Marc Bolan. T rex. 20th century boy. David Bowie/Marc Bolan in pictures together.

I will channel them.

production photos

here a some more production photos, courtesy of peter kaiser

Franc on set/camera

Peter posing on set

production pictures

Lillian Disney costume by Meg Powers

The Mice! 

Olivia as a very edgar allen poe-ish Walt 

First day of shooting (gayest film crew ever(camera man not pictured(also half gay)))

movies that have influenced me

Here is a current list of movies that have influenced me. Some I don't like anymore, but they are all important to me.

la jette

punch and judy

careful

stranger than paradise

pink flamingos

alien

tropical malady

syndromes and a century

meeting people is easy

that high lonesome sound

bill brown's documentaries

my neighbor totoro

dogtown and z-boys 

fanny and alexander

la belle et la bette

barbarella

olrando

la collectionneuse

dillinger is dead

fantasia

l'eclisse

amarcord

lost in translation

bladerunner

la dolce vita

la strada

nights of cabiria

wild strawberries

red dessert

jean dielman

amelie

delicatessen

murmur of heart

the good the bad and the ugly

breathless

band of outsiders

400 blows

cleo 5-7

teorema

life aquatic

murmur of heart

valerie and her week of wonders
pink narcissus
alice
mother and son
mysterious skin

Mice!

I got my mice for my film! Their names are Ennio Mousiconne (after Ennio Moriconne, the great italian film score composer) and Hunka Munka (after a Beatrix Potter character). The little ladies are currently residing in a cage on my dresser. I got 2 because I didn't want them to be lonely. At this point I think that Hunka will be playing the role of Mickey because she's not as crazy as Ennio and seems to like humans more. Here's a picture of them. They're both spotted, Ennio is apricot and white and Hunka is gray and white.

Lillian and walt character study

Here is some information and references for the 2 main characters in the film I'm currently working on.  

Lillian:

child-like

dreamy

naiive

spacey

simple

unpresuming

modest

sympathetic

caring

Walt:

child-like

naiive

frightened

principled

highly moral

admiring

sympathetic

determined

film school ugh

Sorry I haven't been updating that much lately. I am a month into school/producing my senior film. It is still the wildly inaccurate walt disney bio-pic. The teachers are intrigued and confused by what I'm trying to do, which is a plus because they're usually confused or don't care. One of the major problems with trying to make my film at school is that the teachers have this pre-conceived notion of how one is supposed to make their film school films. Their formula is like a mock indie film production. Indie films have tiny budgets, but school films have even tinier ones so it doesn't really make sense to me to try and replicate the process for the school films. One thing everyone is being pressured to do is to post casting calls on websites and have auditions in the city. It's useful to know how to do that stuff but my project is on an even smaller scale than that. My film is my own work, with my friends as actors, and my friends as crew and costume design. There is no member of my production that is being outsourced because i'm not going to try and play my film off as a standard yet indie professional semi-art film. My film is no budget and I have no desire to try and prove I'm a indie yet professional filmmaker. I'm just a person who wants to make their own film, take that as you may. So most of my film work at purchase has been very sneaky, I always feel like I'm trying to conceal the process I use to make my films because the teachers would not like it. Instead I try to be as vague as possible, let them walk all over me because they're confused, and then hope that when I show them my film at the end of the year their doubts will be washed away and they will understand. I know one thing that my teachers are not going to like is how I cast my 2 leads as people of the opposite sex in drag. They're going to think this is unnecessarily confusing. I'm actually considering never telling the teachers that the characters are in drag and just try to play it off as if they were normal. Last year hardly anyone could tell that the venus fly trap in bumbus was in drag. So wish me luck as I navigate my senior production class, hopefully the teachers will end up being supportive.

manifesto

fake manifesto #1

The New Haze Movement

1) The creation of a film operates on a different plane of existence. It's relations to money, equipment, and menial organization should not hinder or discourage the act of creating the film. 

2) The filmmaker or group of filmmakers creating the film are completely responsible for creating the world of the film. Decisions have to be made about the aesthetics, the writing, the choice of actors, the medium, the message and/or experience of the film.

3) Start with what you have and build from there. Push yourself to use your resources and limitations in the most creative way possible. 

4) Do not question your power as the filmmaker. Push yourself and the film into places that you didn't think you were capable of. Believe in the unseen, unimagined, unwritten infinite possibilities that exist only when one believes for no reason other than need for hope.

5) Do not try to expose "the harsh realities of life". There is no "harsh reality of life". There is no "reality". Life is what one makes it, if you want it to be beautiful, it is, if you want it to be harsh it is. Filmmakers who make harsh films make the world harsh. People need hope, give it to them. This does not mean your film should stray from elements of sadness, mystery, loneliness, or suffering though.

6) Fantasy is the future. Movement brings things into reality, stillness allows for absorption.

More research

I finished reading that book I posted about earlier, Film and the American Moral Vision of Nature. I found some really interesting and inspiring information in that book. Here are some good quotes about the questionable ethics behind disney films.

"They allow us to understand how disney's natural history films distance people from nature rather than bring them close in spite of a cinematic illusion of intimacy; we can see his reductionist, patronizing attitudes toward nature and toward human institutions ranging from industry to family; we can see how he used nature as a shill to eulogize American social values."

Disney films serve as an ego-system not an eco-system. They make nature reflect american values, making an american audience believe their values came from nature.

 "The animals in disney's landscape held those same values of loyalty, industry, fidelity, and thrift dear. It was the american way."

"An attitude towards nature that is to preserve rather than protect, which encourages a static image of a balance of nature that must be maintained, and to construct nature ideologically as a useful product for human beings."

I don't want my disney character to know he's bad though. I want him to think he's doing nature a favor. But not in a patronizing way, in a real way, he's just mistaken.

More walt script ideas

It's the last week of my employment at the film summer camp I've been TAing. It's been pretty awesome, kids are my fav. During the last few days there's a lot of editing going on so I've been at a computer writing out ideas for the walt disney bio-pic. So I've described the idea before, and there wasn't really much going on in the beginning of the movie, just the end. So I decided I needed to work a lot more on plot points. Here's what I've come up with:

Walt is agoraphobic. Lillian dotes over him. After a series of nature related dreams he starts to notice small details outside his window that catch his attention. He starts to venture outside bit by bit. Lillian is proud. His visions continue and start to seep into everyday life, nature takes on a fantastical edge. He overcomes his agoraphobia. His visions inspire him to start trying to bring his ideas to life through animation (because they are unfilmable in a realistic sense).  His new appreciation of nature drives him to buy a pet mouse who becomes a constant companion. Walt's visions and dreams start to take on a twisted edge, becoming creepier. Elements from a hidden past start to resurface. Walt begins to realize he can't draw, his visions confuse him, he starts to uncover the fact that he was an adopted orphan. His mother died during a bombing when trying to bring the farm animals back inside. He wanders into the woods with his mouse and drawing pad, he fails once again at illustrating. He becomes extremely distraught, wanders deeper into the forest and gets lost and trapped. He dies holding/talking to his mouse who talks back to him. Lillian can tell when walt dies, she has been drawing a little over the past few weeks after being inspired by walt. At this moment she draws Walt's mouse, an exact replica of the known mickey mouse. She offers it to a movie studio dressed as a saint in memory of walt.

Still needs some more thought and work, but I feel like this is really on the right track now. In classic janeen style I will be employing the usage of a reclusive main character. I've been doing some research on agoraphobia, and by that I mean I read the wikipedia page.  It appears as though agoraphobia is linked to the development of modernity. Which totally works for the movie because walt is trying to re-frame the sanctity of nature, inspired by his bizarre personal visions.

cool disney stuff

It's kind of weird I'm doing a movie about walt disney since I am not nearly as into the canon of disney classics as most of the american population is. Fantasia is amazing though. It's one of my favorite movies ever. And there are not a lot of those. I found this really nice youtube comment a while ago that someone left underneath a clip of fantasia:

Chin up! There are still cartoonists in the world who cherish the beautiful capabilities of this art form. Yes, films like this are no longer in the mainstream now a days, but we can't say it will never come again.

True artists are still out there and still working to bring art like this into the world. It's up to us as an audience to support true quality and bring it back.

The past is not something to mourn, it is a chance for us to learn so we can make our futures better.


 nice right? Well heres some clips of some disney stuff that I personally like. 


Claire De Lune, deleted scene from fantasia



Destino, Salvador dali and disney collab

Mousing

So I decided I want to purchase a mouse to use in my walt disney movie. The mouse will be walt's constant companion which he confides in.

I've been doing mouse research, and apparently its a better idea to buy a mouse from a breeder than a pet store because they are easier to hand train. I found this breeder in nyc. I'll write him an email once it gets closer to school. http://www.mikiodo.com/mice/

Also, I will be purchasing 2 mice, one will be the understudy. I'm trying to come up with good mouse names. So far meg has suggested "ennio mousiconne" which rules, because I love ennio morricone, and on occasion I can enjoy a good pun. I mean technically I could name them mickey and minnie but thats kind of lame. Maybe babybel, after those delicious miniature cheese wheels..... mmmmmm

UPDATE: the mice will be named Ennio Mousiconne and Hunka Munka (after a beatrix potter character)

end of summer is upon us

So the end of summer is quite here yet, but it's time to start planning. Here's some stuff i gotta do:

1) write rough screenplay for walt disney bio-pic

2) make kick starter for walt disney bio-pic

3) record 22 more songs

Kay. time to get to work.

This song rules

Disney research

Here's some stuff from books I've been scanning

 

This last one is just because the cover is so cool and it's got barbarella on it.

Disney research

The other day I checked out a handful of books so that I could start research for the disney bio-pic. I got books of his art and comics, books on interior design from the 40's, and this really awesome book called film and the american moral vision of nature. This book rules. It's about how images and films have constructed the american idea of nature and the way we interact with it. I thought it'd be useful since one of the main conflicts of the movie is between walt and nature.