While this stop-motion frenzy had us hooked at the title, its eponymous character is just one of the many visually dazzling displays in Umlaut Ampersand. Could PES possibly have a protege waiting in the wings?
Comparing the end of one’s life to the fond memories of a child, this beautifully animated short is a tribute to life and love when you have nothing to fear. By overlapping hand-drawn characters with painted textured paper, each frame looks like a work of art that deserves to be hung on the fridge with an over-sized magnet.
How does one break into music videos? According to USC masters film student Brooke Hanson, 28, you contact a band you like and ask them if they want to make a music video: "That's what I did," she says. After Hanson found indie musician Laura Jansen's MySpace page through the
website of a venue called Hotel Cafe, she sent Jansen a MySpace message saying, "Hey can I make you a music
video?" Jansen messaged her back, saying, "Yes! yes! yes!" They met for coffee, found an
instant creative connection, and the rest is do-it-yourself video history.
The duo's charming collaboration called "Bells" combines stop-motion animation, live-action, clever theatrical staging and witty lo-fi special effects. Although the video was inspired by a USC class, Hanson says she produced it independently, as she wanted to own the rights and have the
ability to stream the video online. "USC is particularly restrictive of students showing their work
online," she confesses, "and I was just 'over' doing material that I would invest thousands of my
own dollars in only to see it subsumed by the University."
Shot in a warehouse in South Central Los Angeles with built
sets, the film was inspired by Olivier Gondry's Hot, Hot Heat
"Goodnight" video (where the guys are animated and sing
on their T-shirts). "I thought printing out frames and
re-photographing in stop motion would be a good way to make something look cool
on the cheap," she says. "I thought of the postcard because the concept Laura and I were
working with was 'communication,' and it seemed to make sense."
"On the whole," she admits, "the work of both the Gondry brothers has both intimidated and inspired me."
Currently, Hanson is finishing up her thesis film, "Borderless," which she says is about a college student and illegal immigrant, who has resorted to living in the university's 24-hour library.
-Anthony Kaufman
By asking passersby a vague question, Josh Flowers distills the essence of humanity into four awesome minutes.
We're not sure if this French spec has aired anywhere, but it's certainly Super Bowl-worthy.
]]>A commercial for the popular American bar & grill, from the creators of TDR favorite CUBE.
Breathing life into gravestones at a local cemetery, this touching documentary by Josh Flowers seeks to remember those who have left us.
The hellish monotony of office work has been a potent theme ever since Melville penned Bartleby the Scrivenor in 1853. If Bartleby was killing time in a 21st Century cubicle, it might resemble Jacob Reed's Day Job.
Filmed in one wide master shot, Day Job records the lonely routine of an shlub (Alec Owen), who procrastinates by banging on various office supplies that surround him. That footage was then cut together to create a percussive beat.
Day Job is not the first time that unedited footage has been scrambled together in post to create music -- Norway's Lasse Gjertsen took care of that with his wildly popular clip, Amateur. Reed says that he hadn't seen Amateur until after Day Job was made. Rather, he got the idea from the same clip that inspired Gjertsen -- Michel Gondry's I Am Twelve Forever, which appeared on a Palm Pictures Directors Label DVD.
The shoot took place over two hours, and was made as part of Reed's Cinema 290 Production class at the University of Souther California. "We set Alec up with a metronome in his pocket, and wired an earbud up to one of his ears so that everything he did could be on the same beat, which I thought would make it easier to edit," says Reed. "I ended up only using a tiny fraction of what we shot, and at some point I'd like to recut the film to come up with some different sounds. The shoot was a lot of fun, because Alec is someone I do comedy with - he's great to work with, and he also happens to be a musician so he came up with the sounds very easily."
Reed's currently working on shorts for his comedy troupe Tremendosaur. Check them out on Tremendosaur.com or in iTunes with the Tremendosaur Comedy Podcast.
-Matthew Ross