I didn’t know this, but Filthy McNasty is a real person. He probably has a real name, but I don’t know it nor did anyone I talked to. Club owner, impresario, and roustabout - sweaty hugs, wet kisses
Here’s proof.
Phi Phenomenon Productions was hired to film the reunion event and in turn hired me to run the stationary camera at the back of the club. There I stood for 5 hours as I watched bands from the late 80s who never made it, relive the glory of not making it. Though to be fair, one of the bands was made up of 14 year olds who could play Rush songs better than you ever could.
I was impressed by the number of people who travelled great distances to party one last time with Filthy and by the people who seemed to really truly love Flithy McNasty and everything he had done for them back in the 80s.
Filthy McNasty got really drunk and refused to get in the car the manager called for him at the end of the night.
It was awesome.
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The Autry National Center hired Black Dollar to do sound design for a video piece in the new Cowboys and Presidents exhibit.
The Autry needed a convention soundscape to play behind a slideshow of former presidents roughing it like cowboys. It had to flow seamlessly from decade to decade while not showing any particular political bias.
I didn’t have access to university archive or old new reels; I had to rely on the internet to give me my material. I used Miro to download any and all convention related material I could find on YouTube, Google video, etc. After stripping out the choice audio from the convention footage, I added in some crowd sound effects from my personal library and mixed it all together with DP5.
When you go to the exhibit, you’ll hear the audio as you walk in.
Here’s what the Autry has to say about the exhibit:
During the spring and summer of 2008, April 12 through September 7, the Autry National Center will premiere Cowboys and Presidents. This national traveling show will explore the fascinating and ongoing intersection of cowboy culture and presidential politics from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush.
The exhibit will explain how the presidency became intertwined with the emerging image of a heroic American cowboy at the turn of the twentieth century and will explore the ways that U.S. Presidents have used this powerful iconographic symbol to define themselves and their administrations to the nation and the world. It will also show how the press, foreign governments, and domestic political opponents have found cowboy imagery useful in criticizing presidential policy and leadership.
I had the great pleasure of mixing 6 songs on the new City of Progress record, Human Machine. To be fair, Max had already put the mix together in DP4, all that was needed was some EQ, a little automation, and some Vintage Warmth.
Once you go Vintage you never go back.
Years ago, while I was working nights in Chicago, I started making short films with a fellow night worker. He was a sleep tech, I delivered steaks and cigarettes to the yuppies in the Gold Coast. We found ourselves up and around on a nightly basis until 6am with nothing to do until the idea appeared before us - short films.
We found inspiration and direction by using cartoons/graphic novels as storyboards, and forced ourselves to shoot and edit each piece in one night. Fueled by the crushing boredom of the 2am-6am hours, bottles of wine, and a deep longing for female companionship, I bring you the two ‘best’ of these experiments.
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Black Dollar Productions teamed up with Quiet Pirate Press to create this meditation on what a Web 2.0 video might look like if it was created by an robot Noel Coward. The piece debuted at BETALEVEL’s Late Night Snack in Chinatown.
Two of the robot voices were default Mac text-to-speech voices. The other two, the bawdy Brits, were GhostReader voices. I split the main script into four character scripts and exported each characters lines to audio. After timing the stop motion in Premiere, I chopped up each characters audio in Digital Performer and edited it all together with sound effects and Kraftwerk.
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Black Dollar Productions was hired by Quiet Pirate Press as a web media consultant to help build their new website and produce a video piece for an upcoming event.
Their website needs were simple enough: a blog style CMS allowing all Quite Pirate contributors to post articles, and web 2.0 link share, and a mailing list. A fresh MT4 install with a custom layout and plugin enhancements, coupled with a ma.gnolia account and a DreamHost mass mailer list, and the job was done
I had a friend take 805 pictures of my face. I started to get desperate as I tried to find the 2 or 3 good pictures out of the 805 and wound up making a short film.
Headshots are normally pretty depressing to look at, especially the ones where you are half blinking. But a video like this breathes new life into the half-sneeze, the shit-eating grin, and the sex criminial pictures that are normally deleted as soon as they’re opened.
Enjoy!
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Hypnotic and creepy, eh?
Black Dollar Productions was hired in 2006 by testwiser.com to be both recording engineer and Voice-Over talent for all online media.
Black Dollar Productions recorded and edited over 2500 GRE/SAT words, definitions, and sentences in preparation for testwisers 2007 site launch. For a glisp of the finished product, try testwiser’s online demo.
Listen to a sample:
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About testwiser.com:
Testwiser has been authored by expert test takers who scored in the 99th percentile on the verbal sections of the GRE and SAT, with advice from skilled teachers and real students. The Testwiser system is proven to help students succeed in learning the vocabulary essential to their test.
Once upon a time, Arlo worked at a bookstore. While Arlo wasn’t hard at work in the bookstore or hard at work going to USC, he was in a rehearsal space making up songs with his friends.
One day Arlo said to his friends, “There’s this writer, Jonathan Lethem, he has this really neat idea, and in the spirit of this idea he started a project.
And you know what else? He’s coming to the bookstore to read from his new book. Why don’t we actually write one of the songs from his book and play it at the reading?!”
Arlo made it happen. We wrote the song Monster Eyes from You Don’t Love Me Yet and played it at the reading.
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Imagine a heart warming situation comedy about a group of friends learning to love in the big city.
Now imagine this show has no budget.
Now imagine the credit sequence to this show.
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