New Media by Ryan Adlaf
PART II!
This time I had a friend take only 579 pictures of my face.
This edition of Headshots, The Movie isn’t as hypnotic as part I, however it does find our hero in faraway lands escaping a Turkish prison and running from the forces of evil.
Feel free to compare and contrast part I and part II. There is a seizure warning in effect for children under 12 who watch both videos simultaneously.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
Hypnotic and creepy, eh?
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.
Our entry in the Summer 2003 Fast Forward Film Festival. Teams were given two index cards with a word or phase determining the opening and closing shot. Films were screened in order so each closing shot is the opening shot of the next film. Teams had 24 hours to complete the film. We won a bag of coffee.
The Cannonball Run Scavenger Hunt was a bicycle scavenger hunt organized by Urban Bike Assault recreating the magic of the Cannonball Run on the streets of LA.
Black Dollar Productions rode along and filmed the ride. The short film documenting the day’s events went on to play in the 2006 Bicycle Film Festival in LA, the 2006 Filmed by Bike in Portland, and the 2007 Celluloid Cycles film festival in Melbourne.
I couldn’t find a version of the Cannonball Run theme song without the sound of revving engines drowning out the music. I used Reason and Pro Tools to cover the song.
This was an experiment with a handmade dolly.
It worked remarkably well considering the man wheeling the dolly across the bathroom was keeping time by counting one second for every two floor tiles.