l∅ckedinab∅x: guerilla-underground-retro-cyber-corny

07 September 2004

guerilla-underground-retro-cyber-corny

Get up, stumble downstairs, wait for the conciousness.

Drink coffee, feel a bit more perky, watch part of low-budget action-terrorist film on the Rupert Murdoch Propaganda/Light Entertainment channel (Home in the UK to such ground-breaking shows as When Animals Attack Women Who Love Too Much, the Sharon Osbourne Talk Show Thing and The World's Stupidest TV Shows) - Cliched plot, FX on a shoe-string, mundane dailogue but... Bruce Cambell! Definately worth 15 minutes of my time, which is how long it will take me to drink this coffee...

Brain starts ticking. Come up with idea for tongue-in-cheek TV show about films and film-making... Anything that isn't hollywood. Would be entertaining and informative and unlike anything else on UK TV (I'm assuming).

Think about film making some more. Want creative control... We're talking low budget, independant, hanging on by the skin of yr teeth kinda film making. Will be difficult, but ultimately rewarding and kinda fun (apart from the actual shooting, which in my experience tends to be rather tedious and frustrating - but you gotta love that feeling when things kinda start coming together in post-production) - Fun is important. Play is a great way to get things done. That's why my production group were stoned all the way through the shooting and editing of our documentary (Not because we were irresponsible amatuers - nah)

Am I up to the task? Who knows. Maybe, if I get off my ass a bit more often and stop being such a shut-in. I have this fantasy where I'm off doing my little indie-guerilla film making thing, and one of my scripts gets picked up by someone in America and they ask me to come over to slaughter my own script to which I reply "Sure, Hollywood? Sounds like a laugh. Just point me in the direction of the drugs..." It wouldn't be a script I was paticularly fond of, so I wouldn't really care. I'd have a pseudonym in the credits.

I wonder if there's an official organisation that would certify me "Head Permenantly in Clouds/Unemployable" - would make things so much easier at the dole office.

Have shower, la la la, water is good...

Come downstairs, head still full of film making stuff, sit down in front of the computer. Decide to do a post that rambles on a bit but eventually links to loads of information on low-budget film making.

Chatty guide to making a low budget feature on DV. Basically, this guy is telling you the story of how he wrote/shot/edited/marketed a film. The guy goes on a bit, but I suppose it's all good.

Exposure - I found this UK website a good couple of years ago and found it both informative and entertaining, and it features the Robert Rodrigeuz 10 minute film school, and loads of recipes for fake blood, and stuff. Definately worth checking out.

The ABCs of Low-Budget Film making - A study of three low-budget features that had quite a bit of success; Robert Rodrigeuz and El Mariachi, Nick Gomez and Laws of Gravity, and The Living End by Gregg Araki. It's a step by step breakdown of how these peeps did what they did, courtesy of FilmMaker magazine and republished by the folks at Next Wave Films who specialised in low-budget, independant films, but who appear to have been closed down. Go check them out anyway, and read that article.

Okay, that's enough for now. I'm gonna have some breakfast, now it's lunch time, and finish reading that FilmMaker magazine article.

[qu∅tes]

"one helped oneself out of solitude reluctantly by laying hold of some little odd or end, some sound, some sight." Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

[on cinematography] "After you have done a picture you forget everything you have ever known, so that you become a child again, or an infant or a void into which the new picture creates a whole new evolvement... So that you do not have to keep doing the same thing all over again. In other words you take what yourself back to ground zero. Of course you cannot unlearn what your brain knowns. But I mean it emotionally. I mean you just become scared again, as if you do not know anything... I never felt on top of it. I neverfelt that I knew so much that I could sit back with a cup of coffee and it would all turn out wonderful." - Conrad Hall

[on cinematography] "When the budget is minimal you are forced to look at light as you find it, and to make it look good." - Haskell Wexler

"Rock 'n' roll is like an attitude, it's not a musical form of a strict sort. It's a way of doing things, of approaching things. Like anything can be rock 'n' roll." - Lester Bangs

"The capitalist mind perceives the world purely in terms of material resources to be used for its benefit, to increase productivity and profit without thought of long-term consequences." - Daniel Pinchbec, Breaking Open the Head

"In shamanic cultures, synchronicities are recognised as signs that you are on the right path." - Daniel Pinchbec, Breaking Open the Head (excerpt), Book of Lies

"...reality is up for grabs, so learn the codes through which the narrative is crafted and participate in its unfolding." - Douglas Rushkoff

"Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomized at a time when the Japanese were suing desperately for peace. The American leaders were acting with almost inconceivable treachery by denying that they had received requests for peace…The bombs were exploded on congested cities filled with civilians. There was not even the slightest military justification, because the military outcome of the war had been decided months earlier." - Dave Dellinger

"We're living in a new Beat time, in my view. And it's very difficult for us to hang on." - Tilda Swinton

"Pursue the small utopias: nature, music, friendship, intimate love." -The Fugs

"We have reconstructed the Tower of Babel, and it is a television antenna: a thousand voices producing a daily parody of democracy, in which everyone's opinion is afforded equal weight regardless of substance or merit." - Ted Koppel

"There are alot of things you have to sacrfice. It all depends on how deep you want to get into whatever your gig is. Whatever you're there for. So like the deeper you get into it the more sacrifices you have to do, maybe even on your personality or your outward this and that. I just dedicate my life to this whole art. You have to forget about what people say. If it's art or anything else, whatever you really, really dig doing, you have to forget about what people say about you sometimes. Forget about this or that-when you're supposed to die or when you're supposed to be living. You have to forget about all these things. You have to go on and be crazy. Craziness is like heaven. Once you reach that point of where you don't give a damn about what everybody else is saying you're going towards heaven. The more you get into it, they're goin' to say "Damn, that cat's really flipped out. Oh, he's gone now". But if you're producin' and creatin', you know, you're getting closer to your own heaven. That's what man's tryin' to get to, anyway." - James Marshall Hendrix

"With its totalizing claim, the system created the conditions for this horrible retaliation. The immanent mania of globalization generates madness, just as an unstable society produces delinquents and psychopaths. In truth, these are only symptoms of the sickness." - Jean Baudrillard

"If poetry is what you can't translate, as Robert Frost once suggested, then art is what you cannot define. Nevertheless, it's fun to try." - james monaco, 'how to read a film'

"This spectacle of banality is todays true pornography..." - Jean Baudrillard

"...today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. We are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms." - Philip K. Dick

"There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose ideas, shining in his head, frighted people and for whom delirium is the only solution to the strangulation that life has prepared for him." - Antonin Artaud

"The way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out from the heart." - Charles Bukowski

"Tea heads are a sociable lot. Too sociable for my liking." - William S. Burroughs

l∅ckedinab∅x

07 September 2004

guerilla-underground-retro-cyber-corny

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