This experimental travel film was my contribution to the April 1st, 2016 presentation of Jump-Start Performance Co.’s 8 x 8: Cabaret du Jump. It came out of a road trip I took with Laurie. We both were invited by our friends at Jump-Start to present pieces for their 8 x 8 anthology show, so our road trip was intended to provide the raw information to create a film (mine); a monologue (hers); and a two-person multimedia performance piece (ours).

My film, Up the 98th Meridian West: 8 Destinations, screened on April 1st, 2016. All of the images were shot on our Hill Country road trip. Also, the sound design includes many of the field recordings we made at various stops.

Laurie Dietrich and I have created a website for our current project, Invocation. It’s not a very innovative name, so we weren’t able to find a simple domain name. We went with invocationtheshow.com. It will be filled with all things connected to this project. We hope to stage it in the late summer or early fall. We are closing in on an agreement with a preferred venue, so we’re not quite ready to announce all the particulars. Keep an eye out for updates….

As is often the case, I have several creative projects going on concurrently, and in various stages of development. One of the more rewarding works of the moment is tentatively titled Invocation. It’s essentially a text collaboration with Laurie. We’re using images from each of our Instagram feeds as writing prompts. This early iteration is moving towards 30 short pieces each. It’s still purely an experiment. But it’s such great fun to write with someone else who can write fast and fearless. Best of all, because we stop every so often and read our stuff back to each other, I get to hear fresh work from someone whose work I love. The plan is to fashion this experiment into a cogent staged performance piece, generative in nature, and with audio and visual components.

Here are a couple of pieces I added recently (with the associated Instagram prompts).

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It sounded like metal cooling. That clicking noise. You know, like when you walk by a car with the engine still warm parked on the street. Tick. Tick. Tick. It came from above. One of the rooms upstairs. Maybe even the roof. Was there a metal roof on the building? I couldn’t remember. I thought it was tile, that red Spanish tile, curved like a section of a tube. I was sitting in a room on the third floor. It must have been a classroom. There was a chalkboard mounted to one of the walls, but nothing was written on it. Not even any chalk for me to write on it. A metal desk had been turned on it’s side. The two large and one small skinny drawers were missing. I was sitting on one of the two chairs in the room. They were blue plastic with steel legs. Maybe someone was tapping on a similar metal desk upstairs. I really wanted to think I was the only person in the entire building. I had climbed the fence surrounding the property and pushed my way in through a door almost completely rusted shut. The sun emerged from the clouds and I watched some ducks, high above, flying south in their tight formation. The entire window casement was missing and years of rain had warped the boards on that portion of the floor. I suppose anyone could have entered just as I had. And if someone were hiding out, the floor above, which would be the attic, would be a good place. Tick, tick, tick. Maybe there was a clock up there. But it would have to be the windup kind. I was pretty certain that the electricity was turned off. Wait. Another sound. Tires crunching leaves. And then the sound of a car door opening and then slamming. I walked to the window. A police car was parked in the curved drive below. A lone policeman stood on the pavement scanning the building. He saw me. I leaned out and cleared my throat. But I realized I had nothing to say. I turned and walked back to the chair and sat back down. Tick tick tick. Maybe it was an animal. Possums are always up to something. But they’re nocturnal, right? Squirrels? It seemed to have sped up, that noise. But maybe I was just slowing down.

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The shadows were sharp, well defined. I could count how many fingers I was holding out by their shadows on the ground. But, strange, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t see the light source. It should be the sun. I mean, there was a lot of light. But I could see nothing above me but soft, diffused haze. I had been following my own shadow for hours, it seemed. It went all the way to the horizon, with my head too distant to be seen. But I could crouch down and move my hand over the sand, watching the shadow-play of my fingers there with the advancing dark lines thrown by smooth pebbles and odd bulbous plants which never grew higher than my ankles. So the sun should be directly behind me. I’d turn, but there was nothing but the same haze. I saw shadows pointing at me from the pebbles and plants I had just passed, but there was no indication of where the light came from. I set back on my course, following my shadow. And it was maybe an hour later—though I don’t know how I thought I was marking time—when I realized I was surrounded by little beetles, no bigger than my thumb, all heading in the same direction as myself. I now had to make sure not to step on them. There were thousands of them, but, as I was moving faster, I overtook them and was once again on my own. Eventually I came to an ocean. The shore was perpendicular to my path—my shadow—and extended as far as I could see to the right and the left. The water was infinite, and unmoving. A perfect sheet of liquid glass, with small mounds of sea foam moving occasionally in a breeze I could not feel. I sat down. The beetles caught up with me. They continued on their course, and when they entered the ocean, they began to swim with delicate movements of those tiny legs, their speed unhindered, and onward they journeyed. I sat there until all of them had passed by and had swam out of sight, and I was left on the shore all alone.

Though I’m no longer an active member of Jump-Start Performance Co.’s artistic company, I am still happy to help them celebrate with their annual Performance Party. This is their 31st anniversary. I’m not sure how many years I have contributed with a film or a performance. I think eight. And I’m sure I was in the audience several years before then. This year (2016) the theme was time. I thought I’d put together a quick time-lapse film, forgetting that there really isn’t a quick way to produce time lapse. I like wind, to whip the trees; I like low, fast moving clouds; I like dynamic change. But I was stymied by lackluster weather. Gray, cold, and torpid. My answer was to poach a few time lapse sequences I’d used in a previously produced film of mine. So, here is my offering to “It’s About Time: Performance Party 31.” I titled it “While You Were Napping.” No real reason. I just wanted to put in a title.

This is the fourth year I’ve made one of these little ephemeral films where I create essentially a slide show from my 2015 Instagram feed. I’ve cut this to “Chasing a Bee,” by Mercury Rev.  What makes me feel such a warm connection to these end of the year image collections is to be reminded how lucky I am to be surrounded by so many creative people who inspire me to engage in such a rewarding and playful manner with the world around me.

My friend and frequent collaborator Laurie Dietrich suggested that we create a piece for the 10th anniversary show at Bihl Haus Arts. The show was called Ten, and, as invited artists, we were given the same general guidelines as all the rest: provide an interpretation of “10,” whatever that might be. Laurie’s idea was to shoot ten images of her feet in various locations which, when presented together,  would convey the idea of a life’s journey, from birth to eventual death. We shot the opening birth scene with real blood on the bathroom floor of a colleague from the theater community. The final death scene with the foot in the sky was shot in a field adjacent to Mission San José. Other images were shot on Galveston Beach, the original Taco Cabana, the Hays Street Bridge, and various locations about town. The one other foot was provided by our friend, Michi Fink. The audio is of Laurie’s breath, mixed with a heartbeat lifted from some clip off archive.org. I most like that we took a jaunt out to Galveston for one still image. It turned out quite nice.

As part of the planning committee for Centro Cultural Aztlan’s 7th Annual Mole Throwdown fundraiser, I put together a short promotional video. I was a nice opportunity to take my camera out into the field and shoot some food. Two things I love!

My music composition here is the same as the previous posting. I decided to place it into a video with some time-lapse clips. One of the things I’ve enjoyed about time-lapse is that it reminds me of those years so long ago when I shot photos on film. You’d have a notion of what you had captured, but until you developed the film and made some prints, you’d not really know what the images would look like. With time-lapse on a DSLR you have a very good idea of what the individual frames look like (composition, lighting, etc.), but it’s that motion part that remains elusive until you process the sequence. It can be completely different than your expectations (well, it is for me at the moment, partially because I’m relatively new at this).

The biggest downside is the tedium. I try and remember to bring a book along. Often I plan on hitting at least four locations, shooting for 30 minutes to an hour each. The plan usually is modified to three stops because I’m tired of sitting on my ass, brushing away ants, and listening to that shutter click away 500 to 900 times. I’m currently enamored by slow shutter work, one to two seconds per exposure. It’s nice to blur people, cars, flowing water, foliage in the wind, but it means stacking a whole series of filters to subdue the sunlight. The train crossing the bridge in this piece is perfect, adding a ghostly and insubstantial air, as ephemeral as the clouds. Most of the clips were shot on the southside of San Antonio. Two were downtown. And two were shot at a favorite campsite of mine on the northwestern shore of  Amistad Reservoir.

I am very cognizant of the frame as far as the composition goes; however, I often forget to allow for the native 3:2 aspect ratio of the camera when in still mode. In some of these clips I have deformed the image by stretching it instead of cropping. I really need to remember to plan for the 16:9 presentation. I’m editing in After Effects because of the wonderful tools available to work with the raw files from my Canon 7D.

The title is from Shakespeare, from a line spoken by Ophelia to Hamlet. It’s not terribly relevant here, but I’ve always enjoyed its cadence and drowsy melancholy.

Another track cobbled together with crowd-sourced audio clips provided through the Reddit Play-It-Forward experiment. I wanted something slow, sludgy, and dark. I’ll probably put together a short abstract film to go with this in a week or so.

One of the contributors to the Play-It-Forward had posted quite a few samples created with a bathtub. They were presented as sounds to be used in a drum rack. From listening to the sounds, I assume he or she had used an old style cast iron tub. The sounds all had this wonderful depth and reverberation falloff. I love to use these real world sounds for percussive beats. I noticed that they all were in mono. I rather liked the richness of stereo recording I had done with similar “drum” sounds, because of their added complexity. Now, somewhere along the way, I’m pretty sure I encountered a tutorial from someone much smarter than I who recommended that drum samples be recorded in mono. Nonetheless, I wanted each element to have a wider spread. Luckily I had recently agreed to beta-test a Max for Live plugin which emulates stereo. It’s a subtle addition, but I like it.

It can be quite liberating to work with limited parameters. In this case the limitation is the sound sources. But what you do to them is completely open. As are other elements such as the length of the finished piece, tempo, time signature, what portions of the clips you decide to use, whether you might want to reverse the samples, or perhaps throw them through an audio effect, and so on.

It serves me because there is an imposed deadline, and, also, it’s helping me to better learn some of these audio tools (hardware and software) cluttering up my desk.

This is a little experimental short film I made to accompany the music track which I created through a collaborative online community project, where several people share audio clips, and then all participants are encouraged to create a finished work with the pool of samples. This music bed was what I created. I then shot some footage of the acequia near Mission San Juan, as well as some other items in my home.

I’ve been working these last few months to move away from paid gigs as well as unsatisfying “collaboration” projects (I love to collaborate, but with the exception of maybe four or five people I often work with, most people misuse the word to mean those people they use to help round out their singular vision). I still have a few pesky obligations I need to extricate myself from, but I am using this increasingly unencumbered time  to do little personal projects which help me to better understand various editing programs I’m trying to learn. This particular piece made certain demands on me to dig deeper into Ableton, Max for Live, SpeedGrade, and Resolve.

Here’s a link to the audio only, on SoundCloud: