#bigwhiskeystudios

After a year and half, Night Birds & Ghost Crabs is finally done. As of this morning, it's been submitted to a select group of film festivals so now comes what I always find to be the hardest part: sitting back and waiting for what comes next. You can see more about it as well as my other work on bigwhiskeystudios.com, which has been completely revamped.  It’s been a very unmoored last 18 months, but the making of this film has proven to be exactly the panacea I needed, though I did not realize that until I was done!

Iron Man

This film about the history of Batman is the second short film I made for the mixed-media exhibit “Whatever We Need Them to Be,” which was featured in the gallery show SEEING STORIES: Traversing the Graphic Narrative. (Cur. Kynde Kiefel. Sheehan Gallery, Walla Walla, WA. September 1st to December 11th, 2015.)

A few years back I had the good fortune to be asked to help create create a piece on superhero comics to be featured as part of the gallery show SEEING STORIES: Traversing the Graphic Narrative. (Cur. Kynde Kiefel. Sheehan Gallery, Walla Walla, WA. September 1st to December 11th, 2015.) The end result was a mixed-media exhibit called “Whatever We Need Them to Be,” which included four short films on the movie/tv histories of Iron Man, Batman, Superman, and Captain America. Here's #1, Iron Man.

This is Molasses & Lemon, my most recent film. After two years, its festival run is now over, so it’s no longer private.  Which means you should definitely watch it!

Well, this is the actual first legit rough cut of the new doc. Like the last one, it’s going to be somewhat experimental, so I'm starting with only an audio track. Once I finished the interviews to date (more might be needed--we’ll see) the first thing I had to do, which took about a week, was taking 10 hours of interviews and paring them down to about 23 minutes. Editing all those episodes of The Cold Open podcast sure did not hurt my chops any for this project. I then went through that footage pretty carefully the past few days and now have a cut of 13 minutes. It's still straight narrative clips, whereas I ultimately want a much more impressionistic montage, but even though there's so much more work to do, I feel like I'm starting to get a handle on it. Yesterday I was 60-40 sure I didn’t have a film. Today I’m 60-40 I might. Now I just need it to tell me what order it needs to be in as I go about the task of cutting it in half again...