Gallery Placement

Over on Elliot’s blog he posted some pictures of his artwork handing next to various other peoples. Along the same vein, here is one of mine hanging in Detroit. When you enter a show you rarely have any say in how or where they will hang your piece. Mine in this case is below what I can only describe as a scene from Caligula. No wonder the couple there isn’t paying attention to my piece.

Sign Painting

While walking around the city this weekend I came across men on scaffolding high above painting a sign on the side of a building. I was glad to see that the art of sign painting still exists. This one was on the corner of 23rd and Park Ave. I have always loved old, faded signs on the side of buildings advertising something long forgotten, or when they tear down a building and an old sign decades old sees the light of day again. I didn't know ASIFA-east had the budget for something like this either. Very cool… I am looking forward to the festival on May 3rd.

Record Painting 02

Here is the second in a series of record paintings I am working on. The girl was inspired by a sketch from the Michael Alan’s Draw-a-thon evening I went to last month. The record came from a Salvation Army store on 2nd Ave.

One Stuck Duck

This Friday One Stuck Duck Productions are showing their latest effort to keep busy. Test, a music video they produced/directed and animated. One Stuck Duck is a collection of freelance artists joining together to see what can be accomplished creatively when they “…just shut-up and work together.” This is their third collaborative project and you can track the progress of their video, and see just how they made it at their sister site slipperyrock.com. Also posted there are some great tutorials on how to build and animate characters in After Effects and how to integrate After Effect into your Flash animation workflow.

In the current environment here in NYC, where work seems harder and harder to come by, it is great to see a bunch of talented people taking matters into their own hands and showing just what can be accomplished by pooling their talents together and working on each others projects. I wish them the best of luck and hope their efforts lead to more work in the future. If you want to see the entire video, and hear The Subterraneans live, (the band they made the video for,) they are having a screening at Blondies, 1771 Second Ave, on Friday the 17th of April at 8pm.

You can watch the video here: http://onestuckduck.com/projects/TEST.html

Bananaz marketing

I originally posted a review of the film Bananaz on the ASIFA-east blog which is below in case you missed it. I wanted to follow up that review with the interesting way in which they were going to market this film. The preview I saw was held at the Apple store in SoHo. Apple’s interest in the project was that they were teaming up with Babelgum.com, a new online music/entertainment platform with a global approach to web-video, to release the film. By downloading the Babelgum player to your iPhone you will be able to see the film before anyone else. It is important to say that Babelgum is an internet and mobile TV platform supported by advertising. Bananaz is going to premier on April 20th and will be exclusively available there for a month. Following the online release, the film will have a theatrical run in select cities, and finally a DVD release in May/June. This is the part I found interesting, that it was going to premier online FIRST. I have not heard of a documentary film marketed in this manner before. Most films seem to start with a festival premier, in the hopes of finding a distributor to market and promote their film. This approach seems to be exactly opposite of that; build an online audience first, then the theater release followed by the DVD sale. I thought this was a very smart approach for the filmmaker. The number of people you can reach at a festival is very small in comparison to the potential number you could reach if it is a success online. The Gorillaz are a proven commodity with a huge fan base; based on that alone the film should drive a lot of views to the Babelgum site, which as mentioned above is supported by advertising. I don’t know that this approach would work for a documentary on “Flowers” for example, but I am very curious to see how it goes for Bananaz.

Subway Rhino

While waiting for the train this morning, I was going to shoot some footage of the train arriving for a project I am working on. What I ended up getting was something entirely different. I can only describe it as, a Subway Rhino... Check out the footage above to see for yourself.