I haven’t posted in a while, so I thought I’d just catch you up with what I’ve been up to. The blogging has taken a back seat (let’s face it, it’s always taken a back seat) to some projects I’ve been working on lately. The biggest one being a short horror film I’m shooting over the next month or so. We’ve shot the first scene and it went well. I’ll keep you guys posted.
Secondly, me and Sean are going to be checking out a few films at this years Toronto International Film Festival. We split a ten pack of tickets and were lucky enough to get ALL of our first five choices. The only documentary of the bunch is Larry Charles’ ‘Religulous’, which I’m very excited to see.
Also, a short film I directed will be playing at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. The Goblin Man of Norway is a faux documentary which was released in support of the Xbox 360 title Too Human. The short draws inspiration from the films of Werner Herzog (specifically Wild Blue Yonder), Errol Morris and John Carpenter. I’m very excited to have been included in the festival and hope to get to visit some others throughout the year. You can check out the full film (broken into three parts) by following the link below.
So posting around here will be pretty sparse for a while. However, I hope to throw up some reviews now and again, so stay tuned.
again, nice job! inspirational!! what kind of equipment/instruments did you use to record the music?? I couldn’t help but get this weird Eno/Carpenter/Atmosphere(Joy Division) mesh. Very odd way to describe something. But i absolutely loved it!
Cheers
will be seeing Religulous at the fest as well, and after watching snippets of the Republican convention last night, I think people need a film like this now more than ever.
Funny you say that, because that’s pretty much where the inspiration came from. Brian Eno is one of my favourite musical artists of all time, and John Carpenter was also a direct influence on some of the more ‘genre’ sounding pieces of music. Also, Joy Divisions Atmosphere is a favourite and was a direct inspiration for the final flourish at the very end of the film.
As for equipment/instruments…I simply used garageband! It’s a great program, but I would’ve like to have had more time to do some live recording, or at least use some different synths. Maybe in the future.
Hey man, who is Joe Cheel?
And did you really have an actual crew traveling with you? The credits were huge. You’re turning into quite the real director Jay, next up is TV commercial work!
Joe Cheel is my Dad. He built the wooden crate that housed the fake ice block.
It was only two of us when we traveled, but there were a lot of people involved in the creation of the CG goblin and helping out with props and graphic design and what not.
It was awesome that Rob Niosi was in this.
“posting around here will be pretty sparse for a while.”
What else is new?
Garage band? really, i would have never thought. I have only tinkered with it a bit, i have fruity loops program, but thats all i have actually attempted using. well i must say i am really looking forward to your horror short, keep it up man.
Yeah, I’m not much for computer programs for music making, but it was the best way to access synthesized sounds. I played the songs ‘live’ using ‘musical typing’, and manually manipulated some of the presets. It was actually pretty good.
yeah it sounded pretty damn good. Anytime i hear some good synth sounds/drones, it really draws me in. It really captured my utmost attention. Also, did you have any involvement in writing the script?
Well there wasn’t really a script, but I did write the treatment for it and I did the ‘interviews’. Many of the subjects brought their own ideas to the table as well. The idea was to interview people who are knowledgeable in what they’re talking about, and getting them to hypothesize. The result is pretty convincing. A much better approach then hiring actors to play the part. Aside from the Geomorphologists, everyone in the film, in one way or another, is what they claim to be.
Yeah they didn’t seem like conventional actors, they appeared to be very realistic people. I mean to me, they all did fantastic jobs pretty much just being themselves i guess you could say, and that scene where the goblin noise is being played back, i thought that was really great. It kind of allows the viewer, i think, to kind of paint his/her own mental picture of how it might act or move, it was also kind of chilling in a way too.
While I didn’t think this was chilling or emotionally engaging, I did think it was a great job for an amateur. I admire your work Jay, you should direct some sort of feature documentary. Maybe you should do a short that showed off a bit of versatility, drop the score – to be honest it’s getting kind of repetitive, and prove that you’ve mastered everything, so that you could go and play with anything you want. It’øs a requirement for playing with the rules, that you know the rules, and at this point, I doubt anybody would get much further than you’ve gotten if they were playing by the rules.
In short man, do something surprising and you’d blow anybodys mind!