A new video by Nathan Vollmar: Meatloaf. Music by our good buddy Mike Adams.



In other news, I'm hard at work on a real actual legitimate website for Nineteenth State. I have an initial design laid out, and I'll be showing it to the others before I get too far with it. I expect it to be up within the next couple months.

Alright! Got back from the SF Shorts fest the other night.

The festival was pretty amazing. In my experience there are two types of film festivals: (1) Giant corporate schmooze-fests (ala SXSW) where you see good movies but have to be surrounded by some of the worst human beings the art world has to offer, or (2) Little DIY affairs where you get to talk to nice people but the films are somewhere between embarrassing and excruciating. SF Shorts, thankfully, combined a DIY atmosphere with surprisingly high-quality films.

SF Shorts was a teeny little DIY festival held in an art house co-op theater called the Red Vic, on Upper Haight, two blocks from Golden Gate Park. It was run by a handful of folks who were very nice and super accommodating, and you could tell it was the type of event that just happens because a group of buddies were like "Hey. We like movies. Let's have a film festival." The festival is in its 4th year, and they screened a total of 63 short films and music videos from 20 different countries. Apparently they received over 1200 submissions, so the quality was quite high, and it was certainly flattering to be included.

I only made it to half of the screenings, as I was only in town two full days and was also trying to catch up with friends and family in the Bay Area, but there were quite a few films that made an impression on me, and I'm going to list them below.

A City to Yourself by Nicole Macdonald was probably my favorite film in the festival. It's an autobiographical documentary on urban decay in Detroit, told through narration by Macdonald, who grew up and still lives in the city. The narration is juxtaposed with time-lapse images of the city itself, shot on what looks to be 8mm film. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who knows my work that this film jumped out at me- urban decay is one of my favorite visual subjects, and time-lapse photography is one of my favorite mediums. In fact, this film is so visually similar to my video for Infinity's Lips that I was surprised that they were both in the same festival. I've not been able to find much about this film online, aside from this 30-second clip where she talks about Detroit's preparation for the 2006 Super Bowl:



Another favorite documentary short was Team Taliban by Benjamin Keegan. It followed a young Muslim man who performs in a small-town professional wrestling circuit in rural Illinois. At the urging of one of his promoters, he decides to become a villain and take on the persona of a terrorist as his wrestling character. It's a fairly interesting exploration of the underlying tension that comes with being a Muslim in rural America right now, but the This American Life-style camerawork was what really put it over the top for me. Here's a trailer:

Speaking of This American Life, I got to watch the John Smith episode from Season 2 of the TAL TV series while I was on the plane to SF, and it was without a doubt the most moving piece of documentary filmmaking that I've seen in a long, long time.

Anyway... back to the festival. The most technically impressive and probably the most moving film I saw was Prayers for Peace by Dustin Grella. The content of the short is the filmmaker's remembrance of his brother, a soldier killed in Iraq. It has a moving narrative, to be sure, but what's completely mindblowing about this film is that it's a stop-motion animation done completely on a chalkboard, with just a tiny, tiny bit of digital compositing. Watch this clip, and think about the fact that every single frame is drawn on a chalkboard, with each image slowly drawn over the last as the film progresses. Unreal.

Okay, just one more, I promise. This Australian film called The News played as part of a bloc of films about love and relationships. It kind of blew me away because it starts out excruciatingly cheesy and then takes an amazing turn about halfway through. Behold:



Okay, that's it! Had an amazing time in San Francisco, and was super impressed by the festival. Yeah!

I'm happy to report that this weekend I will be heading to San Francisco for The San Francisco International Festival of Short Films, aka SF Shorts. My music video for Infinity's Lips by The Impossible Shapes will be screening at the festival. It plays during Program 3 on Friday at 7:30pm and again on Saturday at 3:30pm. All screenings are at the Red Vic Movie House at 1727 Haight Street. I'm pretty darn excited about the festival, and now am just scrambling to get all my ducks in a row before I leave town tomorrow. Wish me luck!

Also, if for whatever reason you're not in the Bay Area this weekend, you can watch this video right here, in the comfort of your own wherever-you-are, via the magic of The Internet! MAGIC!

19th State had a radical Labor Day weekend. David and Jennie Orr, Nathan Vollmar and I went up to Monticello, Indiana to stay at Jennie O's parents' place for a couple days. A fabulous time was had by all. We went to a driving range, played Putt-Putt, shot a bow & arrow, and ate more food than any human being should ever consume in one weekend. I can't remember if I had seven or eight eggs for breakfast Sunday, but you get the idea.

It wasn't all fun and games and gastronomic adventurism though. We were really there to get down to business. We've been discussing the prospects of making a documentary on some aspect of rural Indiana culture for awhile, and we've decided to try something related to small-town auction houses. If you haven't been to a big ol' auction out in the country, you're missing the people-watching experience of a lifetime for one, not to mention all the amazing stuff to be found. Personally, I would suggest a place called Dinky's in Montgomery, Indiana as a starting point.

Anyway... these places are absolutely fascinating, and we're hoping that we'll be able to find enough stories with auctions as the hub to make a proper documentary on the subject. We don't know at this point what the focus will ultimately be; whether it will rely on the quirky junk-collectors who frequent these sales, the auctioneers who run them, people trying to get into the auctioneer's business, or (most likely) some combination of them all.

Monticello seemed like a good place to start because Don Wiley, Jennie O's dad, has an impressive collection of random stuff that he's acquired at these types of sales over the years. We spent a few hours with him on camera, showing off his collection and telling stories about how he gathered all the stuff. It was our first test for this documentary project, and the footage turned out pretty well.

The plan right now is to go up again sometime in the next few weeks and actually attend some auctions with Mr Wiley, see if we can make some more contacts in that scene, and then see how the footage progresses. Then after a month or so of shooting, edit down a trailer or a short and try to figure out if we have enough of a storyline developing to keep going with it and try to make this thing work in feature length. All in all, I'm pretty excited about the project so I hope it pans out.

I've been fairly wrapped up in this new script this week. I knocked out a first draft in one day, then I've been refining and revising and in general taking part in the satisfying cruelty of editing. It feels good to think "what the hell did I do that for?" And just delete a piece of dialogue or a whole scene.

Here's a tiny snippet of "Poor Souls." That's a working title, of course.

They get in the car and drive off. Colin holds the two gallons of milk on his lap.

COLIN: I like that phrase, "poor souls." Like, if you really think about it. It has a lot of resonance for me.

MARV: You mean poor like "ain't got no money?"

COLIN: Not just money. General poverty. What a thing to ponder.

Howdy. Jennie, Mike, and I got back into Bloomington early yesterday morning, deciding to drive through Sunday night rather than stop for a snooze along the way. Mike is heading to Japan now (and probably is somewhere above the Western US as I write this), and just returned from playing with the great DM Stith on his European tour. Dude is a modern day ramblin' man. Here's a little recap of our first international film fest.

The first two nights, we thought it would be fun to stay in Atlantic City and live like high rollers. As soon as we got to the Trump Marina hotel/casino, we figured out that any rolling we'd be doing would be pretty low. The restaurants were closing down at 10pm or earlier and the Wi-Fi was $13. The next day, we felt like being treated like cattle, so we ate at the buffet at the Trump Taj Mahal. This is where I finally had the revelation that there are two types of people who eat at these things: the first group are inveterate gamblers who are comped up the wazoo. The second are suckers. I am the former. It was more than $20 and the food wasn't even Golden Corral quality. Worse, they made us wait behind velvet ropes after paying, admitting us according to some impenetrable system of capacity maintenance. While a horde of elderly gamblers seethed in line with us, we gazed at dozens of empty tables that looked perfectly usable. Every few minutes a buffet employee would lift the rope and let a few people into the dining area. After about ten minutes, we were finally guided to a table. After paying what we did, we decided that we had to fill up as much as possible to limit the damage to our budget.

Oh yeah, the fest itelf. It was fun. It was the first year for the Lighthouse International Film Festival, and it was clear that the organizers had been scrambling to make everything go as planned. In order to satisfy all of the towns on Long Beach Island, screenings were spread over the whole length, with most of the high profile ones happening near the middle in a church rec hall, which had the largest capacity. For opening night, we watched Big Fan, a feature length comedy starring Patton Oswalt as an obsessed Giants fan, which was pretty rough but nailed the culture of meathead sports talk radio callers. After that, we watched the rowdy and completely recommended The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia (here's a longer review, and comment thread). The director, Julian Nitzberg, turned out to be a very nice guy and we spent some time hanging out with him, including taking free surfing lessons offered by the Festival, which brutalized me. There were also plenty of parties and opportunities for free food, so it cannot be said that the folks at LIFF did not treat the filmmakers well.

Our short screened before a doc called Facing the Fat, about an obese man's radical water-only diet. It was early on Sunday afternoon at the very tip-top of the island, in the visitor's center accompanying Barnegat Lighthouse, from which the fest gets its name. It was pretty sparsely attended, which is understandable considering its location and the not-too-sunny subject matter of the feature. The people who were there laughed in the expected places and seemed to enjoy it, so that was good - as I've said before, the real reward was just getting accepted. Hopefully the fest soldiers on for a second year and we get to attend again.

As a little treat, here is the trailer for may favorite short of the fest, Elegy for the Elswick Envoy, a beautiful little film:

Things have been pretty quiet around 19th State for the last year or so, but not because we haven't been doing stuff-- we just haven't been telling you about it.

This past weekend David Orr, Jennie Orr, and Mike Dixon headed to Long Beach Island, New Jersey for the inaugural Lighthouse International Film Festival. They took our short documentary "The National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest: The Makers and their Machines" along with them. The video was originally produced for Make Magazine's blog (http://www.makezine.com), and now it's making what we're hoping will be the first stop on a respectable tour of the festival circuit. If, for some strange reason, you didn't happen to be on the Jersey Shore this weekend, I guess you could probably still watch it by going here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kv4dyaH2V-E

A couple other new (old) projects have been added to our Youtube page over the last few months. The first is a 20-minute experimental film collaboration between Goatmother Industrial (aka Mark Rice of The Coke Dares, Magnolia Electric Co, The Impossible Shapes, etc) and William Winchester Claytor entitled "TALL." It's split into 2 parts due to Youtube's 10-minute time limit, but you can watch it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX996b_Z0AM and here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaW8vsay7NY . Probably best viewed on drugs.

Speaking of collaborations featuring William Winchester Claytor, you may have seen his video for The Impossible Shapes' absolutely freakin' beautiful song "Infinity's Lips," which came out last summer. Unfortunately the video was released before Youtube started allowing HD content, and in our humble (biased) opinion, the version available there just didn't do the video or the song justice. So we've now uploaded a new High Definition version of the video that looks as good as it's supposed to. Watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgl2_lSEic0

In other music-related news, we should mention the new record by Vollmar entitled "Tell The Dirt," which is out as a limited-edition (only 300 copies!) vinyl release on St Ives Records. Each record sleeve is hand numbered by Vollmar himself, and features a different photograph from a time-lapse sequence shot over the course of an evening last winter. The entire sequence can be viewed here:http://www.vollmarmusic.com/videos/Tell%20The%20Dirt-Tell%20The%20Dirt-H.264.mov Justin Vollmar came up with the idea, William Winchester Claytor shot the sequence and provided valuable fire-building advice, and Nathan Vollmar worked real hard to keep all our lights from blowing over in the wind. We're all very proud of both the album and the cover art. Did we mention that it was also available digitally on iTunes, eMusic, and a bunch of other online music stores?

Something to look out for in the relatively near future is a short comedy we made a couple years ago called "Little Sister Manipulator." It was written by Kristin Peach, directed and edited by Nathan Vollmar, shot by William Winchester Claytor, and has sound by Justin Vollmar. It stars Peach, David Orr, and David Brant, and features music by Matty Pop Chart. This one kind of got lost in the vault-- it went through a number of different edits and overdubs over a period of many months before we felt we finally had it right, and by that point we'd all moved on to other projects and didn't really do much to get it seen. We will soon be rectifying that mistake.

We have lots of plans coming up that we're really excited about, including some music videos from the aforementioned Vollmar record, and some new scripts by David Orr. We're hoping it will be a very productive summer, and we're gonna try real hard to remember to tell people about the stuff we're doing from now on...

Wishing you all the best,
Your buddies at Nineteenth State