I was able to do some wrap up interviews with three of the Seattle filmmakers, and got their feelings about the festival this year. The filmmakers were Travis Senger, Noel Paul, and Ben Kasulke.



They’ve collectively been to SXSW 11 times with projects they worked on. For Travis and Noel I was able to email them questions and what you see below is the answers they emailed back. With Ben, I got his answers through a phone interview and compiled the notes as best I could.

Ben Kasulke

Within the past few years Ben Kasulke has emerged as a “go to guy” when it comes to cinematography. This year he was the DP for both, Kate Aselton’s feature film, The Freebie, starring Seattle’s own Sean Nelson, and Guy Maddin’s experimental short, Night Mayor.

How many times have you had a film in SXSW?
The last 3 years. I’ve had a total of 7 films. Actually 7 features and 1 short.

How is this time different than your first?
I’d been there enough to have built a little family/community. Now I go back and see people I’ve known a long time. I’ve made a name for myself. This year I went with a short.

What was the most memorable thing about this year’s festival to you?
One was a really good memorable thing. I got to meet one of my film idols, David Gordan Green. We’ve talked a little before but we really got to talk this time. He’d seen one of my films.

A bad moment, I came with a film called Night Mayor, with Guy Maddin. I didn’t know it was up for an award. It won the experimental short film award and I missed it.

The Freebie seemed to come to the festival with a lot of buzz, did that effect your experience at the festival?
We were the last sale at Sundance and it was a lot easier having already sold. Came in with good press. Had a name actor, and Katie Aselton, and the Duplass’ are all household names. Katie is also on TV. She’s in The League on FX. Mark is also executive producing a lot of films at SXSW this year, plus Cyrus.

Would you say that you spent a lot of time working during the festival?
Yeah, I do. SXSW, much more than Sundance, is more of a filmmaker’s festival. There are lot of working people there. When I go there that’s what I look for. I start networking. It is kind of like work. I come home pretty tired.

Did you catch any of the interactive festival?
This year I didn’t. Last year I did. This year I flew in at the tale in of it. There wasn’t a lot of panels that I wanted to see. Nothing trumped any film I wanted to see

What films were you excited to see?
Exciting to see The Freebie and Night Mayor. Night Mayor, I hadn’t seen it yet. [Lena Dunham‘s] Tiny Furniture, [Mark Duplass‘] Cyrus, [Bernard Rose‘s] Mr. Nice, from the UK. I was really pumped to see [Harmony Korine] Trash Humpers. I Was really excited to see Robert Rodriguez’s Predator preview [and also] Aaron Katz’s Cold Weather.

Other than your own, what film(s) stood out for you?
The two that really stood out were Tiny Furniture, after 5 minutes I was like, “this is really amazing.” Like seeing Annie Hall for the first time. And Cyrus, it was awesome!

Did you catch any good concerts?
A little of The League comedy show and I saw Motorhead. It was a great concert.

Do you feel that Seattle and the Pacific Northwest made a good showing at this year’s festival?
Yeah, in the film section I think it was definitely less than last year. Interactive, I’m not sure, but I know that music is all over the place. Music wise Seattle was all over the place. This year there were no features from Seattle. Last year there was three. I think Seattle represented pretty well in the short category and music director category. They are hard to get into so that says a lot. If someone would have come out of Seattle with a micro budget it would have made it.

Have you seen an increase in Northwestern presence this year?
I think it held steady as far as music videos. Last year there was two that both won. What really gets a lot of attention is the features so it was kind of a bummer not to have a Seattle feature. Well there was Cold Weather and Matt McCormick‘s Some Days are Better Than Others. Portland made a good showing.

Travis Senger

Travis directed the award winning, White Lines and the Fever: The Death of DJ Junebug, the short documentary about the career and tragic death of one of the greatest hip hop Djs in the Bronx, in the early 80s.

How many times have you had a film in SXSW?
My music video “Count it Off” was at SXSW in 2009.
“White Lines and The Fever” is my second project to premiere there.

How is this time different than your first?
Well having a short documentary versus a music video was a bit different in that there were only 6 short documentaries in the festival and there were like 20 or something music videos, so we stood about a bit more. Plus, this project featured Kurtis Blow and DJ Hollywood, two Hip-Hop legends, and I think because it was story driven it had a bigger impact. Also, we won a Special Jury Award and I think people really like the film; it’s a project that I think has critical merit and an audience. It was a very different experience

What was the most memorable thing about this year’s festival to you?
I think winning the Special Jury Award. That was nice.

Would you say that you spent a lot of time working during the festival?
Working, but a lot of fun…

Did you catch any of the interactive festival?
I caught some panels on distribution and contracts, both of which related to interactive.
I really feel like film and interactive are merging together and i’m trying to learn all as much i can about the way we experience film is changing.

What films were you excited to see?
“Winter’s Bone” was the one I was curious about. We shot my short in October so I was in an editing frenzy with assistant editor Stephan Gray and editor Michelle Witten from October-January so I didn’t make it to Sundance this year, but I heard a lot of good things about the film. I’m in development on a narrative feature and it has some similarities in that it would be shot partially in rural areas with locals as extras/actors.

Other than your own, what film(s) stood out for you?
“Winter’s Bone” is a really powerful film and a great story. I also saw “Lemmy”, which was pretty fucking cool. I saw my friend Noel Paul’s 3-D film “Annie Goes Boating” and it got me really excited about the future of 3-D.

Did you catch any good concerts?
I kept getting really lucky, like I went into the Fader/Levi’s Fort and suddenly Nas was playing with Damien Marley. Then I go to some party behind the Mexican-American museum and there’s Dam Funk. I also saw the She and Him and Band of Skulls, all by luck just kind of going through SXSW. I guess that’s what so cool about the festival.

Do you feel that Seattle and the Pacific Northwest made a good showing at this year’s festival?
I think so, I left before the Seattle party and that showcase, but it looked great and I saw Noel’s film, which was good. I’m sure the stuff Ben Kasulke shot was great and I look forward to seeing it.

Have you seen an increase in Northwestern present this year?
As with last year, there a good presence.

Is there a difference in your experiences at the festival as a music video director as oppose to a film maker?
It’s actually a lot different, but it’s the difference between something for a band that’s 3.5 minutes v. something that’s mine and 27minutes. I mean this has a pretty specific story and one that became dear to my heart and one I ultimately identified with on personal levels of experience and personal levels of interest.

Noel Paul

Noel Paul directed two entries in the festival this year. In addition to co-directing the Apes & Androids music video, Golden Prize, as a part of the directing duo, That Go, with his partner Stefan Moore, he also directed the short 3-D film, Annie Goes Boating. The short film was produced by the Seattle based, Joy Saez.

How many times have you had a film in SXSW?
This is the 2nd time in the festival for the directing collective ‘That Go,’ comprised of Stefan Moore and me, and the first time for me as a solo director. Last year Stefan and I had a music video (Thunderheist – Jerk It) in the festival and it won best music video. This year we had another music video (Golden Prize), and also my 3D narrative short ‘Annie Goes Boating‘.

How is this time different than your first?
Last year I wasn’t actually able to attend so 2010 was really my first year.

What was the most memorable thing about this year’s festival to you?
Having my car totaled by a crazy driver who fled the scene… long story… But really just being invited to SXSW. When I made Annie Goes Boating I had no idea if it would get in anywhere. AGB is my dissertation film (I’m a grad student in DXARTS at the University of Washington) and it was a really experimental production. It’s an indie drama in 3D… pretty weird. And it really only works if you see it projected big in 3D. I wasn’t able to see it that way until the festival. So we made the film on faith, SXSW accepted it on faith, and then we screened it in Austin: and it worked! It looked and felt just right. I feel like the film communicates in the way we hoped it would. I think the best moment of the festival was sitting there next to the projector with Katie (writer, sound design, music, also notable because she drove me and the 3D projector 5000 miles to and from the festival) and Mike (DP) while AGB screened for the first time. As the film played back and we realized it was all working and people were engaged and enjoying it, laughing and stuff, we sipped some beers and kind of relaxed into this glowing realization that this is why you spend all your time and money making films. It was a really good moment. I was so honored because not only did SXSW accept the film, they also invited me to speak on a panel about DIY 3D filmmaking. It was incredible to be able to share what I’m learning about the challenges and possibilities of 3D cinema in that forum.

I am so grateful to SXSW and specifically Joe, Stephanie, Claudette, and Janet for giving me this opportunity and screening my film. And even more grateful to my amazing cast & crew (in particular Katie, Mike, Joy, Apryl, Alessandra, Alycia, Davie-Blue, Taylor, Sam, and Sophia) for the work and belief that made the film a reality. And finally to the guys at Lightspeed Design who made stereo 3D production possible.

Would you say that you spent a lot of time working during the festival?
Yes. Spent most of the festival hauling around a 3D projector and/or dealing with the car situation! Hardly got to see any films!

Did you catch any of the interactive festival?
Nope. I was bummed to miss out on the Boxee presentations in particular.

What films were you excited to see?
Oh man, so many, and I only got to see a couple of them.

Other than your own, what film(s) stood out for you?
Enter the Void by Gaspar Noe was pretty amazing.

Did you catch any good concerts?
Pearly Gate Music at the Barsuk showcase was by far the best performance I saw.

Do you feel that Seattle and the Pacific Northwest made a good showing at this year’s festival?
Yes. In particular Travis, MJ, & Michelle’s ‘White Lines’ doc won a special jury award.

Have you seen an increase in Northwestern present this year?
Can’t really answer this with any authority.

Was this your first world premier?
It’s the first time I’ve premiered a film at a major festival.

Is there a difference in your experiences at the festival as a music director as oppose to a film director?
Not really. I mean I’m a beginner filmmaker no matter what kind of film gets into the festival.

I would call today invasion of the skinny jeans. I believe today was the first day of the music portion of SXSW and the number of people walking around that looked as geeky as me (if not geekier) decreased significantly. I still enjoyed myself though.

The day started off a little disappointing. Last night I received an email from one of the filmmakers I wanted to interview and he told me that he was having a screening of his film today and he will put me on the list so that I can get a chance to see it. Before going to the movie, I also planned on stopping by the IFC building to get some free breakfast and see what they had going on over there (I loves me some IFC obviously).

I purposely made sure I went to bed relatively early so that I could make downtown and have time to do both of those things. First I went to the IFC building earlier than the scheduled 11am opening because Adrian and I was told last night by the night watchman that they would be letting people in early. They were not. Then I went to the Austin Convention Center becase the movie I was going to see was at the Lamar Alamo which was quite a ways away from the rest of the SXSW festivities and there was a film shuttle that you can catch from the convention center that would take me there, or so I thought. Last night was considered the closing night for the film festival even though they are still showing films (go figure) so the film shuttle was not running anymore, and there was no way I could make to theatre in time on foot. So BOOM my plans blow up.

I choose to instead meet up with Jaguar (today is his last day) and go check out a silent film call The Unknown about an armless assassin. It originally came in the 1920s I believe. There was a band called The Invisible Czars, that provided live musical accompaniment. I believe that modern day silent film scoring my develop into a movement pretty soon. Look for more on this from On Screen in the future. The movie was really good. Unfortunately there is no trailer I can show you.

I have to mention something though. Before I went into the movie I had a little breakfast. It was a bacon flavored waffle cone filled with scramble eggs with green chilies, tortilla chips, and bacon. It was from this place that specialized in savory foods in cones. It was awesome. I just had to say that.

Sadly, although I didn’t realize it at the time, that was the last movie I was to see at SXSW. After that I checked out a series of live shows.

First I stumbled across a series of good live bands that I’d never heard of. I came across them because this bar was giving out free Miller High Lifes from 2pm until 7pm and all these bands were playing there at the time.

Sadly I did not get to see Thee Satisfaction. I tried to but the venues are not that easy to find and by the time I found out where it was it was too late. I did show up early enough to see the LA indie rap group UNI and Seattle’s own Shabazz Palaces.

After that I saw a free GZA show and then drank some free rum at another bar.

Tomorrow we head back to Seattle.

If today had a color it would be green. Not just because it was St. Patty’s day, but because I bumped into quite few residences of the Emerald City today. The day started with some T.G.I.Fridays, then Adrian went to see a movie staring The Broken Social Scene (he‘s trying to get an interview with them). We planned to meet back up at about 3:30pm or so to do an interview we had scheduled. Until then though I’d agreed to help Jaguar do some promotional work for his film. He wanted me to record people on the street as he showed them a copy of his trailer on his iphone and then had them talk about what they thought of it. I thought it was a good idea to keep note of. While doing this we bumped into our first Seattle person(s); Michelle Whitten, editor of the Seattle based documentary, Wheedles Groove, and Michael (I forget his last name), a Seattle based videographer.

After that I called our intended interviewee and didn’t get a response so I just kept helping Jaguar until about 4:30pm when we stopped to watch an awesome documentary called The Weird World of Blowfly. (WARNING: The following trailer contains profanity and brief nudity)

I have been wanting to learn more about Clarence Reid a.k.a. Blowfly for a long time and I was not the least bit disappointed with the movie. I convinced Jaguar he needed to see this movie with me, and Adrian slipped in shortly after it started. Both of them thought the movie was awesome, and I think every one else in the theater agreed.

After that we headed to a lounge to see if we could start celebrating St. Patty’s day. On the way to the lounge I got a call from our interviewee telling me that he may not be able to make it but we can hook up when we get back to Seattle. That has ended becoming a theme since most artist in attendance are on the same page as we are, they’re enjoying themselves while they’re here, but they have to a bit of work to do.

Anyway, we decided to see if Adrian’s explicit Irish features would get us free drinks for St. Patrick’s Day. It did not.

While we were looking for something to eat we bumped into some more Seattleites; artist manager, Kitty Wu, and rap artist, Khingz. We talked with them for a little while and got turned onto a good place to get a BIG burrito. After eating that burrito (it was the size of a small baby) Adrian and I met up with another one of our couch surfing partners named, Eli, and we checked out a film called Saturday Night. It’s a documentary directed by James Franco (Spiderman, Pineapple Express) about what goes into putting together an episode of Saturday Night Live. It was a great movie.

(sorry, no trailer)

On the way to the movie I bumped into Seattle rap duo, Thee Satisfaction. I think I may have freaked them out a little by being a bit too anxious to see them (it’s hard for me to play it cool sometimes). I’ve been wanting to see them perform for awhile and they let me know that they were performing tomorrow. I kept note of it.

The night came ended on a slow simmer because I needed to get up relatively early tomorrow. One of the filmmakers I wanted to interview put me on a list for a screening of his film tomorrow morning.

Last night was a late night which resulted in a late morning. I had no idea there would be free drinks for SXSW pass holders. Needless to say I missed the first couple of films that I wanted to check out this morning. Kudos to Adrian however, because not only did he not show back up to our host’s house until about 5 this morning he then woke right back up at about 9am and was back out the door to check out more interactive stuff.

After breakfast I checked out a British mocumentary called La Donk & Scor-zay-zee. A funny little film about a roadie who helps turn a rapper named, Scor-zay-zee, into a star.

I was impressed with not just the movie but also the venue it was shown in, The Alamo Drafthouse. It was a movie theatre where you can order food while you watch the movie and have it brought to you. I’ve seen theatres like these before, but they are few and far between.

As I was leaving the theatre I bumped into Sean Nelson, one of the stars of The Freebie. I asked him if he would be down for an interview sometime this week (I hadn’t had a chance to talk to him before we left Seattle), and he said “sure“. I just need to see his movie first. I planned on catching it this morning at 11am, but like I stated earlier, there was an open bar for pass holders last night.

After that, I met up with Adrian at the AOL lounge and we then went on a long yet fruitful hunt for food and spirits while we waited on another screening to start.

The next film we saw was Harmony Korrine’s, Trash Humpers. It was described in the SXSW Guide as a film about geriatric peeping toms that hump garbage. I describe it as a Harmony Korine film that I’m glad I didn’t spend money on. However, that’s just my opinion. If you thought Gummo had a good narrative arc and you liked the visual style of Julian Donkey Boy, then you would probably dig this.

After that we decided to call it a relatively early night so that we can start hitting the interviews tomorrow.

Saw Zach Klein, founder of Vimeo and co-founder of CollegeHumor.com, who has a new venture called Boxee. Basically it’s a free software that lets you watch YouTube and Vimeo and everything else online with a remote on your TV. I tried downloading it last week — it’s actually pretty brilliant. Really nice graphic design, sweet visualizer for music, and it aggregates all the different media websites in a nice interface that doesn’t seem to crash even on my ancient 2006-era computer.

Zach Klein, co-founder of CollegeHumor.com, the 'frat house of the Internet.'

Boxee was the first of several presentations I saw on a trend towards aggregators of all the many independent projects on the Web into a single user-friendly interface. Aggregation seemed to be the theme of the conference. At the Microsoft BizSpark Acclerator competition on Tuesday, where finalists pitched their technology business startup ventures to a panel of judges, the clear winner in the “Innovative Web Technologies” category was an iPhone app called Siri. Billed as an artificial-intelligence personal assistant, the app takes any question you give it and automatically connects with all the apps in the iPhone universe to give you an answer or connect a service for you. So if you tell it you need dinner reservations for the closest steak restaurant, it looks up all the steak restaurants near your location and makes a reservation through OpenTable. Not bad, I tried it — seems to work. On my iPod Touch I don’t get the second feature though, which is being able to talk to it and have it recognize your question verbally — supposedly they are working to develop the app with more personality so that it will really feel like an assistant.

Bizspark presentation by Skimble.com - snapped by event moderator Chris Sacca and posted to Twitter within seconds.

Fair enough. The standout app of the festival though was by Friday keynote speaker Daniel Ek. Interviewed by an editor for Wired in front of a packed house, he talked about his startup Spotify, an aggregator for downloadable music that is only available in Europe but apparently is the second coming. It’s a subscription-based service for accessing basically any and all music whether from corporate online stores or on peer-to-peer networks, that gains converts based on its user-friendly interface. Apparently the download speeds are faster than iTunes, and social connectivity is incredible, offering communal playlists and intuitive ways to discover new music. “Music is the most social object there is,” Ek said at one point, inspiring a flurry of Twitter posts. Another soundbite: “Music should flow freely like water.”

One of the weirdest things about the festival for me was how important Twitter was to the whole thing. Having never really used it before, it took me a while to get it figured out on my phone — actually two phones, if you count my iPod Touch which I double fisted in conjunction with my HTC Hero Android phone. The whole conference was buzzing with talk of phone apps and I kept switching back and forth between the two major platforms — not sure if either is necessarily better, but without the phone aspect the Touch’s battery life was way longer and it also had a better Twitter app.

But anyway, the SXSWi paradigm is to be on Twitter CONSTANTLY. Every panel and speaker had a specific hash-code for people to mark in their ‘tweets’ so you can follow along with parts of the presentation people responded to and get a little Cliff Notes version. If you discovered the session you went to is totally boring, you could check out the Twitter feed for the more interesting one on the other side of the convention center. What I still don’t get is how people actually pay attention to what the speaker is saying if they’re constantly monitoring their Twitter — seemed like a lot of mental coordination. At one point speaker Jaron Lanier asked everyone to knock it off for a while since if he said anything memorable we should be able to remember it long enough to tweet it later. I like Jaron, he waves his arms around a lot when he talks and it seems like he’s making it up like a little kid telling a huge lie.

The Twitter CEO spoke in the Monday keynote address, interviewed by someone from the Harvard Business Review, but it was boring and the Twitter feed from the event documented the feelings of the scores of people who kept leaving the room, bitching about the boring pretentious interviewer, etc. At another point the Twitter thing came up in a really interesting panel on interactive data visualization graphics, where people were showing maps they had created based on data from Twitter. There were maps of where the most tweets were occurring in Austin (obviously at the convention center), and another map of the United States showing the most-tweeted words during the last Super Bowl and how that changed over the course of the game.

Later at a bar I thought someone should do an app that figures out the top subjects being tweet-ed near your location so you can walk into a party and know what to say. Maybe next year.

Adrian and I arrived in Texas last night. We got picked up at the Austin airport by our couchsurfing.com host. Our host is also hosting a few other people, one of them is a filmmaker from Georgia named Jaguar X. He showed us an awesome trailer for his movie called The Myth of Time. He plans on premiering it at an Atlanta film festival in a couple months. He is here at SXSW to promote the film and try to find distribution.

Today Adrian got up early to go check out parts of the interactive festival. He told me he listened to a talk by the CEO of Twitter. Meanwhile I checked out a documentary called American: The Bill Hicks Story.

I thought it was awesome, however, if I have to make a complaint it would have to be with the venue, The Paramount Theatre. I changed seats 3 times before I found a seat that wasn’t obstructed by some part of it’s architecture.

After that I met up with Jaguar and hit up a few industry schmooze parties and then called it a night, but not before we walked past Guero Tacos, the restaurant where Quentin Tarantino filmed some of Deathproof.

I always approach internships with worst-case scenarios lodged in my head. I convince myself that I will have to pull out all the stops to make sure my attire is as sharp and as business classy as I can muster, that I should expect to make endless amounts of coffee, and prepare myself for an onslaught of menial labor. And while I have been lucky to avoid such an internship position so far, I continue to be surprised by the actual work and work environment I find myself in, and 911 Media Arts Center was no exception. Instead of cardigans and pencil skirts, I was able to wear clothes that I was comfortable in, clothes I could imagine doing real work in. I’ve always felt like a dress code inhibits and confines a person, and is a silly exterior way to judge the merits of a workspace. 911 is comprised of amazingly intelligent and hardworking people wearing shorts and flip-flops, and I really couldn’t imagine it any other way. And while 911 Media Arts Center does indeed run on caffeine, they respect my dislike for coffee and have never asked me to make them some, though I expect they’ve picked up on the fact that I wouldn’t know what to do. The menial work in particular is one aspect of internships I fully expect, but once again I was both excited and comforted by the fact that all the work I did and continue to do, regardless of its initial importance, has always served to help the center. Non-profit work is by no means glamorous, but is certainly rewarding in many exciting ways. I have been able to take part in the Seattle International Film Fest, watching films and posting reviews on 911’s social network, meet an amazingly diverse and intelligent group of people working within the realm of media arts, get a first hand perspective on the Seattle arts community, get some valuable first-hand experience in running a non-profit, and watch as 911 adapts, celebrates, and works within the community. This has been the most amazing summer in my college career to date, and I have gained so much respect and admiration for the work that 911 Media Arts Center does, and its place within the amazing city of Seattle.

After having interned at 911 Media Arts Center for almost three months now, I can think of no other place that better serves the Seattle community. To me, 911 Media Arts Center is the ideal non-profit, consistently catering to the communities various media needs, fostering creativity in the arts, and enabling people to come together to build upon each others experiences. 911 is a secondary home and community center, a place to feel comfortable enough throw around thoughts and ideas that might even manifest themselves in ways you never thought possible. In my three months here, I have never felt stretched beyond my means, but have been challenged day to day in trying to understand that with a small amount of resources themselves, they are still able to be an amazing resource for others. I hope to take that and apply it to my own life, and serve as a resource within the Bryn Mawr community. I have made friends here and gained some very practical knowledge that will continue to influence me when I return to school, and even on through my future career. 911 Media Arts Center is a place I will most certainly return in the future, and a community and internship I will undoubtedly miss when I return to school.

More than he loves music and media, however, D.A. loves cars, and it was his love of cars that brought him into the hot rod latent realm of Kustom Kulture. “It’s a real artistic scene,” Sebasstion admits, “but it has a real 50s, late 50s, early 60s kind of a slant.”

D.A. defines Kustom Kulture as, “a loose terminology for pin-ups. It includes pin-up models, burlesque models, hot rods, custom cars…..A lot of rockabilly, pyschobilly music, but also some blues stuff. A lot of pin strip artist are involved, and a lot of older style art like, Rat Fink kind of art styles, and kind of late 50s, early 60s art style. It’s kind of all put together loosely by the term ‘Kustom Kulture’.”

The most common congregation place for members of Kustom Kulture is the car show. D.A. explains, “when you go to a car show, if it’s like, an old rat rod, Kustom Kulture style car show, you’ll see pin-up models walking around in front of a lot of these old hot rods. They’ll be trying to look like Bettie Page or something.”

A few years ago, D.A. had a public access television show called, Go-Kustom TV. “That’s where I really got into seeing what was going on within the whole Kustom Kulture car show culture crowd, and I really liked what I saw,” he recalls. “Some of these guys build cars out of junk, but it looks bad ass when they’re done…..it’s like drivable art work, and to me that was just like, ‘wow this is cool.’”

D.A. was happy to find that Kustom Kulture allowed the ‘gearhead’ and the artist in him to merge and find support in a like minded community. “It’s like they’re taking their artistic side and putting it on these cars, but they’re making them look kind of industrial almost, and that’s kind of what I like about a lot of the traditional hotrods.”

Kustom Kulture is not strictly about hot rods and pin-ups. “A lot of guys who also are into tattoos and stuff like that will also have a chopper or a hot rod,” Sabasstion says. “So they’ll do stuff centered around their tattoo shop as well…..You go to certain tattoo shops, you’ll meet guys who have Kustom Kulture stuff, cars and stuff.”

Magazines also play an important part in the culture. “There’s a couple magazines, Car Kulture Deluxe, and Ol’ Skool Rodz. They both really highlight Kustom Kulture and what it’s all about,” Sebasstion points out.

There have been plenty of films and television shows done about Kustom Kulture or ‘greasers,’ as they have also been called. Films like; Hotrods to Hell, Dragstrip Riot, Dragstrip Girl, and even the famous James Dean film, Rebel Without a Cause, fit into the category of Kustom Kulture.

Not too long ago D.A. added a new film to that collection and explains, “my movie, Hot Rod Girls Save the World, is kind of paying homage to that…..I felt like there hadn’t been a ‘real’ hot rod movie made in probably 40 years.”

Sebasstion was able to tap into the network he created for himself putting together Go-Kustom TV for Hot Rod Girls Save The World. He notes, “the hostess of Go-Kustom TV is actually one of the stars of Hot Rod Girls Save The World.”

The television show did more than provide cast members for the film; it also provided authenticity. D.A. says, “because I had met all these people who have hot rods and stuff we were able to get the hot rods in the movie. My screenplay kind of was written around that whole Kustom Kulture style because that’s what I was really getting exposed to, and what I really wanted to do a film about.”

With it’s mixture of aliens, zombies and hot rods, D.A. compares it to a Jim Jarmusch or David Lynch film. It tries to stay true to the style of the late 50s, and introduced many people to Kustom Kulture for the first time. Recent documentary style shows like The Hot Rod Havoc series, and Road to Bonneville have played a part in introducing Kustom Kulture to the public.

Though Kustom Kulture aficionados are often associated with Southern California and other perpetually warm regions, Sabasstion says, “there is a lot of us up here in Seattle and the Northwest area too.We have the Billetproof, and I heard Ink & Iron are on their way up here.”

A hurdle Northwest Kustom Kulture fans have to face is the Seattle weather. Winter provides little in the way of Kustom car show activity, but D.A. explains that in the springtime, there is a cocoon-like emergence of hot rods. “I live up on the north end of Seattle and I see like, tons of cars all of a sudden. There were all of these old Corvettes, and all these old Fords, and stuff. I’m like, ‘Wow! These guys are coming out of their garages like they’ve been sleeping all winter, hibernating.’”

“With the whole hot rod thing you have a real since of tradition, and that is one of the things that attracted me to it overall. Besides the fact that the car is the central piece of the whole scene– and I’m making films about that.”

“I was thrilled at the request,” says Cioffi. This interview, she felt certain, would finally bring much needed international attention to MEND’s cause in a country where 80% of the economy, according to Cioffi, derives from oil production, primarily by Shell, Chevron, and Exxon.

Despite the risk, the government having shown a pattern of responding to non-violent protests with force, on December 20, 2006, Paul, a shy but well-spoken rebel in his early twenties, agreed to be the “unmasked face” of MEND. He was patched through by phone from Oporoza to ABC’s Brian Ross. Both ends of the conversation were caught on film and the footage included in Sweet Crude.

Ross opens by asking who their “beef” is with, but his countenance takes on the laser focus of a bird of prey preparing to dive at its target when he repeatedly encourages Paul to admit that MEND is a “terrorist” group. Paul prefers to call his fellow rebels “freedom fighters.” But as soon as he admits that MEND began taking hostages among oil workers in February 2006 during negotiations to use as human shields, Ross draws a finger across his throat, a signal to his crew to stop recording. Ross fails to tempt Paul to say the word “terrorist,” but “hostages” is apparently close enough.

Cioffi’s film does not flinch from spelling out the cost of oil production to the 20-30 million people crammed together amid the rivers and mangrove swamps in an area roughly twice the size of Maryland. According to her research, one in five children in the Niger Delta die before the age of five from pollution related causes such as asthma or skin disease. “A new steel railing was put on a building in November 2005 when I first came to Oporoza. When I returned in July 2006, seven months later, the acid rain from the gas flares had left rain-shaped divots in the metal.” The average life expectancy has lowered from 65 years of age in the late 1950s, when oil exploration began in the delta, to 40 years of age by April 2008 when Cioffi stopped filming. “Seeing things like this really changes you.”

The Nightline report was eventually “left on the cutting room floor,” but the tenor of the interview sent a clear message. “The outside world views MEND as gangsters,” says Cioffi, interesting only to the degree that they threaten the “cheap supply of oil.”

“After that,” says Cioffi, “the locals seemed to reach a tipping point.”

“If I die today just sitting here,” says a young man in Oporoza interviewed by Cioffi for the film in the months preceding the ABC interview, “I just die. But if I die today trying to change my life, I think that is the best way to do.” After the ABC interview, the grandmothers and mothers no longer felt compelled to prevent their young men from joining the rebel training camps in the mangroves.

Cioffi’s filming activity did not escape the notice of the government, and on April 12, 2008, Joint Task Force (JTF) soldiers arrested Cioffi and her crew to put a stop to it. “I was in a boat outside Sapele in the Niger Delta with my Seattle crew, Sean Porter, Cliff Worsham, and Tammi Sims, and a local, Joel Bisina, a peace mediator, when we were stopped at a JTF checkpoint. I had a legal visa and this was my fourth time in the country, so I never thought we’d be arrested.”

They were pulled out of the boat, their cameras and recordings confiscated, and they were driven without food or water eight hours north to Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, where they were processed into the military prison at the Headquarters of the State Security Services (SSS).

“It’s the creepiest feeling I’ve ever had,” admits Cioffi. “The slow descent into becoming something more serious” began. A six-hour grilling in 110 degree heat followed. “They kept asking crazy stuff, like did I have a Swiss Bank account. They assumed we were rich.” Letters were sent to the Nigerian President Y’ar Adua by fourteen U.S. lawmakers contacted by Cioffi’s human rights attorney, who’d been retained for such a contingency. After six days of incarceration, the five were released. The SSS warned Cioffi and her Seattle crew that if they ever came back to Nigeria they would be arrested immediately.

“Their intention was to scare us so we’d go home and tell other journalists not to go there.” It worked.

What hadn’t been confiscated were 140 hours of previously recorded footage, which Cioffi edited down to a 93-minute film that opens a view onto “one of the most polluted places on earth.” If her film hits its target, the outside world will finally start asking the question she asks in the film: why is this outrage allowed to continue?

At age 47, Cioffi, a professor at Seattle Central Community College in the Film and Video Communications Department is not new to filming. Along with documentary news clips such as Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride filmed in 2003, Cioffi’s credits include narrative features, such as Terminal 187, a half-hour special for PBS. Sweet Crude, Cioffi’s first feature-length documentary, is beginning to earn for her much deserved critical attention.

Three screenings in June 2009 at the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) won for Cioffi the Lena Sharpe Award for Persistence of Vision. The film was also runner-up for the Golden Space Needle Best Documentary Award. The International Documentary Association’s 2009 DocuWeeks showcase, a program created to provide week-long theatrical runs in Los Angeles and New York for groundbreaking documentary films, selected Sweet Crude as one of only 18 features for the program. Showing in DocuWeeks is considered in the film world a prerequisite to qualifying for an Oscar nomination.

“I collaborated on the specific look we wanted with my director of photography [DP], Sean Porter,” says Cioffi. “We wanted to show the landscape as a dead character in many shades of gray, offset against the color of the people. We did a lot of shots of feet to accentuate the feeling of strength coming up from the ground.” Cioffi used two handheld Panasonic DVX100 cameras (“post-production, the final film is ‘rezzed’ up to high density”) so that one camera could still be in play if the other broke down. Repairs or buying spare parts were simply not options. Re-charging batteries was also not an option. Most places in the Delta have no electricity, “a sad irony not lost on the crew,” considering that the region feeds billions of dollars of crude oil to the world’s hungriest consumers of oil for power.

Why Cioffi decided to set aside the risk factor and begin shooting this film is still not entirely clear even to her. In November 2005, Cioffi was hired by an unnamed NGO to film the building of the Niger Delta Friendship Library, ostensibly a peace gesture between warring factions and Chevron.

“While filming the library,” says Cioffi, “a couple of mothers in Oporoza urgently grabbed my arm. They looked at me and my camera like we were a canister of oxygen.” The outside world, she decided, needed to know what was happening there. “Those people were literally dying in order to get media attention.”

The Nigerian government’s hanging in 1993 of Ken Saro Wiwa, the Ogoni environmental leader, is presented in the film as the event that galvanized resistance. Ensuing incidents led to the government wiping out as many as 20 entire communities.

By Cioffi’s count, 50,000 civilians in the Niger Delta were killed by government troops between 1999 and spring 2008. In a film voice-over, Cioffi grimly observes: “Today [April 2008] the Niger Delta feels like an occupied land. The JTF branch of the military is… a constant presence on waterways. They force villagers to pay bribes to pass safely and routinely abuse [“abuse” is the word used in the film; Cioffi confides that what they really do is “rape”] women.”

With the February 2007 national elections, Cioffi’s interviewees began briefly singing notes of optimism. “The election was completely corrupt,” says Cioffi, “but the vice-president, Goodluck Jonathan, was from the Niger Delta.” The election encouraged the rebels to return hostages unharmed and come back to the talks.

When Cioffi returned to Oporoza in April 2008, she says, “I intended to film real change.” What she came back with is a memorable scene that shows 40 clean-cut teen boys who look like they should be asking dates to a prom. After daring to demand access to discussions they hoped to be part of, the boys are lined up side by side belly down on a dock. What we don’t see, but what we’re told follows, is that the JTF soldiers flogged them, and then, using their own version of “water-boarding,” pushed their heads into the water and held them until they nearly drowned.

In the summer of 2008, the militant faction of MEND openly declared an “oil war” in Nigeria. By June 2009, says Cioffi, “Chevron in the Niger Delta has been completely shut down by the rebels. Shell’s production is down 40%.” The reaction from the Nigerian government-supported military has been predictably violent.

On May 15, 2009, according to the film’s epilogue, JTF attacked Oporoza and killed “hundreds” of villagers while the film’s Web site reports that as a result of this attack against civilians, “as many as 20,000 are now refugees, cut off from food, water, and medical aid.”

“But what if they were to win?” asks Cioffi. “The rebels want representative democracy. They also want 25% of oil revenues to go to building local infrastructure. They need roads, schools, hospitals, electricity. But none of this will make any difference unless the multinational corporations extracting oil in the area would be held to higher standards and threatened with consequences if they didn’t clean up their mess.”

The Niger Delta has a checkered history. It sits at the mouth of a river that, claims Cioffi, “is Africa’s superhighway,” and for 250 years was the main shipping point for the African slave trade, and because of that became a repository of displaced people from many different ethnic groups packed together into a country called Nigeria in the 1960s after the British left. For the first time, perhaps, the people of the Niger Delta are willing to work together to fight back against the “benign neglect” with which they’ve been looked upon by a world that wants its oil and wants it cheap. The launching of Sweet Crude might be the warning arrow that pierces the armor of that world’s neglect.

To get the message out, Cioffi’s film has received generous financial assistance beyond its support from The Northwest Film Forum. In 2005, Jody Hall, owner of Seattle’s Café Verite/Cupcake Royale, pumped in enough dollars to get the film rolling. In 2006, another Seattle-ite, Menno VanWyk, who started a film company, “Virasana Productions,” raised support for Sweet Crude to continue. Elizabeth Rudolf of Seattle kicked in money in 2009 to help offset the cost of attending film festivals. Five distributors are showing an interest in the film. “It’s a matter of selecting the distributor best positioned to advance the film’s message,” says Cioffi.

“Honestly, I was taken with Sandy and the story, the potential ramification of getting the story told,” says VanWyk, the film’s leading investor. “The fact that she wanted to do the film to effect a positive outcome frankly impressed the hell out of me. It was something that needed to be done.”

It’s a deserving film that will make you uneasy. It could be argued that the film is biased and fails to pursue key angles: the government’s willingness to permit oil drilling without mediation of damage to the area; the plight of the hostages taken from the oil rigs by the rebels; the responsibility of a government that receives, according to Cioffi, a 60% tax on oil profits but spends very little of that revenue to help its own people.

Cioffi admits that, in the filming, she lost her journalistic objectivity, even came to question its validity. But was she prepared to be the ambassador for the delta’s cause?

“When the stakes got high,” says Cioffi, “I asked myself, was this something I meant to do, put myself in this much danger? Sitting in a military prison, you realize the real price of oil.”

Scott Driscoll is a Seattle-based freelance writer and teacher.

Contact: Sandy Cioffi, 206-612-0684 or fastfwd@speakeasy.net
Menno VanWyk 206-236-3229

Hamedani should know. Although from all appearances he might easily have just jet-setted back from a Mediterranean seaside village, and he speaks only a few phrases of Farsi, when September 11 happened the entire weight of 4,000 years of Persian history and U.S.-Iranian tensions was on his back. Iranian-U.S. relations were still shaky years after the 1979 student-led revolutionary takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, but in 2001 there was no connection between Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center towers and Iranian dissidents. It didn’t matter; Hamedani is convinced his Edmonds neighbors were afraid of him. They stopped greeting him and he feels they should have known him better than that. When on an airplane he later found himself eyeing each Middle Eastern passenger with suspicion, he walked to the back of the plane and inadvertently looked at himself in the mirror. He had an epiphany: “I look exactly like the people I was staring at. You have to work against the tendency to discriminate,” he says.

At the University of Washington, where Hamedani earned a degree in comparative literature in 2005 with a focus in cinema studies, there was no discrimination. “I was a freshman at the time, and no one at the U. ‘Dub’ gave a shit.” But Hamedani still cared enough about his experience in 2002 to start writing a screenplay. “I saw Shaun of the Dead [classic comedic zombie flick by Edgar Wright] and got depressed. I thought, ‘someone’s already done it,’ and put it away for two or four years.” What emerged in 2006, when he had several shorts to his credit, is a portrait of a town so caught up in surviving that its townspeople are finding it literally impossible to remain human. It’s a portrait drenched in political satire.

In ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction, overseas Islamic terrorists unleash a deadly virus in Port Gamble that turns its normally phlegmatic inhabitants into terrorizing, cannibalizing zombies. Within minutes the infected turn ashen and are driven to pursue, then rip and devour healthy flesh. One of the first close encounters with “undead” is with a middle-aged mother, played by Linda Jensen. Her gay son Tom is attempting to ‘come out’ to her. When Tom yells that he is gay and she stumbles back into the dining room ill, one cannot escape the disagreeable feeling that this is how Mrs. Hunt really feels about her homosexual son.

The film’s special effects enthrall the viewer to the screen in a horribly memorable way, and the victims’ disgusting transmutations are relevant to its underlying topic. (Hamedi refers to Tom Devlin and 1313fx, creator of ZMD’s remarkably detailed special effects, as “an amazing guy who took his time and bent over backwards to create these amazing effects for us.”) The viral zombie epidemic is an extended metaphor for the viciousness of small-mindedness, the tired bigotry that needs only an impetus like national disaster to tip it into bloodthirstiness. Survivors of the epidemic include two female and two male gay characters resistant to the conformist strictures of small town life. Hamedani philosophically says, “Humans tend to be zombies when they follow a certain routine.” His father, who in the film plays the father of young female protagonist Frida (and who with his accent lends a certain cinema verité to the film), worked 20 years as a restaurateur in Seattle. It’s not hard to discern that the younger Hamedani has been traumatized by his country’s lead up to military engagement in Iraq. “There was a lot of support for the war in the beginning. It was fear. There was too much, too fast, too soon, and people believe what they see on T.V. There was no reliable news.”

Hamedani’s inspirations for his film are the cinematic satires-Dr. Strangelove by director Stanley Kubrick and Election by director Alexander Payne. Kubrick is known to have been haunted by the nuclear arms build-up, and his objective was to hold his audience (with comedy) long enough so that it might give consideration to an unpleasant topic. Hamedani thought about Payne throughout his shoot. “The writing in Election is so good. [Payne] loves his characters and the comedy is respectful.” He adds, “Back in the day zombie films were scary. Now they’re often comedic, but not satirical.” He acknowledges that sophisticated moviegoers don’t warm to genre films, and he didn’t know how Seattle audiences would respond to ZMD– in spite of its political satire– so he was thrilled when it went over big. “The audience reacted exactly as I’d hoped.” And adds, “Seattle’s a very intellectual, highbrow town. Sometimes I get frustrated with elitism. It’s hurtful for young filmmakers to be surrounded by elitists who preach against genre films.”

Hamedani takes his cues from Francis Ford Coppola, and Francis Ford Coppola’s first feature film, Dementia 13, was a horror flick. The things he’s learned about filmmaking from Coppola have informed the most important decisions of his career. Godfather Part II is his favorite movie; he did his thesis on it. “I’m obsessed with storytelling, having two stories, cutting back and forth, and I got it from Godfather Part II.” Hamedani thinks horror is a great way to start, that the lighting is very cinematic, that it lends itself to great storytelling. Hamedani was able to talk to Coppola for a moment during the party after Tetro, which showcased at the 2009 SIFF festival, and tell him his first feature was horror. Coppola was supportive. Hamedani says that SIFF has been very good to him, and he calls Carl Spence, its artistic director “awesome.”

When Hamedani talks about encounters with others in the industry, those who have helped him and influenced him, he does so with gusto. His passion for and his appreciation of his particular cinematic journey are palpable. The influences on him are wide-ranging. He says:

“I like John Cassavetes, Kurosawa, Sam Raimi (Evil Dead). I like Kiarostami (A Taste of Cherry). I love Antonioni. I studied Fellini for a good year; I met his co-writer for Intervista. Tetro is a really good, simple, strange film; I could see Fellini the whole time. I like Scorcese, Herzog, Bergman. I like Czech new wave, Forman’s Loves of a Blonde. I like all (Judd) Apatow films, I’d like to work with him. Spielberg is so good with actors, the acting is so good in Munich (Hamedani thinks Munich is Spielberg’s most restrained, mature film). Young filmmakers focus too much on camera work– let’s actually care about the writing, care about the actors, the same way we would if they were in a drama [theatre piece].”

The dramatic arcs for each of the characters in ZMD were crafted with astute attention to story, genre and affect. John Sinno, producer of ZMD and 2007 Oscar-nominated documentary Iraq in Fragments, hired writer Ramon Isao to assist with the ‘fleshing out’ of the characters, but Sinno and Hamedani remained actively involved in reworking the story. Hamedani recounts, “At one point John said, ‘we need more horror, go write a horror scene.’ That’s when I wrote the scene with the little girl.” The film’s main protagonist is Frida, an Iranian-American college student home for un unspecified length of time. When Frida lends a hand to a terror-stricken girl, the expectation that a strong adult will protect this cute-as-a-button child and that they will go through the movie and survive this ordeal together is misleading. Hamedani refuses to be subdued by expectation or by what has worked in the past. “I don’t like safe films. That was my middle finger to the filmmakers who use cute kids to keep the audience invested.” Hamedani’s investment is to drop us into a kind of war-zone that very few Americans have ever experienced: one of uncertainty, carnage and mayhem.

The most disturbing scene in the film is the one in which quick-witted, good-natured Frida is tortured; her only crime is the misfortune of having Iranian antecedents. How did Hamedani know in 2006 the extent to which the CIA was involved in torturing terror suspects? “Abu Ghraib. I was going off what I’d heard about innocent people being taken and locked up in small rooms and tortured.” How did he know the audience could tolerate this excruciating scene, coming on the heels of 2009 disclosures about the extent of the ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ used in Iraq and other places? “I hope the audience feels uneasy about torture. It’s supposed to take you out of the film. You’re laughing, ‘ha, ha,’ and then… ‘is this supposed to be funny?’” Sinno warned that putting a nail through the arch of Frida’s unblemished teenage foot was reminiscent of Jesus Christ being nailed to the cross, and that it might create an uncomfortable if not entirely unintentional parallel. Hamedani insists he isn’t in the business of making religious innuendos. Not consciously, anyway. Deliberate or not, the effect is chilling.

Frida, played by Janette Armand, is not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill female horror protagonist, either, and hers was the most challenging character arc for the creators. Hamedani recounts, “Ramon [Isao] and I tried to give her some edge. She’s a pothead and says things that would get [her] killed in any other horror film.” The character has traits that feel true-to-life. Hamedani admits that he was very lucky to find an actress like Armand, who has so many distinctive and ultimately complementary features. “She had to be ethnic, all-American, a pothead, attractive, so many things at once.” Armand got a BA in Drama from the University of Washington in 2008, and ZMD is her first film. She displays vibrancy and openness, and fictional Frida displays so much common decency in the face of unimaginable brutality that watching her makes you pray if you were in her shoes you would be as decent and resourceful. Armand pulls you in directions that are surprising; you feel invested in her survival.

Another atypical element in the movie is its B-plot story involving two gay partners, Tom and Lance (played by Doug Fahl and Cooper Hopkins), who venture back to Port Gamble to relieve themselves of the stress of keeping their relationship under wraps, and who are ironically swept into the maelstrom of the epidemic. Tom’s ‘coming out’ to his mother is a come-out-again, go-back-into-the-closet-again ordeal for Lance and the audience, but a few seconds into the confessional scene the film gives us one of its moments of pure theatre. The dimension of absurdity is lobbed onto the screen. As Tom’s mother morphs into a dim-witted predator, her degradation is topped by the defensive action of her son’s partner Lance, who with a deft movement completely restricts her ability to move. Previously fearful Tom browses through the family photo album as though nothing unusual has just occurred. The scene leaves a nauseous aftertaste, not because of its graphic nature, but because it is unflinchingly funny as well as horrible. It is morally discomfiting. If there is anything that can illustrate the folly of trying to understand human activity, here it is. The unpredictability of the two characters, and indeed our own alliances as we watch the two men struggle with hate and love, are laid out bare. Tall, lanky, dressed in tight jeans and a white Panama hat, Kevin Hamedani does not appear to be the kind of young filmmaker you would expect to take on a gay theme, but he is unapologetic about tackling hypocrisy. He is suspicious of homophobic people; he wonders what it is they’re afraid of in themselves.

Frida’s fictional father, portrayed by Kevin’s biological father Ali Hamedani, succumbs to the epidemic. Although the character is inflexible and impossible to deal with from his teenager daughter’s point of view, he is true to his culture and he is authentic. After eight long years of real war waged in Iraq, one wants someone from the ancienne regime to survive, even if only in fiction, so his downfall comes as a blow. Cheryl Banks, a politically correct survivor drawn from Hamedani’s real-life middle school drama teacher and played by Cornelia Duryée Moore, swivels a full 180 degrees before the film draws to a close. When the scourge has finally fallen on itself in exhaustion, and daily life in ‘idyllic’ Port Gamble is returning to normalcy, she stands before her fellow citizens and exhorts them to be “vigilant against any future threat,” because “we can’t protect a island, or a country for that matter, on peace alone.” After everything that has happened, after witnessing a society steeped in barbarity, one silently begs: Ms. Banks, please concern yourself with preserving your civil rights and your humanity… never mind vigilance or future threats. It was Sinno’s idea to have Cheryl Banks abandon her idealism. Behind her, the camera zooms in on crayon drawings by fictional child survivors of the epidemic. An “I Hate Arabs” by-line accompanies a drawing. Hamedani pauses before commenting on the final moments of the film, on its nihilistic undertones. “The drawing next to the hate speech is a picture of me. It’s a self-portrait.” The real terror lies in realizing that the seeds of destruction are there all along, lying dormant beneath the glassy surface of neighborly coziness.

Leone Fogle edits and writes for onscreen magazine.

I always approach internships with worst-case scenarios lodged in my head. I convince myself that I will have to pull out all the stops to make sure my attire is as sharp and as business classy as I can muster, that I should expect to make endless amounts of coffee, and prepare myself for an onslaught of menial labor. And while I have been lucky to avoid such an internship position so far, I continue to be surprised by the actual work and work environment I find myself in, and 911 Media Arts Center was no exception. Instead of cardigans and pencil skirts, I was able to wear clothes that I was comfortable in, clothes I could imagine doing real work in. I’ve always felt like a dress code inhibits and confines a person, and is a silly exterior way to judge the merits of a workspace. 911 is comprised of amazingly intelligent and hardworking people wearing shorts and flip-flops, and I really couldn’t imagine it any other way. And while 911 Media Arts Center does indeed run on caffeine, they respect my dislike for coffee and have never asked me to make them some, though I expect they’ve picked up on the fact that I wouldn’t know what to do. The menial work in particular is one aspect of internships I fully expect, but once again I was both excited and comforted by the fact that all the work I did and continue to do, regardless of its initial importance, has always served to help the center. Non-profit work is by no means glamorous, but is certainly rewarding in many exciting ways. I have been able to take part in the Seattle International Film Fest, watching films and posting reviews on 911’s social network, meet an amazingly diverse and intelligent group of people working within the realm of media arts, get a first hand perspective on the Seattle arts community, get some valuable first-hand experience in running a non-profit, and watch as 911 adapts, celebrates, and works within the community. This has been the most amazing summer in my college career to date, and I have gained so much respect and admiration for the work that 911 Media Arts Center does, and its place within the amazing city of Seattle.

After having interned at 911 Media Arts Center for almost three months now, I can think of no other place that better serves the Seattle community. To me, 911 Media Arts Center is the ideal non-profit, consistently catering to the communities various media needs, fostering creativity in the arts, and enabling people to come together to build upon each others experiences. 911 is a secondary home and community center, a place to feel comfortable enough throw around thoughts and ideas that might even manifest themselves in ways you never thought possible. In my three months here, I have never felt stretched beyond my means, but have been challenged day to day in trying to understand that with a small amount of resources themselves, they are still able to be an amazing resource for others. I hope to take that and apply it to my own life, and serve as a resource within the Bryn Mawr community. I have made friends here and gained some very practical knowledge that will continue to influence me when I return to school, and even on through my future career. 911 Media Arts Center is a place I will most certainly return in the future, and a community and internship I will undoubtedly miss when I return to school.

This year the Seattle International Film Festival celebrated its 35th anniversary. This seminal Seattle institution was one of the reasons I moved to Seattle 18 years ago, and it has been an amazing window into the world of film for many in our city all this time. SIFF is the biggest film festival in the United States and is considered by many to rank among the top ten in the country. At 35, SIFF is more ambitious than ever. Following their venture into year-round film exhibition with the establishment of the beautiful SIFF Cinema a few years ago, SIFF is about to make another big leap. This bold new step will take SIFF into the realm of film education. However, this year it seemed as though SIFF showed signs of aging and of being out of sync with the times.

With all this in mind, I would like to examine some of the thoughts I had while attending the film festival this year:

A lot has changed in the film industry in the last 35 years. We live in an age where accessibility to films is no longer an issue. A good festival sets an agenda of what is worthwhile among the dizzying array of films produced in the world each year. As the film industry moves into new and un-charted digital terrain where film revenues are dwindling and film output is at an all time high, film festivals all over the world are scrambling to keep filmmaking and film viewing relevant in the twenty-first century. Some of them, like SIFF, have ventured into the year-round exhibition business with varying degrees of success. Others are acting as mediators between funding agencies and filmmakers. However, with the plethora of entertainment options available to moviegoers these days, film festivals should be focusing on their audience more than ever and delivering a rich and rewarding festival experience. Due to its incredible size, SIFF experience centers around what was unfortunately missed rather than on what was seen and enjoyed. The feeling of community is lost that a smaller festival would engender. With their top-notch website, SIFF does its best to help attendees navigate its cinematic offerings; this year, SIFF even unveiled an iPhone application that allows attendees to sift through the festival’s nearly 400 films. Even so, the feeling is that one is never able to adequately cover the festival, nor therefore share that experience with others.

In addition to its unmanageable size, SIFF takes place at the wrong time of year. Just when most Seattleites are coming out of hibernation to salute the sun, filmgoers are asked to spend an entire month in a darkened theater. This year I could not convince a number of friends to check out SIFF’s offerings with me; I was turned down because those friends preferred to spend their time outdoors enjoying the season’s first gorgeous weather. I would bet that the festival would gain a 20-30% bump in attendance if it were rescheduled in the autumn, winter, or even sometime earlier in the spring.

On the curatorial front, the festival has had a history of discovering gems, (The Stunt Man, for example), and has been credited with promoting German cinema in the 1980s. Apart from its emphasis on size, however, it’s hard to see a distinct curatorial strategy of late. This comes at a time when many festivals are focusing their film selections to pursue an identifiable niche. I would argue that there is a niche for SIFF that would give it an edge nationally– internationally even– and that relying on size alone no longer works in this brave new world of 24-hour video-on-demand.

The festival has always made an effort to showcase local films and filmmakers, and the good that it does is incalculable. However, it does so in a way that segregates them from other festival films. This year’s local films were grouped together under the heading “Northwest Connections,” and included several fictional films, an array of accomplished documentaries and even a multi-million-dollar Hollywood film starring Robin Williams screened under “Northwest Connections” only because it was shot in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood and executive produced by a local producer. Another local film received no less than 13 one-star audience reviews at SIFF’s website with one viewer lamenting that two hours of sunny Seattle weather had been wasted on the film. I can’t help but wonder if this film, its filmmakers and Seattle audiences eager to support local film might not have been better served if this particular film had been left out of the festival altogether. One assumes that if a film has been chosen for inclusion in the festival, it is qualified to screen alongside any other film chosen from among the hundreds submitted– otherwise it would not be an official selection.

This year, SIFF threw all its promotional weight behind a single Northwest film. Lynn Shelton’s accomplished, micro-budget film earned several Sundance awards and has been picked up for U.S. distribution by Magnolia Pictures. In the process several lesser-known works by Northwest filmmakers that were craving exposure to attract distributors received little attention, and the filmmakers we left to pursue their own promotion. Perhaps this does not have to be an “either-or” situation; perhaps several Northwest films could be highlighted every year? These films include the film I co-produced, ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction, and terrific audience favorites like The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle and True Adolescents. Even without much promotion from the festival, ZMD screened to sell-out audiences and was voted fourth most popular film alongside Morris: A Life with Bells On.

A primary mission of any film festival is to deliver the chosen films in an ideal theatrical setting. Traditionally, SIFF films have been presented to the audience in a way that is more literate than at many other festivals. When Darryl MacDonald (one of SIFF’s founders and its longtime director) introduced films, the presentation was sometimes more exciting than the film presented. He was able to shed light on the significance of the film being shown, the circumstances under which it was made, and explain why it was selected for the festival. In addition to engaging the audience, these well-crafted presentations showed filmmakers that the programmers had carefully considered their selections and that they respected the films being shown enough to take a little extra time to prepare an introduction for an appreciative Seattle audience. Introductions now offer little insight into the work that’s about to be presented; after mundane announcements about voting and sponsors, audiences are told that they are in for a special treat. I believe each film is special, and that its uniqueness deserves special consideration as much as it deserves a paean extolling its general noteworthiness.

One of the mandates in festival planning is to show a film the way the director envisioned it. Showing hundreds of films with a variety of film and video formats can be a real challenge for projectionists. The opening night film, In the Loop, had soft spots on the screen, and sound echoed throughout the beautiful Paramount Theatre. These problems, coupled with the actors’ fast moving British accents, greatly reduced the effectiveness of this first-rate film. There was no audio for the first five minutes of a film screened at Pacific Place Cinemas; reels were projected in the wrong order at The Uptown; audiences missed the ending of The World’s Greatest Dad at The Egyptian when the projector bulb blew out during the film’s climactic final scene. Because film festivals are the main chance the majority of these films have to be shown in a theatrical setting, festivals have a responsibility to present the works they’ve selected in the best possible light. Other festivals struggle with these problems, too, but many festivals offer filmmakers a chance to do a technical check before they’re screened to ensure proper projection and audio. Currently SIFF’s contract states that filmmakers must pay a fee if they ask for a tech-check, but a free check could become an unlooked for boon if SIFF reigned in costs associated with logistics and size, and delivered a better exhibition experience to its patrons.

The opening night party this year was a scintillating, celebratory start to SIFF’s 35th-anniversary festival. Because Seattle is celebrated for its democratic fair-mindedness, however, I found it sadly unbefitting for Seattle to quarantine VIPs in a separate tent so that they wouldn’t have to mingle with “regular” guests. Not only is this not fair to the Seattle audiences who were asked to support the festival during the opening ceremony, but it put a literal barrier between visiting filmmakers and their local audience.

I think everyone agrees that SIFF is one of Seattle’s cultural treasures, and that SIFF is lovingly managed by a tireless, educated, ambitious and dedicated staff. Although the above critique may rub some associated with the festival the wrong way, I offer it with the best interests of SIFF in mind. I want the festival to enjoy another 35 years of bringing great films to audiences in Seattle. I want the success of Humpday and The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, True Adolescents, and ZMD to inspire a new wave of creative and resourceful filmmaking in our fair city. I want the art of film to remain relevant.

John Sinno is a writer and producer, and founder of Seattle-based Typecast Films.

by Nichole Rathburn

“Ultimately, martial arts means honestly expressing yourself…empty[ing] your mind. You have to train, you have to keep your reflexes so that when you want it, it’s there. When you want to move, you’re moving, and when you move, you’re determined to move.”

And with the words of the immortal Bruce Lee, Walking to the Cage, Matthew Hickney’s documentary on mixed martial arts, or MMA, begins. A Seattle-based screenwriter, filmmaker, and director fascinated by the stories and challenges we carry as individuals, Matthew’s work runs the gamut from the experimental to the commercial. After moving back to Seattle from Los Angeles in 2006, he became interested in making a feature-length documentary, and began to write. Making a movie proved to be no easy feat, and after several attempts at producing screenplays and raising money, Matthew became frustrated.

“I was inspired by the Sundance success stories of individuals who had made movies for less than ten grand. After seeing a short documentary piece that a friend of mine produced on moped riders in southern California, it seemed to be something I could pull off and I immediately began to brainstorm…what did I have around me? What did I know about? What would be interesting? By that time I had already achieved my blue belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.”

Matthew’s interest in mixed martial arts had been sparked by a visit to Amoeba Records in L.A. After randomly purchasing a DVD of UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) fights to screen for friends, he realized that his perceptions of mixed martial arts had been skewed by ignorance.

“I was amazed at how much went into each fight, and how intricate and technical every moment of a fight was. I likened it to a game of human chess.”
Soon after, Matthew began to train in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, an offshoot of Judo focused on grappling techniques. “I fell in love with the sport and the art, and could see how beneficial this type of training could be in so many areas beyond the mere physical exercise aspect. I had made some awesome friends and felt a new sense that is difficult to put into words. A swagger, I guess, and an appreciation for simpler things.”

Through Matthew’s work in Jiu Jitsu, he came into contact with several men training to become amateur cage fighters. He quickly realized that showcasing the hurdles they faced could provide an opportunity to explain the connection he had found between mixed martial arts and his new quality of life.
Matthew also realized he had found a way to introduce cage fighting to viewers in a positive way. The general public rarely sees anything beyond the physicality of the fight itself, which can be off-putting if they are lacking in knowledge. “I felt that a lot of people had a negative impression of the sport, and through highlighting the community building aspects of it, the personal strength, respect and camaraderie, I could craft something that would offer a different, more progressive perspective.”

The pre-existing relationship that the director had with this subject provided Matthew with a valuable opportunity to get the footage he needed to prove his point; the fighters he chose to interview were comfortable enough with Matthew to give him honest glimpses into their community and support systems. Privileged enough to be allowed to see his interviewees (whose experience levels range from very experienced to beginning) at their most vulnerable, Walking to the Cage emphasizes how the fighters’ relationships with each other enriches their lives.

Matthew’s documentary also reminds the viewer of the oft-forgotten link between the condition of our bodies and our spiritual and mental well-being. Mixed martial arts are not necessarily an outlet for aggression or anger; the intense physical concentration needed for cage fighting feeds into many other aspects of life in a positive way. One interviewee says, “after fighting in front of 250 people, giving a speech in front of 30 doesn’t seem so bad.” By achieving such extreme physical goals, other hurdles — personal and professional — become easier to jump.

Matthew is active in Seattle’s media arts scene, having screened work at Northwest Film Forum and STIFF (Seattle’s True Independent Film Festival), as well as dedicating time to workshops and youth programs at 911 Seattle Media Arts Center and SOTA Humanities in Tacoma. He also works as a freelance editor and videographer. Despite Matthew’s broad range of media and life experiences, making Walking to the Cage has provided him with valuable lessons. “I feel more sensitive and empathetic to people and situations. It just feels good to create something [videos] that can bring some thought or emotion to an audience, and hopefully cause someone to think about the subject with a different perspective. It is my pleasure and passion to make movies…I couldn’t see myself doing much else.”

Walking to the Cage will informally screen on June 6, 1:30pm at the JewelBox Theater at 2232 2nd Ave. As an official selection of STIFF it will ‘premiere’ on June 11, 7pm at Central Cinema. Central Cinema is located at 1411 21st Ave., at 21st and Union.
More of Matthew Hickney’s work can be seen at www.chokeproductions.com.

Nichole Rathburn is a Seattle-based writer and student at Cornish School of the Arts.

by Scott Driscoll

Picture a young married couple in bed, laughing. It’s late. They lose interest in sex and agree it’s time for sleep. The doorbell rings. The husband gets up to see who’s disturbing them. It’s a bearded long lost friend, just back from Mexico. It’s the stranger at the door routine, but with a twist. The bohemian friend, who needs a place to stay, doesn’t mesh with the wife’s plans to get pregnant and start a family.

Cut to the interior of a low-budget hotel room. The friends convene to produce an unorthodox art video. Art, that is, with a porn theme. What’s unusual is that the porn is to involve two heterosexual friends. Is this a nod to the literary critic Leslie Fiedler’s assertion that asexual homoerotic passion between two males represents our purest manifestation of love? Or, will they follow through and actually have sex?

The story arc that leads from that doorbell ring to the hotel tryst is Humpday. And Humpday, which will probably be marketed as a romantic comedy, is proving to be Seattle director and writer Lynn Shelton’s breakout film.

Premiered in January 2009 at Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, the country’s leading showcase for independent films, showcased at the centerpiece gala in Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF), and picked up for distribution by Magnolia Pictures, Humpday is slated to appear in theaters sometime in summer 2009. Shelton’s third narrative feature film, Humpday may actually pay dividends to the cast and crew, who worked for minimal pay, but who accepted percentage points of the take in lieu of industry salaries. Meanwhile, Shelton’s low-budget film has drawn interest from Los Angeles. Shelton won the 2009 Someone to Watch Award, presented by Hollywood’s Film Independent’s Spirit Awards, and in May won the Seattle Mayor’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in Film, presented by the Mayor’s Office of Film and Music. She is currently reading scripts sent to her by her new agent in L.A.

Shelton’s success with her latest film reflects an industry in Washington and Seattle that is healthy and growing. “Since the state incentive came on line in February 2007,” says Amy Dee, executive director of Washington Filmworks, “we’ve seen exponential growth, especially in Seattle. This year [2009] the state legislature took the incentive from 20% to a 30% return, a big jump that really makes a difference.”

Filmmakers in Washington State who can show expenses surpassing the minimum of $500,000 are invited to apply for a post-filming 30% return, or rebate. In 2007 Washington offered $1.5 million in funding assistance to filmmakers. That figure more than doubled to $3.5 million in 2008, and Dee projects that in 2009 the state will “give back” as much as $8 million.

Last year, in 2008 according to Dee, Seattle was rated by MovieMaker Magazine to be among the top ten cities in the U.S. for independent filmmaking. Eight narrative features shown at SIFF were Washington based in terms of money spent on local production services and talent as well as location. They are: Humpday directed by Lynn Shelton; Finding Bliss directed by Julie Davis; World’s Greatest Dad directed by comedian Bobcat Goldthwait but filmed and crewed entirely in Seattle; The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle directed by David Russo; True Adolescents, directed by Craig Johnson; The Spy and the Sparrow directed by Garrett Bennett, and Zombies of Mass Destruction directed by Kevin Hamedani.

Why did Humpday hit for Shelton?

“I yearned for a high level of naturalism,” says Shelton. “I shot it with handheld cameras and a minimal crew on set, and the scenes were shot in sequence as much as possible to make it easier for the actors to have a natural feel.” By using two cameras and minimal lighting (one light and two reflectors for most shots), she was able to help the actors maintain their sense of continuity, eliminating the long wait in between shots that lots of lighting demands. Even with the minimal use of lights, Humpday is less experimental looking than her earlier films.

My Effortless Brilliance was shot using only two handheld cameras and natural lighting, but Brilliance has more of a bouncy, gritty, cinema verité documentary feel than Humpday. Brilliance premiered in 2008 at the country’s number two independent film showcase, the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas, and will be distributed by IFC Entertainment. Also a “buddy” story, Brilliance follows two re-united male friends into the woods of Eastern Washington on a late night hunt for an elusive cougar.

Great filmmaking, Shelton demonstrates, can be done on a low budget. She won’t say what filming Humpday cost; she is hesitant to disclose the dollar amount she’s spent on projects partly because it’s difficult to assess given the amount she’s received in-kind donations. Major resources were donated, such as a place to stay for the lead actor, Mark Duplass, locations and food for the cast. Costs that couldn’t be donated were offset by grants from “4 Culture” from King County, “City Artists” from the mayor’s office of arts and cultural affairs, and not-for-profit status conferred by Northwest Film Forum.
She received a smattering of funds from private benefactors.

The low cost of production was a “happy side-effect” rather than something that was planned. The entire Humpday shoot was done in ten days in an effort to keep the cast and crew moving together seamlessly together through the arc of the narrative. A standard Hollywood film takes 28 days to shoot.
Brilliance was filmed in seven and a half days, again with most resources donated by friends and family. “If you’re uncle owns a cool pick-up truck, and you can borrow it, you try to work that into the script,” she says. She doesn’t want emerging filmmakers to be stymied by lack of funds or difficulty securing grants. Her first narrative feature, We Go Way Back, is the story of a young stage actor whose goal seems to be to please the men in her life. It premiered in 2006 at Park City’s alternative film festival, Slamdance, where it won the Grand Jury Award for the best narrative feature and the best cinematography.

A glance at the 43 year old’s filmography bio—experimental and documentary films dating back to 1994 followed by music videos—suggests a life devoted to making films. That wasn’t always the case. Her first love was acting; she was addicted to feeling the “electricity between the actor and audience.”

After studying theater in college and moving from Seattle to NY for auditions, Shelton landed a series of roles in one-act plays that were “misogynistic, women were either raped or murdered.” She was fast on her way to becoming a “theater slut.”

Being on stage suddenly seemed “vain.” She enrolled in the New York School of Visual Arts in the MFA Photography Program. It was there that she discovered film.

“Video allowed me to really explode with creativity,” and gave her a marketable skill. “I used a digital program to edit and got work in New York editing corporate commercial stuff.” When it was time to start a family, she and her husband moved back to Seattle, where she got work editing her first film, Measure, a dance film showcasing a dance-team duo, “33 Fainting Spells.”

“I edited that film for free, but it showed at a lot of 35 mm film festivals, and then people sought me out to edit feature films. That’s the nice thing about working in Seattle– you have opportunities like that.”

Shelton admits that she was “harboring a secret desire to direct.” That chance came with We Go Way Back. The now defunct Seattle non-profit The Film Company raised enough money to produce five feature films a year, and impressed with Shelton’s editing on earlier films, The Film Company commissioned her to do a feature-length narrative film (minimum 75 minutes) that would employ a Hollywood-style set with a big crew, fixed cameras, staged lighting, and lines that had to be memorized.

“When they came to me with the idea I had no story. That was okay. They thought you’d write differently if you knew the film would get made.” Within five weeks she had a script, and within nine months, using The Film Company’s cast and crew, she shipped her film to Sundance and Slamdance. She was 39 at the time.

Shot mainly in Seattle, We Go Way Back is a story about a disillusioned adult looking back to her pre-adolescent self to see what went wrong. Protagonist Kate, played by Amber Hubert, listens to the voice-over of her younger self, 13-year-old Katie, played by Maggie Brown. Katie ‘talks’ to Kate in letters written from an earlier time. Kate spends time on the couch drinking, screwing, and pondering why the harder she works to please the men in her life, the less they seem to care for or understand her. Kate becomes the theater slut Shelton worried about becoming.

Kate lands the lead role in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. Told by the director that she needs to speak the lines in Norwegian, she hires a coach and learns Norwegian. Despite the effort, the director decides it’s just not working. What if, he suggests, Hedda were taller? Maybe Kate could wear stilts?

Shelton claims she didn’t intend for men in the film to seem evil. “They certainly don’t see themselves as rapists” or users. But the film refers to autobiographical material. As a young woman Shelton was date raped by a friend. “I used to get really angry. But now I realize I had been complicit. So this movie is about exploring her [Kate’s] passivity. It’s a cautionary tale.”

Aside from a two-week run at Seattle’s Varsity Theater, We Go Way Back never got distributed. The reaction from women who’ve seen the film, she claims, made it worthwhile. “They say when they see it they’re seeing themselves.”

That big-budget film taught Shelton what she didn’t want. “Everything is shot out of sequence to keep the number of filming days as short as possible. The actors are considered last.” Filming Brilliance, she “slashed the number of people on set to the minimum– a director of photography, a sound guy, me the director, and occasionally a second camera operator.” Working this way made it possible to get multiple angles without laboriously resetting lights and cameras. “It allowed me to give the actors a lot more freedom to develop their roles.”

Shelton learned she could achieve the naturalism she sought by developing the script with the leading actors. The lead role in Brilliance, a writer in his late 20s whose pride took a hit when his second book bombed and who wants to rekindle an old friendship, was developed as a collaboration between Shelton and actor Sean Nelson, who sang in a band and was at the time also writing for Seattle’s free weekly alternative publication, The Stranger.

“I do like structure, though,” notes Shelton. “I dislike too much improvising on screen. I have a thorough outline of each scene, the meat of it, and how it feeds into the next scene. We talk a lot about character backstory. My actors know who they are when I let them talk.” She adds, “I let them go for 20 or 30 minutes, and in the editing room, cut it down to the 5 minutes I need. My goal is to make it seem like we’re a fly on the wall in these peoples’ lives.”

The story is set mainly at a cabin in the woods somewhere east of the Cascades. The friend, played by Basil Harris, has moved out to the cabin. It’s been two years since the friends have seen each other. That night in the cabin there’s a lot of drinking. Another friend, played by Calvin Reeder, shows up with a rifle, and Calvin wants to go cougar hunting. The action pushes to a dramatic climax that night, fading into early morning, when, fed up with Sean’s carping, Calvin raises the rifle, points it, and tells Sean to shut up.

How did this become Humpday?

“I pitched Mark [Duplass] the idea, and then let Mark develop his own character. I cast around him. I had a script in place, no dialogue. That was improvised by talking with the actors.”

There’s Ben, played by Duplass, who chooses to marry the conventional Anna, played by Alycia Delmore. Then there’s Andrew (Joshua Leonard), the would-be artist with wanderlust who has yet to complete a project but who’s having fun in an X-rated Huck Finn sort of way—basically by refusing to grow up and get serious.

Mix those extremes together and what do you get? Temptation. A Dionysian party at a friend’s apartment, Ben stripping to his tee-shirt to show he can get down, too. And, a challenge. Andrew throws down the gauntlet. “You’re all locked up and can’t do porn,” which, after more banter, incites Ben to retort, “Okay, I’m renting a hotel room, Sunday night. And I’m getting the equipment.”

From there the tension mounts. There’s Anna to consider, believably so, but at its heart, the story is about the halves that are at war in so many of us: the rational, disciplined Apollonian side that wants a conventional slice of the American Pie, versus the Dionysian side that wants to indulge and take pleasure to an ecstatic extreme. And it’s about the downside of one-upmanship.

So why does Humpday work? Maybe it comes down to this: Shelton’s talent for drawing fly-on-the-wall naturalistic behavior out of her actors; an emerging ability to edit scenes in a way that keeps narrative tension mounting; and a story that taps into themes in which we all have a stake. Bake that together and you serve a film that keeps viewers, this viewer at least, wanting more.

Scott Driscoll is a Seattle-based free-lance writer and teacher.

By Shannon Gee

David Russo has always kept almond milk in his refrigerator. He says if he didn’t make films he would be a dental hygienist. And he thinks Walt Whitman is the greatest artist since Shakespeare. One can’t be sure of the influence that almond milk has had on his work, but office hygiene and Walt Whitman figure in Russo’s first feature film, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2009.

“Whitman was a complete individual, the first slacker artist who indulged his body and his mind and was completely outside of fashion. The character of Weird William is my homage to Walt Whitman,” explains Russo as we sit down in one of the office building hallways that serves as a location in Dizzle. In this corridor, Dizzle’s band of janitors vacuum, gripe and mop like charming delinquents in the twilight hours after office-worker drones have left the building. And their boss Weird William supervises… wearing a dress.

There seems to be a bit of Whitman in most of the characters in the film. Dizzle begins with Dory (Marshall Allman), a data manager, who after experiencing an overload of white-collar office chatter inanity, fritzes out and quits. He finds a new career through Spiffy Jiffy, Weird William’s (Richard Lefebvre) janitorial company that is staffed by a misfit bunch that includes the hyper-sexual couple Ethyl (Tania Raymonde) and Methyl (Tygh Runyan) and the charismatic, motor-mouthed OC (Vince Vieluf), a struggling artist-amongst-the-urinals.

Why Russo chose janitors to be the protagonists in his very first screenplay and feature length film is one part personal history, and one part American. Russo began writing the script in early 2003, a couple of months before Operation Iraqi Freedom began. Russo himself was a janitor for over a decade and that post 9/11 brand of “you’re with us or against us” patriotism jogged some memories. “It brought me back to that feeling of being marginalized, of being a janitor,” he explains. “You’re a receiver of culture but not really a participant in the culture. So that point of view, that janitor’s eye view of the world, is sort of what I was really feeling at the time.”

The invisibility of Dory, OC and the gang make them an ideal trial group for a bit of nefarious experimentation run by Gary (Matt Smith) and Tracy (Natasha Lyonne) of Corsica, a research firm that test markets novelty gems like farting wine bottles and non-F.D.A. approved cookies that create the illusory comfort of freshly baked cookies still warm from the oven.

A steady diet of chemosynthetic cookies strategically and deliberately placed in trash bins (“Being a janitor, we ate out of the trash a lot. We did and we do!” says Russo), cause the male janitors, but not the women, to crave salt, experience horrible cramping and wacko hallucinations. This is where “Dizzle” drops into something markedly Russo-ian: dazzling imaginative sequences made in his distinct animation style, a hands-on, analog technique that has developed and evolved throughout Russo’s short films.

A self-described “weirdo animator,” Russo’s shorts have screened all over the world and have garnered several awards, including The Stranger’s Genius Award, and the Special Recognition Award given by the Betty Bowen Memorial panel for the visual arts. He went to Sundance with Populi in 2002, and Pan With Us in 2003, where Pan got an Honorable Mention. These two films have action that leaps far beyond the confines of any animation cell; from open fields to speeding pavement, Russo moves objects he’s painted or built (a bird drawn on paper that transforms to metal, an endless rolling carpet of shadowy leaves that stretch to infinity) effortlessly through never-ending landscapes. The process is painstaking, time consuming and uniquely his. “The opening sequence (of Dizzle) took me a LONG time,” he reports. The scene is a breathtaking journey of a bottle traveling in a smeary drift of blue and purple water. “People would be shocked [if they knew] how long it took.”

In “Dizzle,” the construct of Russo’s own imagination and the subject of the film are blue fish-like creatures that are borne out of the market research experiment … and the male janitors’ digestive tracts. They make memorable appearances and make for some good old-fashioned, slapstick butt jokes. “Giving birth to a little blue fish… is very much the feeling I get being a male artist in my culture,” he says when asked about what Little Dizzle, a single biogenetic specimen, represents. “The film itself … is Little Dizzle, the thing that gets born. It’s this misfit creature that I knew was going to come out malformed. I knew it was destined for possible oblivion.”

The possible oblivion Russo is referring to is “Little Dizzle’s” continued search for distribution after its debut. It is a film that defies description somewhat, but Russo wanted it that way. “There was a time when we as movie goers were more adventurous,” he says. “And I built my film for those people. I don’t really think there is a niche for me, but I’m just going to err on the side of vision, I’m going to err on the side of originality and just let the chips fall where they may.”

One chip has already fallen towards his next project. After the Blue Man Group screened Dizzle, they tagged Russo to work on their next project, a film to be shot so it can be shown in no less than 3-D IMAX. Their film about “the human brain and its functions within a musical operatic structure” seems like a natural next step for Russo. “I feel like I’ve been struggling with 2-D my entire life,” he explains. As a filmmaker who has created feverish and distinctive animation with hand crafted/low-fi techniques, it will be very interesting to see what Russo will do with some of the highest-fi technology around. “The more I learn about 3-D it’s like ‘oh my gosh,’ all my short films…they’re struggling to have a dimension they don’t have. So this is my opportunity to run off into the distance with that.”

Shannon Gee is a writer and documentary filmmaker; she produces the documentary series “Community Stories” for the Seattle Channel.
This article will be reprinted in ON SCREEN magazine, a publication of 911 Seattle Media Arts Center.

by Tajuan LaBee

German born composer, inventor, sound sculptor Trimpin has been described as one of the most talented and undervalued artists in the nation. * Trimpin, who uses only his last name, has been the recipient of a 1996 Guggenheim fellowship and a 1997 MacArthur Genius grant, so it is surprising that there has been no commercial recording of his music, and that his name for most Seattle residents does not conjure up images of scuptures, like Dale Chihuly’s does.

Enter San Francisco based filmmaker, Peter Esmonde, who decided that Trimpin would be a good subject for a feature length documentary. Over the course of two years, from early 2006 to early 2008, Peter filmed Seattle native Trimpin in his workspace environment and in concert, and the outcome is Trimpin: the sound of invention, which is having it’s west coast premier at the Seattle International Film Festival in May 2009.

What made you choose Trimpin as a subject for a documentary?

I wanted to observe someone working creatively, across disciplines, with various collaborators, using multiple design methodologies and a wide range of aesthetic criteria. And I hoped to spend time with someone who – just by the nature of who they were and how they worked — challenged the aesthetic assumptions and practices of those around them.

To put it in context: this society values people on the basis of what salable commodities they produce, how famous they are, or how much they can consume. It’s a narrow and horribly pernicious way of viewing humanity. And anyone who tries to make a living as a truly creative person in that kind of society has their work cut out for them.

So, for very personal reasons, I needed to observe and learn from a highly creative person not tempted by the lures and snares of a market-driven society. I needed to witness the life and work of someone who would not trade in their creative gifts in order to become rich or famous or fashion a more readily commercial product. I had to find a creative person who not only retained the courage of their convictions, but reveled in them.

All of this led me to Trimpin.

You’ve mentioned that it took you months to shoot something resembling “passable footage.” ** Why was that and what did you learn from that process?

I wasn’t speaking about focus and exposure — or even composition. I learned that retaining a producer/director’s overview while doing the nuts-and-bolts work of a cinematographer means making a lot of compromises.

To shoot well, you need to be extraordinarily open and alert. The footage always betrays your emotional state; if you’re tired or distracted or closed off, it becomes painfully obvious on the screen. You need to continually evaluate what’s taking place around you in the context of the argument(s) you’re hoping to make in your film. Ultimately, translating that argument into mise-en-scene equals cinematography.

What type of preparation did you have to do before starting this film?

I prepared in the same way I do before every film, doing lots of research about the subject and his world– tried to appreciate Trimpin’s modernist roots in Dada and Fluxus; his connection to composers like John Cage and Conlon Nancarrow; his deep respect for free jazz, particularly the work of Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor; his ties to sculptors like Jean Tinguely; and his affinities with traditional makers of music. He is inspired by the repetitive ‘music’ that machines and automata make, too.

All that research was a prerequisite for my initial conversations with Trimpin.

What were some of the challenges you faced translating to film the experience of observing a Trimpin piece in person?

First off, I needed to determine what exactly ‘translating the experience’ meant before I could proceed with any kind of filming.

From the outset, it was clear to both Trimpin and myself that I’d never be able to reproduce the experience of being in a space with a Trimpin sound sculpture. The best I could hope for was to determine precisely what the most central audial and spatial aspects of each sculpture were, then do my level best to represent them.

Assumptions about the very nature of what I was up to – representing rather than reproducing – led me to specific choices around filmmaking process, apparatus, and personnel.

Did you find yourself working more with your sound department than in any other film you’ve done?

Having worked as a sound editor myself, I was determined to give the music in this indie documentary the kind of treatment usually reserved for commercial studio features. And for some of the professional doc folk, divvying up the work in that way seemed a bit puzzling and off-putting.

So I needed to work closely and supportively with the audio people – especially music editor Phil Perkins and sound designer Jim LeBrecht – to make sure key dialogues and exchanges took place. I wanted to make certain each of them was in a position to do their best work.

I didn’t spend any more time recording, editing, or mixing than is usual for me – but spent much more time organizing resources and teasing out everyone’s best game.

You filmed Trimpin in Seattle for two years. What was your overall experience of the Seattle art scene and how does it compare to other scenes in other major cities you’ve worked in?

I have to admit that I quickly fell in love with the arts scene here. Having worked in LA and NYC, I anticipated I’d have to make my way through labyrinths of attitude and artspeak — but I was surprised to find both artists and art professionals in Seattle and Tacoma refreshingly straightforward, generous, and wonderfully dedicated to the work at hand.

And — this being the Pacific Northwest — they generally had more physical room in which to work. So their ideas and their work seem more expansive.

Seattle is known as a big music city. Was that a factor in making this film?

Yep. Lots of people with big ears in this town – and Trimpin’s smack in the middle of it. I’d really like to say ‘thanks’ to the Seattle arts community for all the help I got on this film, so there will be a special screening of Trimpin that will happen July 1st at Experience Music Project in Seattle Center. Trimpin will be there himself. I’d like to think that some of the joy in and through music that I found in Seattle comes through in the film.

* “[Trimpin is] one of the most stimulating one-man forces in music,” Charles Amirkhanian, http://www.otherminds.org/shtml/Trimpin.shtml. “[Trimpin is] one of Seattle’s most talented and best-hidden artists,” Rock Hushka, http://www.tacomaartmuseum.org/page.aspx?hid=442.

** http://www.indiewire.com/article/sxsw_interview_trimpin_director_peter_esmonde/.

Tajuan LaBee is a Seattle-based filmmaker and frequent contributor to ON SCREEN magazine.

By Ty Hulse

The Internet promises a new world of distribution possibilities, and anyone can succeed. This is a presumption that is usually false. Before the Internet, selling a film was practically impossible without a distributor, because distributors controlled the market. Filmmakers didn’t make much even when they got them distributed, because the retailer would take 50%, the distributor would take 60% or more of what remained, which left the filmmaker less than 20% of sales. So selling direct via website not only offers the opportunity to double money made on a film, but provides a mechanism for the filmmaker to brand himself or herself and his or her movies by controlling the look and feel of the movie’s site. Proper branding improves the reputation of a filmmaker and increases the likelihood that visitors will become repeat buyers. But succeeding requires a good understanding of marketing tools.
Any viable distribution plan has two parts: 1) monetization (a way to make money); and 2) promotion. Major distributors work to monopolize monetization, both on and offline. They have successfully monopolized standard distribution to the extent that no independent can compete with. The advantage of the Internet is that large distributors cannot control every avenue open to a would-be on-line independent distributor.

Promotion costs money and time, and so the bigger players still have an advantage over the smaller ones. Indie filmmakers thus need to work more intelligently with the resources they have in order to maximize chances of success. Independents, by utilizing the Internet, can control their marketing, target specific audiences, and do it at a lower cost than they could elsewhere.

Monetizing

Success requires that the filmmaker use as many methods to earn revenue as they can. Pay-per-view retailing is the most obvious means of earning money and the method with the highest potential for turning a profit. But selling direct is just one way of monetizing a movie. Another method is to sell through retailers who already have a known brand. Selling through an existing retailer helps to increase the likelihood that consumers will purchase a film, and increases consumers’ opportunities to purchase.

Amazon.com is one of the better retailers, and they have a built-in system for independent filmmakers called CreateSpace.com. Through this site, any filmmaker can sell DVD’s or downloads. There have been a few sports documentaries that have done very well on this site. Documentaries have a huge advantage because they are not sold using their own “brand,” but instead rely on the “brand” of the sports team they are documenting. Success in the retail world, whether on or offline, requires that a film be built on a solid brand or promotional strategy, and this is where independent marketers run into difficulties.

The problem is that most people who go online to purchase a film already know what it is that they want to buy. This means that most of the money made selling online is made selling movies that are already blockbusters. Therefore, the independent marketer cannot depend solely on a few retailers to help carry his or her film; a film must be sold through a large number of retailers to meet with success. In order to expand beyond a few retailers such as Amazon.com, the filmmaker must use Business-to-Business (B2B) distribution methods.

B2B on the Internet is the process of marketing and selling to businesses. This works differently from using retailers such as Amazon.com, because in the B2B process one must build a relationship with the retailer, or with the warehouses/shops that sell to retailers. There are a number of websites that help with this process, places where retailers go to purchase their goods. By promoting a film on the warehouse sites, by promoting directly to retailers, and by selling films at bulk rates, a filmmaker can add a large number of stores to their revenue stream.

The difficulty is that most wholesalers on the Internet deal in cheap goods– dollar stores, used goods, overstock and so on. This means that a movie sold through a wholesaler on the web typically has to be sold cheap. There are potential advantages to this– short films in particular could be distributed to dollar stores, in a way that would provide a new outlet for a genre that typically doesn’t generate much in the way of sales. And as the B2B online industry grows, filmmakers will find additional opportunities to sell their movies directly to retailers through the Internet.

Beyond wholesalers, another method of adding more sources to a film’s revenue stream is the ‘drop shipping’ method. Drop shipping means that the ‘e-tailer’ will attempt to sell a film. If they are successful in doing so, they will pay the filmmaker for the sold film and the filmmaker will ship to the e-tailer’s customer. Doba.com is one of the many drop shippers that allows any filmmaker to sign up to become a supplier for their e-tail customers.

A method similar to drop shipping is something that was developed and used first by Baker and Taylor and a handful of other companies for offline book and video stores. Baker and Taylor’s distribution method has made them one of the most successful distributors, and is a major reason that Amazon.com has been profitable. Amazon.com used Baker and Taylor to distribute, and therefore didn’t have to purchase or stock many products, because book and video stores can order products without paying for them unless they are actually sold. While nearly any content creator could historically sign up with Baker and Taylor, the Internet has simplified this process greatly.

Once a movie has identified a number of ways to sell to retailers, filmmakers should begin to promote their films to businesses. Filmmakers should have a section of their website devoted to selling direct to retailers just as they would to do for customers. They should sell their movies to retailers for about 50% less than market value. The exact amount depends on which distribution system the filmmaker is using to send to the retailer, and which distribution group, if any, the filmmaker and store agree to utilize.

Similar to the retail method of monetization is the pay-per-view system. Potential customers resist paying for content online because the original Internet companies offered much free fare, assuming they would be generating a lot of ad revenue. Charging for a service can be difficult. Indeed, even Google has tried a pay-per-view system and had very little success. Again, these problems are exacerbated by the rise of YouTube and other large free-content providers.

Providers of rentals, on the other hand, have met with better success, a hint that filmmakers could and should consider rentals in combination with retailing. It is often easier to convince people to pay three dollars to try something than it is to get them to pay the full twenty to purchase. Netflix, Blockbuster Online, Red Box, and other rental providers have started to take a huge percentage of the total rental market by renting DVD’s through a combination of Internet and mail. Amazon’s UnBox and iTunes, among others, have also had some success renting downloads.

Only UnBox offers a way for independent filmmaker to earn money. Netflix stopped dealing with indie films because they didn’t want to appear to be competing with major distributors. iTunes has determined that they don’t want to deal with a lot of filmmakers, and would rather work with a limited number of distributors, which practically speaking means that a filmmaker must have a deal with a distributor to sell through iTunes. Blockbuster will allow anyone to work with them as a content provider, but has strict supplier guidelines that will prove difficult or impossible for most independent filmmakers to meet.

Beyond sales, advertising is the most common way for content providers to earn money on the Internet. During the Internet bubble, Internet standards were set so that it was difficult for any content provider to earn money through fees. Sadly, ads did not pay as much as was first thought possible, adding to the burden that led to the crash.

The new set of Web 2.0 companies are currently running into the same problem. Ad space does not sell for much on the Internet, so as a result even well-established sites like Facebook and YouTube are struggling to make money. Organizations like MTV say their biggest problem earning money online is the trouble they have selling ad space. Companies such as Revver (similar to YouTube except that they pay a percentage of ad revenue to those who load content) have had serious difficulties selling their ad space, making the amount earned per view very small.

There are a few sites, however, that can and do share a decent amount of money with makers of short films through ad revenue. Atom Films is one, and it is perhaps the oldest the best established among these sites. Their ad system works well because they target their site to a very specific audience, and allow for media ads that earn more revenue per visitor.

Blip.tv offers a syndication service to filmmakers, allowing them to syndicate their films across a number of sites, including MySpace, blogs, and other sites. Blip.tv, furthermore, has a unique and high-value ad format within the videos themselves. While some find such ads annoying, they are the only way for filmmakers to earn money with ads. When reviewing a site that might be a source of ad revenue, filmmakers should keep in mind that certain types of ads pay ten or more times what other types pay; the number of visitors is just one factor to consider.

Outside of the difficulty of earning revenue from ads, the biggest challenge filmmakers face when trying to earn money on ad syndication is that the business is currently fractured into a large number of companies and different services. Some companies offer the technology needed to syndicate, others offer ads to earn money, while others provide a space to show the film. This makes navigating the world of ad syndication complex and often unaffordable for smaller independents operating solo.
Perhaps the only viable solution to the problem is for filmmakers to build their own conglomerates for the web, similar to way that newpapers created CarerBuilder.com in order to compete with online job classifieds. This idea is simple enough: a group of filmmakers would join together to create a site that syndicated and sold ads for the filmmakers’ movies, allowing them to earn money on the content they placed on sites such as YouTube. In practice, however, things could become very complicated unless various rules were established to ensure that the brand remained intact. Negotiating deals with publishers such as YouTube might also raise issues for many alliances of indie films, as they are not yet profitable and so are very concerned with earning their share of any revenue. Furthermore, any rules established to ensure the continued success of the conglomerate make it another disturber, creator of barriers that keep independent filmmakers out.

Promotion

In order to find an audience for movies, filmmaker must either spend time or money promoting their movies. If more time is spent on promoting, less money needs to be spent, and spending more money generally requires less time. Knowledge of marketing methods can help to lessen time and money spent and increase the odds of success in any campaign. It is very important that filmmakers understand that it is not possible to simply make a good movie and walk away from it in the hopes that a large audience will see it, and it will somehow become successful.

The first and perhaps most important aspect of promoting a film on the Web is the film’s website. The difference between a well-designed and a poorly-designed website is not always obvious from a visual point of view. Such differences can be huge, however, when one examines the sales and visitor reactions to a website. For some websites, a few small changes can double or triple sales. Sometimes small changes may not be enough, and the entire website must be redone in order to achieve the same result. Eliminating egos from the retooling process, and focusing on results is important. In order to understand the response to a website, the filmmaker needs to subject it to analytics, and Google offers a free analytics program at www.gooogle.com/analytics. This site includes tutorials that instruct the user in how to use the site.

Even with a good website in place, a movie may not sell simply because the Internet is filled with millions of websites. In order for anyone to find a movie’s website, the film has to be promoted outside of its own website, so that customers know where to look. This kind of promotion requires a combination of public relations savvy and advertising.

The mention of pop-up ads often elicits a groan, but pop-ups can be very useful to filmmakers. Pop-ups have a number of advantages over other forms of marketing, which is why some companies still use them. Netflix has used pop-ups, earning millions of dollars with very little marketing expense. Pop-ups are one of the lowest-cost methods of advertising. Further, trailers can be placed directly within the pop-up. Pop-ups also offer the largest visual branding space for ads on the Internet outside of expensive page-insert advertising.

Another common ad format is the banner ad, or small visual ads placed on the actual web pages. For a filmmaker, these can prove to be an invaluable promotional tool for the same reasons filmmakers have difficulty earning money from advertising: banner ads are the cheapest form of visual advertising, online or offline. Further, banners can be used to target specific interests, demographics and regions. The ability to target viewers and track their responses allows advertisers to make certain that banner ads are effective.

Banner ad targeting also allows filmmakers to show ads to towns and segments of the population that react well to the film in festival. By targeting specific groups of people, the filmmakers can build their movie’s brand within the audience that is most likely to purchase it, while spending the minimum amount of money necessary to do so. Once money has been made, filmmakers can then continue to expand their reach without fear of losing money.

Currently, banner ads are fading in popularity on the Internet and are being replaced by text ads. Text ads are growing in popularity because they bring lots of low-cost visitors to the site, and filmmakers have only to pay for a text ad when someone clicks on it. They cost less than other ads overall, but for movies, text ads may not be as useful as banner ads for a number of reasons. First, a text ad does not provide visual recognition of the product, it offers name recognition only. Second, if a banner is well-designed and interesting, the banner can receive enough clicks to make it cheaper than text ads.
In order to know what advertising mix is right for any given movie, the promoters need to keep track of which ads are bringing the most people to the website, and need to keep track of the ads that not only bring people to the website but bring customers who actually end up buying the movie. ‘Google Optimization’ helps the filmmaker make this determination.

The key to success in advertising is to review the effectiveness of any ad campaign in order to constantly improve marketing methods. The effectiveness of an ad campaign can be improved to a point where a filmmaker is earning more money than is being spent. In that case the overall amount spent becomes unimportant because the filmmaker has the potential to earn money for promotion, using minimal investment.

There are many ways of marketing online beyond advertising, and many of these methods are free, outside of the time spent to set them up. Each of these methods—as with websites—require that consumers find them to be successful. This means that some knowledge of SEO is necessary. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is in essence building a page, writing an article, posting a video, or placing some other form of content online which people can find easily using search engines. SEO is important because most people on the Internet find what they are looking for using search, whether it a search portal like Google or Yahoo, or an onsite search within YouTube or MySpace. Making content findable by search is important to the success of that content.

The most important aspect of SEO for most filmmakers is ‘keyword’ or ‘keywords’—words in the text of a page that people use to search with. Search engines determine content by the words in the page to an exacting degree. For example, a page with the words “independent film” on it would not likely be found by someone searching for “independent films,” “movie,” “indie film,” or any other term not on the page. In order to be found, a page must contain that word or phrase that the searcher is using. Many people assume this means they need to put as many search terms as possible onto their page, but this is not the case. A page will typically get better results with three or four search terms than it will with dozens, because it is unlikely that the results will be ranked by more than three or four terms anyway.
In order to choose the words that should be used on a page, filmmakers on a tight budget should use Google’s ‘Keyword Tool.’ This program allows filmmakers to see how many people are searching for a particular word each month, and to see how much competition there is for that word, in other words, how many other results come up when that particular word is searched. Picking a keyword that produces enough searches to be valuable, but that doesn’t have too much competition for a movie’s promotional materials to rise to the top, is tricky. SEO in general can be very tricky, and so anyone who plans to use SEO should research it before performing it on a website. Making mistakes with regard to keywords can actually hurt a website.

Outside of websites, there are many places where it is easier to perform basic keyword SEO, such as Article Marketing. Article Marketing is the process of writing an article and posting it to an article directory (such as ExineArticles.com) where it will show up in search, and be republished on blogs and other websites. By placing three good keywords in an article, the article can be seen by thousands of people, along with the biography of the writer and a link to the website. Be forewarned, however, that too many article links to a website is considered a form of spamming by Google. For this reason many articles should link to a site separate from a film’s primary website.

Finding a subject to write about that is both relevant to the film and is searched can be complicated. A simpler option is to use PR Log or a similar online PR site to submit press releases about a movie. In the case of press release distribution sites, an article about the film and the filmmakers can make it a valuable marketing tool.

For movies running the festival circuit, a press release can be submitted for each festival that screens the movie. This release can include the name of the region, or some keyword related to it, so that anyone searching for entertainment in that area might read the press release.

SEO can also be important for the success of social media. Flickr and YouTube both show up on Google and Yahoo Search and have search features of their own. By choosing the right words for tags and descriptions, a filmmaker increases the likelihood that people will see the images and clips from the movie. Even Facebook pages show up in search, so carefully chosen keywords for the profile aids in getting a film noticed.

Ultimately, for independent films to succeed, both online and offline, there should be coordination between the many forms of promotion and monetization that a film uses for distribution, and increasingly, coordination between films as well. Independent films never have the resources major films have, and for that reason, filmmakers, producers and distributors should work together to find niches they can occupy. This is what the Internet does well; it provides openings for a group of intelligent entrepreneurs to spot and utilize. Forty or fifty horror film writers/filmmakers could band together and create a site that comes up any time that genre is searched, eventually and theoretically making that site a prominent brand for horror. By understanding the unique challenges of the Internet, and beginning to explore the many ways it can be utilized, the Internet has the potential to be a superb marketing mechanism.

By Stelarc

I was always intrigued about engineering a soft prosthesis using my own skin, as a permanent modification of the body architecture. The assumption being that if the body was altered it might mean adjusting its awareness. Engineering an alternate anatomical architecture, one that also performs telematically. Certainly what becomes important now is not merely the body’s identity, but its connectivity- not its mobility or location, but its interface. In these projects and performances, a prosthesis is not seen as a sign of lack but rather as a symptom of excess. As technology proliferates and microminiaturizes it becomes biocompatible in both scale and substance and is incorporated as a component of the body. These prosthetic attachments and implants are not simply replacements for a part of the body that has been traumatized or has been amputated. These are prosthetic objects that augment the body’s architecture, engineering extended operational systems of bodies and bits of bodies, spatially separated but electronically connected.

Having constructed a Third Hand (actuated by EMG signals) and a Virtual Arm (driven by sensor gloves), there was a desire to engineer an additional ear (that would speak to the person who came close to it). The project over the last 12 years has unfolded in several ways. The EXTRA EAR was first imaged as an ear on the side of the head. THE EXTRA EAR: ¼ SCALE involved growing small replicas of my ear using living cells. And recently, THE EXTRA EAR: EAR ON ARM which began the surgical construction of a full-sized ear on my forearm, one that would transmit the sounds it hears.

The EXTRA EAR: EAR ON ARM has required 2 surgeries thus far. An extra ear is presently being constructed on my forearm: A left ear on a left arm. An ear that not only hears but also transmits. A facial feature has been replicated, relocated and will now be rewired for alternate capabilities. Excess skin was created with an implanted skin expander in the forearm.

By injecting saline solution into a subcutaneous port, the kidney shaped silicon implant stretched the skin, forming a pocket of excess skin that could be used in surgically constructing the ear. The body is a living system which isn’t easy to surgically sculpt. And recovery time is needed after the surgical procedures. There were several serious problems that occurred: a necrosis during the skin expansion process necessitated excising it and rotating the position of the ear around the arm. Ironically, this proved to be the original site that the 3D model and animation was visualized. Anyway, the inner forearm was anatomically a good site for the ear construction. The skin is thin and smooth there, and ergonomically locating it on the inner forearm minimizes the inadvertent knocking or scraping of the ear.  A second surgery inserted a Medpor scaffold and the skin being suctioned over it. The Medpor implant is a porous, biocompatible polyethylene material, with pore sizes ranging from 100-250 micrometers. This can be shaped into several parts and sutured together to form the ear shape. Because it has a pore structure that is interconnected and omnidirectional it encourages fibrovascular ingrowth, becoming integrated with my arm at the inserted site, not allowing any shifting of the scaffold. We had originally considered mounting the ear scaffold onto a Medpor plate thinking that this might elevate it more, and position it more robustly to the arm. But this wasn’t the case and this solution was abandoned after being tested during surgery. Now, implanting a custom-made silastic ridge along the helical rim would certainly increase helical definition but also would make room for later replacement of that ridge with cartilage grown from my own tissues. The helix would need to be lifted enabling the formation of a conch and make the ear a more 3D structure. The ear lobe will most likely be formed by creating a cutaneous “bag” that will be filled with adipoderived stem cells and mature adipocytes. In other words the ear lobe would be partly grown using my own adult stem cells. Such a procedure is not legal in the USA, so it will be done in Europe. It’s still somewhat experimental with no guarantee that the stem cells will grow evenly and smoothly – but it does provide the opportunity of sculpturally growing more parts of the ear… and possibly resulting in a cauliflower ear!

During the second procedure a miniature microphone was positioned inside the ear. At the end of the surgery, the inserted microphone was tested successfully. Even supported with a partial plaster cast, the arm fully wrapped and the surgeon speaking with his face mask on, the voice was clearly heard and wirelessly transmitted. Unfortunately it had to be removed. The infection caused by the implanted microphone several weeks later proved to serious and heroic efforts were undertaken to save the scaffold, after the microphone was surgically extracted.

The final procedure will re-implant a miniature microphone to enable a wireless connection to the Internet, making the ear a remote listening device for people in other places.  For example, someone in Venice could listen to what my ear is hearing in Melbourne. This project has been about replicating a bodily structure, relocating it and now re-wiring it for alternate functions. It manifests both a desire to deconstruct our evolutionary architecture and to integrate microminiaturized electronics inside the body. We have evolved soft internal organs to better operate and interact with the world. Now we can engineer additional and external organs to better function in the technological and media terrain we now inhabit.

It also sees the body as an extended operational system- extruding its awareness and experience. Another alternate functionality, aside from this remote listening, is the idea of the ear as part of an extended and distributed Bluetooth system – where the receiver and speaker are positioned inside my mouth. If you telephone me on your mobile phone I could speak to you through my ear, but I would hear your voice “inside” my head. If I keep my mouth closed only I will be able to hear your voice. If someone is close to me and I open my mouth, that person will hear the
voice of the other coming from this body, as an acoustical presence of another body from somewhere else. This additional and enabled EXTRA EAR: EAR ON ARM effectively becomes an Internet organ for the body.

The body now performs beyond the boundaries of its skin and beyond the local space that it occupies. It can project its physical presence elsewhere. So the notion of single agency is undermined, or at least made more problematic. The body becomes a nexus or a node of collaborating agents that are not simply separated or excluded because of the boundary of our skin, or of having to be in proximity. So we can experience remote bodies, and we can have these remote bodies invading, inhabiting and emanating from the architecture of our bodies, expressed by the movements and sounds prompted by remote agents. What is being generated and experienced is not the biological other – but an excessive technological other, a third other. A remote and phantom presence manifested by a locally situated body. And with the increasing proliferation of haptic devices on the Internet it will be possible to generate more potent phantom presences. Not only is there FRACTAL FLESH (bodies and bits of bodies, spatially separated but electronically connected, generating similar patterns of recurring activity at different scales); there is now PHANTOM FLESH (Phantom not as in phantasm, but as in phantom limb. Haptic technologies generating tactile and force-feedback that results in a more potent presence of remote bodies). The biological body is not well organ-ized. The body needs to be Internet enabled in more intimate ways. THE EXTRA EAR: EAR ON ARM project suggests an alternate anatomical architecture – the
engineering of a new organ for the body: an available, accessible and mobile organ for other bodies in other places, enabling people to locate and listen in to another body elsewhere.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS FOR EXTRA EAR ON ARM

SURGICAL TEAM- Malcolm A. Lesavoy, MD,  Sean Bidic, MD and J. William Futrell, MD
CARE IN MELBOURNE- Supervised by Wayne A. Morrison, MD
STEM CELL CONSULTANT- Ramon Llull, MD
PROJECT COORDINATION- Jeremy Taylor, October Films, London.
PROJECT FUNDING- Discovery US for the documentary series “Medical Mavericks”.
3D MODEL & ANIMATION- The Spatial Information Architecture Lab, RMIT, Melbourne.
SURGERY PHOTOGRAPHER- Nina Sellars, with funding from the Australia Council.

By Adrian MacDonald

A Skilsaw gets squirrely at the Power Tool Drag Races in Georgetown, 6/28/08.

Rusty Oliver has been making art in Seattle for 10 years, has drawn hundreds to his installations and performances, and presides over an art collective some 30 members strong. But he has never shown in a gallery, and probably will never be the darling of the city arts commission. “If I want to fucking do something I fucking do it,” he says. “I don’t need permits, I don’t need insurance, I don’t need red tape, and when the cops show up, sometimes I stop, sometimes I don’t.”

Rusty stands over a worktable in his Georgetown machine shop, tinkering on a new interactive sculpture. The piece consists of four control consoles in a square, with three large metal cages in the center. To make the sculpture work, people have to fiddle with the controls until together they discover the right combination of switches, resulting in three magnificent blue fireballs coming alive inside the cages. “I expect them to be yelling back and forth and going no, no, throw that lever, or put the fuse in like this,” he says. “They’re going to be decoding this deliberately wonky, anti-intuitive control with a couple other people.”

It is difficult to define the kind of art Rusty’s collective, Hazard Factory, deals in. The work tends toward the sculptural, but with a heavy palette of industrial materials and equipment, and a distinctly interactive element. Rusty calls his MIG and TIG welders his “paint brushes” and his 5-horse air compressor his “texturing machine.”

“What really drew me to it is the fact that you can mix technology, tools, and processes at will,” he says. “If you can work metal you can fix things, or hack machines together, and you really have access to quite a lot of power.” The interactivity is where the hazard comes in. “I rarely put something in front of my audience that is easy for them to deal with. I don’t like audiences really, I would much rather have people get involved.”

The same Skilsaw...shot by the guy in the middle of the first picture...

In Hazard Factory’s most famed project, teams of artist-machinists convert old power tools into moving vehicles and hold the ever-popular Power Tools Drag Races at events like the Georgetown Artopia and Critical Mass and traveling as far as the Robodock festival in Amsterdam. “Legitimately dangerous,” the event consistently attracts an enthusiastic crowd of PBR-swilling race teams who decorate former Skilsaws, drills, and lawn edgers with sponsor stickers, doll heads, plastic brains. The machines get raced, sent off ramps through flaming hoops, and pitted in head-to-head collision combat.

One woman became so involved in the races that she developed a cult following around her machine, a converted Skilsaw on rollerblade wheels she called Lady Safety. “It was the best time she’d had I think, perhaps in her entire life,” Rusty remembers. “She now has a posse.”

Risk and danger is a constant element in all of Hazard Factory’s work, and Rusty revels in being able to challenge people’s boundaries. “On a daily basis, the most dangerous thing anyone’s doing is driving a fucking car,” he says. “That’s a risk everybody takes every day. It’s the minor chances that you take like saying hello to somebody or responding to a phone call or an email, putting yourself out there—those are the kind of things that we as a society should be doing more of.”

In one piece shortly after 9/11, as the US military began bombing Afghanistan, Rusty fastened a dummy bomb to the hood of his car like a giant horn and made readerboards for the side saying “George W. Bush bombed my Toyota because it’s small, foreign, and full of oil.” He drove around for a year that way, engaging in dialogue about the war with anyone brave enough to approach him. “For people to even come up and talk to me was for them to take a chance, for them to come out either for or against the war,” he says. The small few that attacked him for defaming the war were “chickenshit,” he adds. “If you stood there and looked at them and just didn’t blink, they just backed off, they were done. The depth of analysis wasn’t there.”

Rusty Oliver in his natural element.

Then there was last New Year’s Eve, when another local tech-art workshop, Hackerbot Labs, invited Hazard Factory to perform in their industrial Georgetown lot (the location is secret). Rusty and company devised a deafening parade, dressing up like business people and pulling behind them 55-gallon oil drums, lit by road flares. Then came a bombed-out Mercedes Benz, towed behind on chains. The lead actress Janice began unchaining the slaves with bolt cutters, ranting about the evils of global capitalism—“can’t you see, can’t you see”—as tension built.

“Anytime you put a car in front of an audience and they suddenly understand that you’re going to destroy the car,” Rusty says, “All hell breaks loose. Every single time. It’s like something more than a little ugly.” Janice smashed the windows with bolt cutters, while someone chucked an oil barrel through the side window. The audience surged in for the kill, but Rusty held them back—if only because he was explaining that he was going to set the car on fire. “Which is what I did next,” he says. “I charged it with about 15 pounds of magnesium compressed air and a couple of propane cans, and lit it up. It was just a pretty little New Year’s fire.”

Rusty doesn’t have much trouble finding collaborators and volunteers for Hazard Factory projects. At any given time the active roster comprises about 30 people, but the number of people who can be called on to help or consult on a project is “vast.” The group holds weekly meetings of around 5 to 10 people, depending on what projects are up. “We’re a deliberately amorphous organization,” Rusty says. “If you show up and continue to show up, you are in Hazard Factory. If you are no longer showing up, you are no longer in Hazard Factory, or maybe you are no longer participating right now.” What matters is that when participants say they want to take on a project, they do it, on time. “In a few instances you’ll say, this person just didn’t really have the chops, or just didn’t really seem to understand the purpose behind this, or he really didn’t seem to have a sense of egalitarianism about him.”

Hazard Factory at the Robodock Festival 2007, Amsterdam

Rusty takes much of Hazard Factory’s organizational structure from his experience with the Infernal Noise Brigade, an activist marching band that formed in the 1999 WTO protests and lasted until 2006, including a legendary tour of Europe. Famously, the band of some two-dozen musicians made every decision by consensus, and would keep playing even as police began arresting its members.

Artists join Hazard Factory in much the same way they did the Brigade, he says. “Someone would say, ‘hey I’ve got a friend who I think would be a really good addition,’ so they come to one practice, and everybody sort of checks them out musically and socially and sees if they want to work with them. Very frequently that will turn into a long-term collaboration.”

Hazard Factory's Fire on the Duwamish

Rusty is also a founding member of the Stronghold Arts Collective, with a roster of some of the city’s heavy hitters in the underground, do-it-yourself art world. The group of eight includes Randy Engstrom, director of the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center, and the couple of Gabe Stern and Jordan Howland, the central organizers of the Georgetown Artopia. (Randy and Gabe were also the founders of the lower level bar in the Capitol Hill Arts Center, and ran it for the first year of operation.)

Stronghold recently pooled its funds to buy four houses on Beacon Hill, which they own and live in collectively. “The upshot of that is that now we all do have some ownership, and we have the ability to bootstrap the next art location,” Rusty says. “There have been a lot of interesting side notes as well – there’s a lot to learn in really tight communal living.”

As a central figure in Seattle’s counter-cultural art scene, Rusty is sometimes at odds with mainstream institutions like the Seattle Art Museum. He remembers attending a meeting for the Lawrimore Project (a progressive Seattle art gallery), and being appalled by the group’s lack of a critical eye toward a SAM exhibit bringing art from the Louvre to Seattle.

Rusty, who lived in Paris for 7 months and visited the Louvre extensively, maintains the work is irrelevant to Seattle. “Why is that useful? Why would anyone give a fuck that the work from the Louvre is here?” he growls. “Have they done a single piece about either of our wars [in the Middle East]? Have they circulated so much as even an interoffice memo? Virtually anything in there, you can pretty safely say it’s the work of dead white men.”

To an extent, SAM represents Hazard Factory’s mortal enemy, soaking up all of the attention and funding in the art world and distracting from the culture being created locally by grassroots artists.

At the meeting, “most of the people sitting at the table are art critics, or art makers, or artists—but it’s the gallery crowd,” he says. “I mean, I’m going to this meeting so I can understand what is the non-underground art scene like. Because I have no idea.”