Film making, by nature, is one of piecing things together. For me this has always been influences in story, visuals and many other elements. I constantly find myself referencing other films, books, videos, etc. For the Ron Roger's video we shot last weekend I wanted to try something new. When explaining my thoughts and visuals to people I would still reference things, but unlike before, this time I wouldn't immediately find a computer to pull up a video or picture. I wanted to see if I could get at the heart of what I really liked about my reference material, what I wanted to take from it and utilize, therefor making it my own. If the person I was talking to had seen the same reference, all the better, it got us a little closer to the idea of what we enjoyed about it and how we could utilize the strengths that stuck with us, while taking it to the next level.
I felt this was a successful exercise for myself, it forced me to explore the things I enjoy watching and would love to weave into my work, and really find what it is I liked about it. Next time you're working on something and want to reference a video on youtube, take a second, and really try to explain what it is you want to pull from that. Let me know how it goes.
Oh well, I wanted to share our newest music video with you all and give you a little background.
Directed by Kyle Glenn Shot by Tyler Carey Edited by Steve Crocker
I had been wanting to do a video with And And And for a while, they were friends of Steve's and their energy on stage was crazy. I had a few ideas floating around through my head when Tyler came to me and told me he had been talking to them about doing a music video for a class. I immediately jumped on the boat. We didn't have the time or budget to do any of my other ideas, but that was fine.
The song we originally talked about shooting, "You Can't Hide," had a harmonica part that just yelled sun drenched day at the river to me. Though the content was a little darker I really liked the idea of the conflicting imagery of the video and the song.
One day in September we loaded up in a few cars and headed down to my favorite river spot, about 20 miles this side of Tillamook. We stopped on the way for sammies and beer. When we got to the river the band decided to change the song, they hadn't really had a chance to thoroughly discuss what song they wanted to do. After a few minutes of talking they settled on "Is It Any Wonder?" A very different song, but once again I bit at the idea of the contrasting images of the song and video, this time though even the melody was dark and anguished.
The shoot of the day was pretty simple. I piled all our gear in a raft and took trips back and forth from the rock to the shore. We shot the performance first, getting the technical stuff out of the way. First we shot from the shore, capturing the rock in the middle of the water, getting some nice flares. Then Tyler jumped in the raft and I swam/walked him around in our makeshift dolly. Getting some pretty cool, fluid shots.
The remainder of the day was spent hanging out with the band just capturing life style stuff
It is a goal of mine to push myself conceptually for music videos. Starting with themes and constructing complex imagery. That however, was not my goal for this video. THis music video would be the bands first, and with first videos I think it is important to really get a sense of the band. The audience of the video will be current fans, but there will be many new ones, so I try to give them a slice of what they can expect from the band at a show.
With the shooting finished Tyler took the footage and cut a video for his class. I gave a copy of that video and the footage to Steve Crocker, who had previously edited the Local Superheroes video I directed with Eli. I have grown to trust Steve quite a bit when it comes to editing. He can take edits to a place that I can not. He is willing to tweak and cut up frames, reverse them over and over. I can definitely say this video would not be the same without his touch on it. Because he's so good, it took awhile for us to connect on the video and get a finished product. Luckily Steve is friends with the band, so he would show them pieces every now and again to keep them satisfied.
I want to say much thanks to Tyler for giving me the opportunity to work with these guys, and for his fantastic photography. To the band for being a great group of guys to hang out and work with. And to Steve for kicking this video's ass to the ground, cutting it into pieces and stitching it back into a super monster.
There are a lot of you that might not know about our close QO collaborator, Andy Combs. The building blocks for what would become Quarter Orange were actually forged on our first Andy Combs music video. Directed by the lovely Selena Persiani-Shell, Shot by Kale Heily, Produced by me (Eli). Here is Bloodship:
And that was just the begginning. I also directed a music video for Andy and used his music in many of my shorts throughout college. My favorite being Dos Hermanos Tacos.
All the music featured in Dos Hermanos was Andy's, and it is still some of my favorite music of all time! (A bit hyperbolic, but whatevs, I really dig his stuff!)
Lately we've been working with Andy on our doc-style client projects, from Stand for Children and now OMSI (we'll put the link up after we finish the projects).
Andy is great to work with. He always comes through and his stuff is unique in it's sweetness, while staying deeply rooted in the weird land that Andy inhabits. A place with giant robots and 50's style doo-wop, lasers, zombies and shacks full of coffee. I've used his talent more times than I can count at this point. He is fantastic, but my favorite usage of his music in film thus far, has to be...
this.
Andy is the best. He always comes through, and I am a huge fan. AHe can be a bit hard to find, like the proverbial "diamond in the rough" (first Alladin reference of 2011! Woot!) but you can download new music and hopefully talk with him on Facebook. Andy plays around town with his band "The Moth". Look for Andy Combs and The Moth at a venue near you.
Listen to Andy Combs, go watch Andy Combs, Love Andy Combs!
As us in the great soggy northwest know all too well, In all of our lives a little rain must fall. And so it goes with companies. Here at QO, with great sadness we want to inform you all that we have lost a member of our team. Walker Williamson will no longer will be working with us as active partner. Walker was an extremely valued asset in our creative arsenal at Quarter Orange, sadly, he has chosen to take a separate path. Though we are sad to see him go, we know he will go on to do great things in the industry and we wish him the best of luck.
That being said, we continue moving forward with the new year. We are deep into submitting Sasquatch to horror festivals around the country. With a new year comes changes that can be scary, intimidating and difficult, but also these changes can lead to new opportunities, new successes. We feel that Evidence of the Sasquatch is a strong film that is both entertaining and scary that will do well on the festival circuit.
We are currently working with The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry to produce a series of videos for both fundraising and marketing purposes. The experience thus far has been wonderful and fulfilling as we all believe in OMSI’s mission of educating the public from kids to old folks. This institution is a much needed part of life in Portland.
Jason just finished a project that he has been working on for years on the side from our many other projects. It is an amazing animation that we’re sure you are going to love! We will be premiering this short animation as soon as we develop a plan for it’s release.
We are also in talks with local musician, Ron Rogers, to produce a music video in the near future. We are very excited about the direction it is going both story wise and aesthetically. We'll let you know more as this moves into pre-production.
If you’ve been following us on our blog and facebook you will have seen our “1st Quarter Orange Cell Phone Photo Competition”. Everyday for a week Quarter Orange friends Sean O’Grady and Alex Ladzinksy posted a cell phone pic that people voted on by “liking” on Quarter Orange’s facebook page. This has been a fun week and you can see all the photos on our facebook page.
We are also working on three different feature length scripts that we hope to have finished later this year. Each one is extremely different from the others and shows the spectrum of talents located in our circle. 2011 is going to be a big year for us and we look forward to every minute of it.
Today begins the week long photo competition between Alex Ladizinsky and Sean O'Grady. Everyday we will post two new photo in the photo album. These photos will then be voted on by our facebook friends by hitting the "like" button. You can vote on which ever photo you want, but please only vote for one picture a day. The photographers must take photos on a cell phone with the phone's original camera (no toy camera apps.) At the end of the week we will total the "likes" to determine the first winner.
Enjoy! And please spread the word to your friends!
Blogs are tough. When you first start you write on them every other day. You check back often to see how many people have read it, and you think about your next blog regularly. Eventually that every other day turns into once a week, then bi-weekly, monthly. Soon you turn around and it's been months since your last blog. The longer you go without, the more of an obstacle it seems to be. But eventually you get back in to it. You commit yourself to write, every other day, just to start the whole process again. But for those of you that do come back to the blog. For those that are interested in what we are doing. We appreciate you, and we do this for you. So ON TO THE BLOG!
Stand for Children is done!
If you haven't heard, we did a series of documentaries for the local chapter of the non-profit organization Stand For Children. These people are advocates for children across the country. Besides organizing protests, letter writing and phone campaigns to lobby for more school funding, they also provide underprivileged youth with the opportunity to go to college through their "beat the odds" scholarship. This is a scholarship that provides much needed assistance to kids with few other options to attend higher education.
This year we were fortunate enough to work with Stand For Children on their videos of the winners of the scholarships. These were all shot by us, driving across the state over a whirlwind weekend of production in Portland, Albany, and Medford, Oregon. While preparing for our Sasquatch screening we began cutting on Stand. We finished our rough cut soon after the screening and a few back and forths between us and Stand For Children's staff, and we had the spots finished and polished ahead of schedule. The videos were shown at Stand for Children's annual fundraiser held this year in the Oregon Zoo ballroom. It was quite an event with a delicious entree, wine, coffee, and desert!
Here are the three videos of the scholarship winners:
Produced by: Kyle Glenn, Walker Williamson
Directed by: Eli Shell
Shot by: Patrick LaValley, Jason Windsor
Sound by: Kyle Glenn
Edited by: Kyle Glenn, Eli Shell
Visual FX: Jason Windsor
This has truly been a positive experience for me personally (Eli here). As we have worked primarily in fiction it was nice to stretch ourselves creatively, try something a little different. Aside from that it is also nice to do something for others. We all took minimal pay, donating more than half of our time to this worthy cause. The better the video ended up, the thought was, the more that Stand For Children could raise at their fundraiser where this would play. We all put alot of time and effort into making these the best they could possibly be. It has been an extremely rewarding experience, and the end product turned out better than I could have hoped. All of us over here at QO look forward to working with Stand for Children again.
Hello, hello! It's been awhile since you've heard from us over here at QOHQ, most likely because we are deep into post on 'Evidence of the Sasquatch.' As I type this Eli sits at a computer in our dark workspace figuring out how to best foley the sound of a character urinating off a deck. A bucket full of dirt, leaves and grass later, Jason slowly trickles water out of a Yeyo bottle to synthesize the sound. Next up, how do we replicate the sound of a body dragging across a deck?
We've been in sound design for about three weeks now with Anthony Gainer and Eli tag-teaming Pro Tools. Our picture edit is locked, our visual effects are done, thanks in part to the hard work of our friend Ed Vilderman, and we are working on locking our screening date towards the end of October.
Other than 'Evidence of the Sasquatch,' we've been up to a few other projects. Kyle directed a music video for the band 'And And And,' produced and shot by Tyler Carey. This video is now in the editing stage and should be ready for release in a couple of weeks. We are also hoping to begin Pre-Production on some live video/recordings of the band 'Sallie Ford & The Sound Outside,' that will take place at a friends ranch and will be Directed by Nate Baston. Our Co-conspirator Selena Shell, is working on treatments for a music video for the band 'Monarques,' to be produced by QO.
Next month we will be producing three short videos for Stand for Children's Beat the Odds scholarship. We are super excited about this opportunity. Each video will feature one of the scholarship winners, showcasing their story and their lives. These videos are always an inspiration and we are proud to be a part of telling these kids stories this year.
We've also been talking to Yeyo Tequila about producing a few short drink videos for them this fall, so keep your eyes open for more on that, they should be pretty slick.
That about sums it up for now, come out to Portland Film Network Meet-Up next Monday, October 4th @ Rontom's, to chat with us in person! There will be drink specials for members of the Meet-up this time!
I don’t want to change the world.I don’t want to “push the boundaries” of citizens today.I feel just as bad as anyone about the atrocities of the world.I hate that in today’s world things like Darfur happen.I'm saddened by the genocides of Rwanda and Myanmar.I cry for the orphans in Rio De Janeiro, and the homeless on the streets of America.I worry about cancer, racism, xenophobia, homophobia and sexism.Life is rough.
What I want, is to give people a couple hours away from that.I want to take audiences to another place of our creation.Somewhere different than the world we live in.Whether that place is funny, scary, or just beautiful, it is a break from the world.I want audiences to laugh, cry, and fall in love.Not write their congressmen.
I want to tell stories.From when man crowded around the campfire and told stories about the Gods, we have always depended on the storyteller.So this is a manifesto, of sorts, a creative credo, because as I’ve look around at opportunities for filmmakers; grants and funding opportunities, each one describes films looking to “push the envelope”.That’s not what I want to do. I want to make the world disappear for a couple hours, while you sit in a darkened room listening to my tale.The only world I want to change, is the one of my own creation.
