Neon Buckaroo

It's been a long time coming

I haven't done a Youtube Fav post in some time, so here it is. Some of the best of Elliott Smith on Youtube:

(Re)Cycle Seating

Check out the short video I made for Gainesville artist, Raymond Rawls, over on his website. I think he does great work!

Open file - app essay attempt 2

The title of this post is a reference to another I made on livejounral exactly four years ago today. The post consisted of my personal statement submitted to FSU's undergrad film school. My intention tonight was to post the rough draft of my personal statement for FSU's graduate film school. The coincidence of the dates is completely unplanned, in fact I only realized it when I dredged up the old post on livejournal to reference its title. I can't say anything other than that it's just kind of funny. I would take as omen or auspice if I could, but whatever it means is just too vague. Other than the obvious damnation to the same failure that occurred four years ago, I can't think of anything else, and since I refuse to believe in my repeat failure, I will simply ignore this coincidence. So anyhow:

It felt a lot like one of those hot summer days of my childhood spent at Ft. Lauderdale Beach; the gritty sand was in every crack and crevice on my body, the salt spray of the ocean and the high equatorial sun were stinging at my pink neck, and the sunscreen was melting from my flushed forehead and bleeding into my burning eyes. I stopped toiling in the sand for a moment to borrow a gulp of water from Rachel, then slipped into melancholy while thinking about how after so much, being here and doing this had come to feel quite ordinary. Here was atop the sacred temple Huaca de Cao located in the El Brujo complex on the coast of Peru. What we were doing was archaeology, or less glamorously, preserving the temple by repairing tiny cracks on unearthed adobe walls. We were a study abroad team, the fifteen of us, two anthropology professors, our guides, a Vietnam veteran and a young female Peruvian archaeologist, and a diverse group of students from ages 18 to 40 and only one of whom spoke any Spanish. From afar the half overburdened temple looked just like a giant sand castle.
We made our way down the temple, heading for a hot afternoon lecture in a room with no A/C, when out on the foot of the temple we saw several men working in the sand far away from the activity we were used to seeing. We came upon them and there not even a foot below the sand under the same path we walked that morning to get up the temple was a burial mostly uncovered. The body had been posed arms crossed across the chest and there were several beautiful pieces of pottery broken around the body, which we were told were intentional broken and placed around the body as an offering. None of us students had seen anything like this before, and as we watched the workers dust away the sand from the bones, I felt again the enchantment that I stepped off the plane with in Lima. My experience with cinema is related in kind to what I felt on that day in El Brujo, the realization of disillusionment and then its reversal into enchantment.
For most of my life I kept the wonder of cinema safe in my room inside a wooden cabinet along with every saved theatre ticket stub. However, as I packed away the safety of that room for college, the creeping curiosity that had consumed my life like a slow moving snake full of half-digested interests finally flicked its tongue into the air of that wooden cabinet, which I’d swung open to wonder back at what to do with its contents. So in the jaws of my curiosity I was lead to an education in cinema at the university; that is where my enchantment with movies began to slip off the spool.
This personal anecdote might illustrate my disillusionment better than any florid description: While careening around the turns of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland in a cart with my two older sisters we suddenly jerked to a stop. Just as we realized that this wasn’t part of the ride, the house lights were slammed on, and although we had stopped I still felt my stomach drop as the magic of that once wild ride was crushed upon witnessing its bare mechanics. It was nothing more than a rolling skating rink with bits of track laid out on the floor and some painted cartoon cutouts propped up in the corners. The feeling was the same when the lights were slammed on film when I begun my first courses in cinematic studies at the University of Florida where my eminent professors taught rigorous classes in deconstructing the continuous images of cinema in order to understand them in terms of a film language, their psychoanalytic messages, or their social, political, and historical importance. Through this indoctrination into the art of film I can say that I’ll never look at a movie in the same way again, and though at first I worried that I had ruined movie-going for myself, I soon became enchanted once again with a deeper love gained in understanding the systems supporting the once impenetrable images seen on screen. This understanding has lead me to otherwise overlooked influences in historic and world cinemas, and, oddly enough, even to finding much delight in the films of the French New Wave, or more specifically, the films of Jean –Luc Godard who did so much to confront illusions in cinema. Furthermore, naming these illusions has given me a great deal of respect for those masters of illusions, namely Hitchcock. However, it is the more unassuming films that currently influence me most.

In my six weeks of training in black and white 16mm silent film at NYU I found a connection to a more simplistic kind of film. I suppose that coming to understand the complexity of film production through practically doing it has lead to me to a love for films that work on a fundamental level, films like Knife in the Water (dir. Polanski, 1962) or The Bicycle Thief (dir. De Sica, 1948). I suppose it is something like a Bob Dylan song, though it can be beautiful dressed up like Mr. Tambourine Man (The Byrds, 1965), I still prefer Dylan’s bare essential version. It’s through removing ornamentation that you can truly understand the lasting quality of the work. That is the kind of film I want to make, films with universal stories told with a very specific and thoroughly investigated settings so that the drama which unfolds becomes organic, films that do not overlook the potential for adventure however minute in any setting, films that capture a milieu, films in which the drama is accessible on every level, inner, inter-personal, and extra-personal, films in which entertainment is a byproduct of seeking fine craftsmanship and not the other way around, films with equal attention paid to the broadest level of story and the level smallest detail, beautifully cinematic films, films that are aware of their place in cinematic history, films in which nothing happens without reason.

Two Documentaries

TOPIC: After a while of silence (see digression one below) I guess I should inform you that I am currently working on a short five minute documentary about a local craftsman, Raymond Rawls, who has a link on the side of my blog. I've already shot the interview, which turned out great besides some slight audio issues (see digression two). There are some more scenes/ sequences I need to shoot and then hopefully I can have it done soon after that. I should also let you know that I intend to post the doc I made for the World Music course I took this summer, but it really needs a re-edit.

DIGRESSION ONE: Even if this blog had more exciting content like maybe stories of my life as an unlikely stripper, it still wouldn't get very many hits because I don't update enough. I guess I'm not really addicted enough to my blog to warrant anyone else being addicted to my blog. However, for the few people that read this thing and check it every once and a while for updates, I'm sorry I'm so infrequent, and thank you for coming back.

DIGRESSION TWO: I stupidly recorded the audio with the shotgun mic attached to the camera. This was partly due to, partly to over confidence (thinking it would work fine), oversight (not thinking about it long enough), and my inadequate shotgun mic. However, I am happy to say that the audio is completely usable, and in reaction to my mistake I took the plunge and bought a Rode NTG-2 Mic, built a homemade boom pole, and am planning to pony up a little more cash for a shock mount and quality windscreen. This is brining me ever closer to a nice little production kit. All I need now is a unit dedicated to audio recording (most likely a Marantz PMD660), and a small light kit (most likely similar to the one I used at NYU, which was from Mole Richardson). One day...

Peer Evaluations: The Augur

I've been pimping The Augur a lot in the last few days, but I do so only in attempts to create an interested creative community. I have one last thing to say about the movie.

The Augur: Building the Future

I have and probably always will have an affinity for images that depict the process of construction. I am not an engineer, mechanic, carpenter, handyman, or even craft artist by any means, but I’ve been completely and mysteriously enthralled with the process of construction ever since the days when I used to watch Home Again with Bob Villa while I sat at the Formica countertop in my house and ate the pancakes my Dad made for me on Sunday morning. I was probably at most ten years old. My Mom was real estate agent and I faintly understood that my Dad was something called a “Human Resources Director,” both middle-class white-collar careers no where near manual labor. So I can’t explain through any early developmental clues why, but can only assure you that I’ll stop flipping through the channels in order to watch a crew of red-necks weld exhaust pipes onto a massive truck, or to gaze at the tedious process, in which tennis balls are manufactured. Maybe it’s just simply because construction is an action, and actions are what compose compelling images.
I hate to begin with something only to leave the thought unfinished, but the reason I have described my affection for images of construction is so that I can then tell you that The Augur by Takashi Doscher and Alex Shofner, which is a bout a young man who escapes a foreboding dark flood following him by constructing a device that he naturally seems to know how to build, also has my affections. I was speaking with Takashi about this video and most of what he told me how exhilarating the movie-making process was for this project. He spoke about how he and Alex decided to throw their storyboards to the wind and just create this video from nothing as it came to them, and there is was, the answer to my unexplained love for watching construction. The movie The Augur is a movie that hinges on the imagery of constructing a device, a beautiful metaphor for the very movie-making process, in which these images are rendered. However, it goes even further than that. Not only is the construction of the device a representation of the movie-making process, but it signifies the process that Takashi, Alex, I, and perhaps some of your reading this essay are in, that is building a career in the difficult industry of film-making. The doubts and fears that follow us are the dark pools of ink that drift towards the hero, and we can only hope that at the last minute we can through our own skill and natural desire escape to a better place even if that place is unknowable until we get there. Our hero in The Augur made it, but we left behind as he moves on. Hopefully when our turn comes, when it is down to the last second, we will join him. Until then we must keep building ever greater devices such as Takashi and Alex who have taken a great step forward with this movie in their use of special effects, suspense, and expressive lively camera work. This is the best I have seen from them.

written by Kyle Reid

Re-feature: The Augur

Design by Kyle Reid

Just Some Photo Fun

I just got my dSLR back from Aimee's oldest sister, and I've been messing around with the computer software it came with. I've learned that I can remote trigger the shutter release from my computer. So I've stuck the camera on my new fancy tripod and have been using it like a very expensive version of mac's photo booth.

If that seemed completely pointless, expect a new little documentary I've been editing together for class in a few days once it's done, and I'm also going to posting a list of books I recommend on film making and cinematography.

Cross-Blog Content: Sharing the Wealth (of Information)

I'd like everyone to check out Takashi's and Alex's newest video! It's called The Auger, which I happen to think is a badass title. I would have loved to create some garish horror-style lighting for this suspenseful short, but unfortunately I wasn't able to help on this video for reasons which I can't really remember. I hope to feature more content from Takashi's blog in the future.

The Auger from Mass Entity Productions on Vimeo.

Happy Father's Day

Here's a early version of a song I wrote for my Dad for Father's Day.

Here are the lyrics

Sittin’ next to my Dad on a descending airplane
We’re staring down the city outside the window that eventually fades
Into a cloud and it’s all white now
I see the home that he gave me and the stories therein found
Like once upon a time…

Basketball one game I saw you playing for the team
And though it’s a little blurry, it left an impression on me
Oh I wanted to be just like you, just how I had seen
So you taught me everything about how to play clean
And how to hide when you don’t

Rollerblades, oh what a surprise when we went out for a drive
You didn’t say where to we would go, didn’t let it on your face show
You tried to keep the magic alive till teenage sarcasm arrived
Then apart we did grow and those rollerblades did go
Into the garage sale pile

It was Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Star
It was George Harrison, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel
They put us both back together after being long apart
I learned to play guitar for the songs you played in the car

written by Kyle Reid Copyright 2008

Corrective Techniques

Haven't posted in a while so here's a little gift to make up for it: Corrective Techniques
It's a useful little handout I got while at NYU last summer. Try it out! See if you can make everyone look like a movie star.