11.23.2011

Trubble Club

So there's this group of comics artist in Chicago called Trubble Club. They meet every week to make jam comics: one person draws a panel, another draws the next, so on and so on. The participants are all talented, productive individuals with whom anyone would be honored to associate. When I first started making comics in Chicago, Trubble Club was the coolest thing and a symbol of local success. My friends and I joked about starting a rival jam comics group, and placed jealous bets on who would be invited to the Club first.

So, last month my friend Grant Reynolds invited me to join. The freshman infatuation with Trubble Club had worn off, and I'm friends with a lot of the folks who participate, so it wasn't really a big deal (but it was kind of a big deal - or at least it still felt like one). Anyway, I've been attending for the past several weeks. Today Jeremy Tinder posted some new TC comics, and you can see my work in one of them:


That last panel says "SQUELCH" and I drew it.

Ya'll should check out Trubble Club's website and get excited about the upcoming (recently completed) Trubble Club Full Color Comics Spectacular Issue 5. I have one panel in it, and it's really, really dirty. (Disclaimer: that is not actually the title for the collected TC comics, I just made it up.)

11.07.2011

Untitled (Times For)



Ross and I had been joking about making an homage to the elusive, rigorous, and very very serious avant-garde filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos for ages. Markopoulos, who died in 1992, took all of his prints out of circulation in the United States in 1967, in order to create an 80-hour opus (structured in 'cycles') that screens partially (as it is completed) once every four years in the middle of nowhere in Greece.

Markopoulos's 1967 film Himself as Herself is [from the Harvard Archives] "based loosely on Balzac's Séraphita. The film consists of a shimmering, nearly plotless evocation of gender identity in flux, and it contains some of Markopoulos’s most haunting, densely interlaced images." It is also a particular favorite, and the film that Ross and I always dreamed of ripping off.

So, then I was asked to take part in the Chicago 8 Film Festival's 'Bride of Super 8' screening. Participants receive one roll of Super 8 Ektachrome. They shoot anything they want, editing in camera if at all, and return the roll undeveloped to the festival. Everyone sees their film for the first time on the night of the screening.

The films at these screenings generally fall into one of two categories: home-movie footage of dogs and camping trips, or general abstract fucking around. I thought it would be extra funny to present an incomparably overambitious film in the same context.

We planned out every scene and shot sequence in Untitled before beginning the shoot, and it took us five days (spread out over three weeks) to complete the roll. Each scene took hours to set up and get dressed for. The second scene (rolling on/with the carpet) was especially tricky, because we weren't sure if the camera movement we worked out would translate in the finished piece. That motion is copied (then repeated) from a single edit in Himself as Herself, when the whole film goes upside down for a moment. The staircase sequence is a reference to the moment in Himself as Herself when the main character, wearing this weird veil and representing both his masculine and feminine aspects, meets himself through cross-cut editing on the platform of a lush staircase. That's why Ross and I are in drag after that sequence, because we've crossed over the gender binary.

Because this entire film was shot in camera, and we wanted to make it without help, one can imagine the logistics that went into each take - I'd shoot a couple frames of Ross, we'd switch, he'd shoot, switch, etc. This was particularly trying during the staircase scene, since we single framed two seconds (36 frames) and had to have our fingers touch in the finished sequence; there's a penny taped to the wall high up behind us, and each time, before opening the shutter, the cameraperson would direct the actor in precise placement of their finger over this penny in the eye of the camera. This and the drag sequence were shot in my apartment building lobby. I'd like to thank my neighbors for humoring us.

At the end (when we become one, and, conversely, when we are seen together in a shot for the first time) we put the camera on a wheelchair, tied ropes to the legs, and looped them around poles in my basement. This was our way of fashioning a dolly that would require no additional hands, and maintaining the integrity of our 'pure' filmmaking experience.

11.01.2011

Brain Frame 3


I am very proud to announce the third installment of BRAIN FRAME! It's happening a week from this Thursday (that being the 10th of November) at 8pm, at 1542 N Milwaukee (on the second floor). Myself included, there will be five readers:

Krystal DiFronzo
Bret Koontz
Ian McDuffie
Grant Reynolds

It will be sooooo fuuuuuun! I'm serious. Look how excited I am, I'm so excited that I was too lazy to scan in the small version of the flyers, and took a backwards picture of myself holding them instead:


The poster is a collaboration between Ben Bertin and myself. If you can't tell, that's a turkey stuck in the throat of the snake (the snake that's winding through a face skin, a muscle mask, and a skull, and barfing out its brain up at the top there). The snake just ate the whole turkey because it's almost Thanksgiving. You might even say that the snake has Thanksgiving on the brain.

The big version of the poster is actually a seven-color-separation. Each layer (CMY, RGB, K) was printed separately. It's vomitous. When Ben and I finished the drawing, we propped it up on a table in my house and played some metal music, as a test. We nodded our heads and stroked our chins, mumbling "Yes, yes."

If you're on Facebook, there's a page for Brain Frame now. And, um, you should probably 'like' it.
 
If you attend BF3, you'll see me as a scientist, reading a field report (from the future!) about the squishsacks, complete with alien tissue samples and funny glasses. I'm going first, so get there on time. Here's the documentation, thanks to Jenna Caravello, of my performance at BF2. I'm reading Night City in character as Llama Man. I wrote monologues for him to insert into the narrative of the comic, and later realized that it's the first time I've given him a voice. It was louder than this video makes it seem. You get the idea.


Lyra Hill reads Night City from Lyra Hill on Vimeo.