Llama Man: Documentation

Here are some photos documenting the making of my final film for the semester. Most of them are from the super 8 shoot, which happened in early March in the Chicago Forest Preserve and on Montrose Beach.


Mark and AJ helped me out with this part, AJ working the camera and Mark helping me get my costume on and off and move stuff around.




At first we were having a really difficult time as it had rained the previous day, so these big fields we were in were very muddy and my stilts got caught in the ground. This is a disaster for anyone who knows how to stiltwalk; because you have no ankles or toes on the bottom of your 'feet', you must keep in constant motion to stay balanced, and that is impossible if your legs are glued to the ground.




We finally had to find places for me to walk on concrete drains or paths, with a natural background to make it appear as though Llama Man were walking on the grass. This is why, in the film, you'll see that his feet are cut off in several shots.




AJ did really well considering he didn't know that much about film or shooting film. We'd frame shots together and then I would yell at him through my mask how many seconds I wanted him to roll. The time was around lunch, and there were lots of working men on their breaks, eating in parked cars and watching us.




Llama Man must have looked really bizarre to them, especially since this girl kept emerging from behind the mask. I would wave at them in costume as often as possible, and usually they were good sports about it and waved back. A couple cops stopped to ask what we were doing, if we were shooting a horror film. I said yes because I didn't really want to launch into the whole explaination.



The shoot for the 16mm stuff was way different and much harder. Most of the time was spent constructing the set.


My crew could not have been a better group of people. They were all very patient and supportive and I owe them eternally for it. Here's Zaven, my camera man, on the dolly at probably around three in the morning:


Thanks guys!

Circle Head

I painted this in my friend Crockett's studio the summer before last, in San Francisco. We had just traveled to Scrap, a creative recycling and reuse center in China Basin. I found a bunch of square white plastic lids for square white plastic buckets and gessoed them, and then we sat in the studio with sun through the windows and music on an old boombox. Crockett keeps his acrylics scrambled around and we used the brushes we could find buried underneath wood scraps and cassette tapes. The whole day was an adventure.

Squid Gold

Those gold bubbles in the grey wash are speech bubbles. They are speaking squid but because it is underwater, we can only see it as funny little cartoon circles, like those you see above any drawing of a goldfish. I drew this last year for no reason at all.

Sketchbook: Bird vs. Snake

I got these cool pencils a while back. They're called "INKTENSE," a title I feel has to be written capitally in order to really capitalize on the intensity inherent in that caption.

Anyway, they're like regular colored pencils except that when you take a wet brush to them they turn into ink. Above you see my first experiment with that medium. I believe my class was discussing various studies intended to prove a genetic disposition towards bipolarity.

Final Crit: Figure Drawing

Figure Drawing 2007 is complete. Above is the wall section allocated to me for the best drawings of the semester. There were more on the wall before I took this picture, but I've already posted them/they suck. (We had to put up our best and worst.) These are all india ink, and the one in the lower right corner is charcoal.

Paintings

These are the paintings I made last semester in Beginning Painting. I've left out the first half of the semester, because I entered this class having forsaken paint and pretty much most color for the past six years. Thank you, Carl Baratta, for making me love painting.

This is the only piece in this post done in acrylic. After this we switched to oil, and I swear I'll never go back.


This is my first oil painting; that's a pen I own covered in skulls. I got it at Pantheacon one year.


This is one of my favorite painting still, and hangs in my kitchen.


We had an assignment to do a "painted collage". Basically you take random images and paint them on top of each other.


An in class "incidental painted collage". Our classrooms are pretty industrial, so all I found of interest was a door and an outlet. This painting is unfinished but remains a favorite.


Last but not least, this was the final for my class. I'm sorry the photo sucks, the painting is very dark and difficult to capture at 9.00pm in a doom room with only a desk lamp for lighting. Another painted collage, but more situational, this is set in the Tado Ando gallery in the Art Institute of Chicago, featuring Magritte's red dot from "The Banquet" (my favorite painting ever), and creeping around is the Llama Man from my childhood nightmares. Opposite him is a common theme in my mental compositions, the Arm Umbrella. (Stay tuned for my first etching sometime soon also featuring an arm umbrella.) There were some crazy qualifications for the final project.