Hells Bells

January 12, 2012

Photo by James M. Johnston.

I leave for the airport and Sundance in about four hours, and I'm still up trying to squeeze in as much work on this thing we shot last week as I can. It's a new music video for School Of Seven Bells, and I think we might have pushed our meager budget and inferior brains too far on this one, resulting in irreparable damage and unchecked carnage. Motion control, mathematical equations - these are things best left to experts! Of course, as soon as it turns out (if it turns out, which it will), I'll forget what a headache it's been and talk about how wonderful technology is.

I finished two FX shots just now, and I'll be checking the progress on everything else that's going to fill up that green from up in the mountains next week. Hopefully it'll be done and online in a week or two.

Posted by David Lowery at 11:51 PM

Lookbook 2

January 5, 2012

Posted by David Lowery at 6:39 PM

January Firsts

January 1, 2012

I spent a few minutes perusing old annular writings and found this entry that I actually like quite a bit. I was telling someone recently that I almost I trust my writing enough to try my hand at writing fiction; this bolsters my confidence.

January 1, 2009

I didn't want to leave. The path from Texas to the Windy City is straight line; so why when I travel there do I always wind up in Atlanta? Some ancient ley line pulling me East when I need to go North; making straight a curve, as natural as an arm bent at the elbow. I trace its length with my fingertip; finding the radial artery that runs the entire course, following it to the elbow where I pause, and then turn on towards the wrist. Along the way that vein opens of its own accord; the sun is low in the sky and spins gold out of the pools and rivulets that well up from its riven surface; a spatter of mercury stretching to the horizon. Little lakes and ponds shimmering like mirages that do indeed disappear as the sun sinks lower and the faded green and brown quilt below turns monochrome with frost. Winter spreading in the afternoon. I flatten the image in my head, as I imagine Vermeer must have done, so as to see it as patchwork of color and shade; to detect the blues and purples in what looks so uniformly gray.

We hit a bank of clouds, and all color vanishes. Something deep and guttural shifts within the plane as it beginning to drop. Nearly there, after six hours. The radial artery wraps around the wrist. Its shoots spread into the fingers. It is almost as far from the heart as I can get. To get to where I really want to be, I'd have to retrace my steps, take the same path further back, back to the brachial artery, where I'd slip through a a wall of muscle below the shoulder and try to make longitudes out of the axillary artery, which itself would give way to the subclavian artery. I'd stay its course and then duck under the arch of the aorta and slip down through its descending branches, into those depths below, where East and West and up and down no longer matter and everything is a deep shade of red. Finally I'd find myself in the coronaries, and I could curl up warm and rest.

Vapor on the window; a thick imposing rolling wall of gray, thousands of feet high, reaching from the ground to somewhere above us. I settle back, and it's then that I see in my periphery: a ribbon of pink, unfurling across the sky in less than half a second and then vanishing. An optical trick, I think, but then there it is again. Brilliant, shimmering, heraldic, rippling long across the distance. Seemingly free from physics and all the natural laws, like the sailor's green flash, and like that gone in an instant. It makes no sense. I see it a third time. It's something to hold onto. And so I do. I hold on tight and let it be what I need it to be.

The cloud bank dissipates. The patchwork below is deep dark blue, and off in the distance is that same splash of pink, but sustained. A valiant sunset, making itself known while it sinks into the West. Hanging over the source. Waiting for me to see it. I know. We land.

Posted by David Lowery at 2:50 AM

The Ross Brothers on the River

December 31, 2011

One of my sheerest pleasures these past two months has been the weekly installments of the Ross Brothers' series about their adventures on the Mississippi. Bill and Turner, who made the wonderful 45365, set out with their other brother Al and friend Kyle and sailed down the Mississippi, more or less, all the way from their homestate of Ohio down to New Orleans over three weeks in October.

Perfectly paced, bite-sized but never too brief, these episodes will be a treat to anyone who loved 45365, and with a combined running time of over two hours already, this is in effect an amazing feature film in and of itself. It is gorgeous nonfiction filmmaking, although there are some moments that stray from strict documentary form in strange and funny and wondrous ways. There's also a scene with some impersonations and a random tree limb in the most recent episode that delighted me to no end.

Here is the first episode.

The Brothers Ross will be returning to the big screen in 2012 with Tchoupitoulas, their portrait of one night in New Orleans. Let's all join hands and look forward to it together.

Posted by David Lowery at 12:30 PM

Best of 2011

This year I celebrated ambition, regardless of whether it was directed inward or out, and so the films whose experiences, messy though they may be, remain affixed most firmly in my head should but one come as no surprise. In the order that I saw them:

1. The Tree Of Life (Terrence Malick)

2. Margaret (Kenneth Lonnergan)

3. Open Five 2 (Kentucker Audley)

Three movies in my top ten - that's one more than last year. Things are looking up! In truth I could easily list ten more, which could beget an additional ten or twelve, but I'll quit while I'm ahead.

That last one has yet to officially screen anywhere, but the night I sat up in bed watching it until the wee hours remains one of the very most affirmative cinematic experiences I've had this year. Hopefully you'll have a chance to see it in 2012, and until then use it as a proxy for all the low-to-no-budget films that were released in 2011, of which I loved a great many. But during Open Five 2, I actually pumped my fist, which says a lot.

P.S. Honorable mentions to the skyscraper sequence in Mission: Impossible 4 and to my wife for making sure I got to the first screening of Melancholia on time the day that it opened.

Posted by David Lowery at 2:11 AM

Lookbook 1

December 29, 2011

Reference images, these ones from one of my top-five favorite movies:

Posted by David Lowery at 8:05 PM