Neon Buckaroo

(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...

Re-feature: The Augur

Design by Kyle Reid

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.

Fingerprints

Here's the progress on one of my many summer projects. It's part one of a video that is composed of five tableaux that center around each of my five fingerprints and a dominant hue in order to tell stories on very broad/abstract themes about humanity such as the place of man in nature.

Progress on FINGERPRINTS from Kyle Reid on Vimeo.

The Official List of Student Movie Cliches

Takashi and I are working on a definitive list of all student movie cliches. These are things that all of us young moviemakers have done at some point. Although these tropes are not necessarily bad on their own, they become tainted by their over-use in bad student movies. I am posting my half of the list here, and Takashi will create the other half over at his blog (check it out on my friends list). Then we will edit the list down to create The Official List of Student Movie Cliches

My List:
Drug abuse
Suicide
Cutting random shots to your favorite song
Stabbing
Soft-core porn
Forests as a location
Angst
Excessive Dissolves
Existentialism
Homeless People
Muggings
Absurdity
Copyright infringement
Crediting a production company that is not a real company, but just you and your friend(s)

Live!Life!Loud!

Some people have been asking for it so here it is, Live!Life!Loud!. Thanks again to Miguel for all the help.

The Black Box Final

For reasons unbeknownst to me this very short and (I think) well-crafted video didn't make it into FUF's Cinerama, although my other video, Live! Life! Loud!, which was equally short and equally well-crafted, did. Since it won't be in the show, you can check it out here, a world premiere!
EDIT:
Oh yeah I guess I should edit this post. This movie actually did play at Cinerama, it just wasn't on the roster posted on facebook. Thanks for playing it guys!

The Black Box from Kyle Reid on Vimeo.

The Work of Saul Bass

So the other day Wikipeida and my own curiosity introduced me to the influential graphic designer and filmmaker Saul Bass. I am really excited by his work on film title sequences. Coincidentally much of what I enjoy from his work is involved with, though is far better than, the last project I finished, the animated short entry to a video contest called An Abridged History of Miscommunication. I feel as if combining simple expressive graphic animation with traditional cinema to produce a more complete narrative is something I am going to do much with in the future. I'll leave you now with sweet embedded youtube videos of some of his work

Anatomy of a Murder

Ocean's Eleven

Psycho

Vertigo