Some of you might have seen the video clip I posted on Instagram a few days ago to promote submissions to the CAULDRON INTERNATIONAL FILM AND VIDEO FEST.
This post came out of an urge to kill at least two birds with one stone.
Since I started this Substack page, I have been intending to post/archive nearly all my old work here for easy shareability, and to provide a sort of foundation of a page with subscribers, so that when I start to post new projects here, I have an audience (thanks to anyone reading this now! YOU are my early adopters, so to speak).
Also, I currently am trying to promote CAULDRON (the film fest), and get video and film makers to submit their work. As this is the first year of the festival, I don’t have previous selections to show, so I need eye-catching ads and can’t (yet) pay anyone to make me ads.. so…
For a while, and on a weekly basis, I will be plugging in the old hard drives (150 Gigs and heavy as a cinder brick!) and harvesting clips while sharing the original videos with all of you good people.
So, now that I’ve explained all that, I’ll get into the sharing part.
In late 2003, the band Mahjongg was newly transplanted from Columbia Missouri to Chicago and they were circulating their home-recorded EP, Machinegong.
I knew them from when I had lived in Columbia and I found them a venue in Salt Lake City for their first western states tour. About seven people came to the show (at Kilby Court in Salt Lake City), but all seven of us were floored by the music and I daresay we all bought merchandise. I asked the band if I could make them a music video and it took me 3 months because I was new to video-making and I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I moved to San Francisco while I was working on it and collected footage from Craig Baldwin’s mythical basement* to supplement the footage I copied from library-loaned VHS tapes (Youtube was a brand new thing then, screen capturing videos online was not yet a thing that most people had heard of).
After 3 months, I had completed a very lo-fi video mashup/music video for the song “Aluminum”. This was the first work of mine to make it into multiple film festivals (Chicago Underground Film Fest, and many others). I often think of this film as the start of my career as a filmmaker. Here it is.
*The legendary experimental filmmaker has an archive of film reels and other ephemera that crowds his workspace in the ATA gallery, and you can literally (or you used to be able to) go see him there and buy film clips by physically cutting them from the spools.
While you're all here please help me out by spreading word about the CAULDRON INTERNATIONAL FILM AND VIDEO FESTIVAL. We need weird, quirky, innovative, and/or just playing unique submissions from film and video makers. We need tons of this stuff so that we can create the very best program for our inaugural year.
Just send this link to all the media makers you know. Thank you! Thank you! thank you!
https://filmfreeway.com/Cauldron-1
- Tyrone