rrrojer.net

Two new additions to the Beauty Machine site:

1. Hate streaming web video? High quality .mp4 download now available on archive.org.
2. Email list for upcoming screenings and other announcements.

BEAUTY MACHINE, the short film I’ve spent the past semester+ working on, is now online for your viewing pleasure:

watch in HD
official site: http://rrrojer.net/beautymachine

Please help spread the word!

I finally got around to uploading PRE-APOCALYPSE, the short I made this fall. My new film BEAUTY MACHINE is still lingering in post-production, but it should be up soon too. Enjoy!

Why haven’t I touched this blog all semester? Because I’ve been making a movie! It screens tonight, come check it out:

Cameron’s band The Franks has a new video out and it looks great, sounds great. Very impressive and lots of fun. They sure are stylish over there … something about watching The Doom Generation* this weekend and then seeing this video, combined with all the snow outside, is giving me some LA envy like I haven’t felt since I first read Weetzie Bat.

The Franks: Neon Politik from The Franks.

* I think Ché put it best - “The Repoman of the 90s” … definitely nsfw.

My new short, Pre-Apocalypse, is screening next week along with the other projects from my fiction film class. These films are pretty rough technically– each filmed in one day on 16mm, edited by hand on the Steenbeck, single track audio, no sound mix, no titles, some camera problems– but represent a lot of talent and hard work. I’ll be posting a d.i.y. digital transfer of my film up here soon, but I want to encourage everyone to come out and see it on the big screen because the film projection looks so much better. Hope to see you there!

VES 150 Fall Screening
Thursday, January 8th
5:30pm
Carpenter Center Lecture Hall
24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA

This student piece has everything I love in cartoons and folk songs. It’s adorable and grotesque, in the tradition of both Betty Boop and Ren & Stimpy. Moral but not preachy, it makes me really happy.

Story from North America by Kirsten Lepore and Garrett Davis.

[via Paul]

Casting Call for VES 150: Fiction Filmmaking
Saturday, January 10, 2009
10am - 6pm
Sever Hall, Room 416
Harvard University

Audition for 6 films at once! My film class, VES150, is holding a class-wide audition for our spring films. Slots are almost full so don’t wait to sign up.

My friends Jon and David, and their friend Carson, are Tingle Fingers, an in-house design + screenprinting operation in Brooklyn. Their stuff looks really good– gorgeous designs and professional quality printing– but is made in the same loving d.i.y. way as when Jon was a jersey hardcore kid.

Their rates are reasonable so hire them or show them some love on facebook and myspace.

School has me very busy and hence not blogging much. But there’s been some little things I want to post, mostly creative endeavors by my pals and smidgens of youtube joy, and it seems wrong to do so without first addressing the election. Not so much cause I have anything new to say about the topic, but because as Guy put it, “insofar as this blog functions as some kind of archival document of my shit I thought it would be appropriate to note this (4 th3 future and @!!).” So two weeks late but better than never:

[CC-BY-NC-SA David Katz/Obama for America]

GO AMERICA!

Its clear at this point that the lefty wet dream of Obama being a closet radical who will dismantle capitalism from the inside is but a tantalizing fantasy. Luckily we have the financial crisis to accomplish that mission and Obama’s victory represents many other awesome things. For one, we’ve defeated the fascist elements in this country. Democracy finally pulled through and now I can stop being paranoid about prison camps and nuclear wars (hopefully). And maybe the Constitution will finally be rescued from the bathroom of the White House, where its been used as toilet paper for the past eight years. It will be nice to believe that I have rights because I am an American, not because I am a privileged white college student.

This is a definite win of intelligence over ignorance. I still can’t tell if our past few leaders (sans Clinton, maybe) were actually stupid or just pretending, but either way its fantastic that America elected someone who is not just crazy smart and competent but also graceful and stately. It almost makes me proud to be a Harvardian. Not so much because he went here but because he is a model of an elite (meaning those who are highly skilled and educated, not necessarily born rich) actually contributing to society, not just plundering it.

From a multicultural and racial perspective, this is huge and empowering, and not just as a welcome break from all those scowled white faces. I’m thinking about the difference in how the black students my sister goes to school with will view this country and their options for the future, compared to when I was in middle school. I doubt many students at MMS, black or white, would have believed you nine years ago if you told them a black man would be president less than a decade from now, however much they would have liked to. Now its real. Obama is inspiring to everyone, but for young minorities he opens up possibilities that may have previously seemed unattainable. I look forward to the next generation of leaders.

And the Obama family, what a joy to see such a power couple and their adorable children. Michelle and Barack are both intelligent, strong, and beautiful. They seem to sincerely love and respect one another, to treat each other as equals. They make matrimony seem both sexy and fulfilling.

Finally, how exciting to hear my peers say they feel patriotic for the first time in their lives. To cry with my friends and then cheer for hours in the streets with strangers. To have a couple weeks of feeling hopeful and optimistic, before settling back into pessimism. Which unfortunately is already trickling in, hence the need to dash this out for the archives.

Liberty and justice for all.