Posts Tagged ‘jon reiss’

(photo credit: Sheri Candler up in London Town)

It promises to be a veritable feast of blogs this week on the the DIY movement with a 2-day do-it-yourself workshop presently afoot up in London Town run by my friends, mega-DIYers Jon Reiss & Sheri Candler, organized under the auspices of Chris Jones’ amazing Living Spirit production outfit, makers of the award-winning Oscar-nominated short film Gone Fishing.

Film fanboy Oli Lewington will be dispatching from the confab throughout the week and here’s his latest summary from Day One.

I’ve been enjoying the sessions vicariously from here in the Golden Burg, but as I was doing so it did get me thinking about how the whole notion of DIY was perfectly suited to the budding Chinese independent scene.

Here’s why:

Do you trust me?

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For the past couple of nights, I’ve been this close to burning straight through the midnight oil while catching up a series of long vidclips at London-based production company Living Spirit’s Vimeo Channel. If you’re drawing a blank right about now on Living Spirit, it’s because you’re not making the mental connection between it and standout British indie sensation Chris Jones, director of the award-winning short Gone Fishing.

Over the next couple of days, I plan on doing even more full-court blogging about the independent film movement, in general, along with a generous slathering of commentary about several of the streaming materials I find while trawling around sites like Chris’ and others’ in search of well-done, well-assembled films.

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Hey I’m always up for a good vidcast and Chris Jones and Judy Goldberg’s The Production Office is hum dinger– and it’s brand new, to boot!

With episodes running at least an hour and a half long, the three they’ve assembled thus far have been chock-full of tips and trade tricks that aspiring DIY filmmakers should make an integral part of their weekly coverage. You won’t want to miss a single episode, and I don’t say that lightly.

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I’m almost done reading Scott Kirsner’s Fans, Friends & Followers: Building An Audience and A Creative Career in the Digital Age (affiliate link) based on a majorly strong thumbs-up from Jon Reiss, author of Think Outside the Box Office. Both books complement each other well, even despite their mild overlap, and I’ve been particularly enjoying how Scott’s book is structured along Po Bronson lines, essentially a series of comprehensive vignettes showing a representative sampling of people who embody the DIY/social media/take no prisoners message Kirsner is conveying to his loyal audience.

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I spent Sunday evening flipping through Winter 2010’s edition of Filmmaker Magazine, fresh off the press for January. I stumbled across two excellent DIY articles, one called REMIND (p84) penned by its aspiring editor, the filmmaker Scott Macaulay that reported on several hot do-it-yourself trends from 2009, some of which set to become the norm for the coming decade and beyond. The second was by the excellent guest editor Alicia Van Couvering (“SLUMPDAYS,” p90), who gave a clever summary of five Sundance-entry films  that recently shattered the independent funding sound barrier using innovative crowdsourced fundraising approaches which helped catapult these titles all the way to Park City.

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Jon Reiss‘ Think Outside the Box Office has so far turned out to be an excellent read. Yesterday I happened across an interesting passage from his “Rethinking Marketing” chapter (the sixth, if anyone’s counting) which sounded uncannily similar to something I’d heard Loren Feldman opining about three weeks ago. Read the rest of this entry »

It took me an extra couple of days over this year-end Holiday Rush, but I finally managed to catch the entirety of Jon Reiss‘ BOMB IT!, an independently-produced, guerrilla-marketed documentary about the phenomenon of “tagging,” “piecing,” and grafitti writing all around the globe (US, The Netherlands, Germany, France, the UK, South Africa, Spain, Brazil, and Japan).

Truth be told, I never intended to watch this film — in fact, I was somehow gently persuaded into forking out a “combo price” for the non-bootlegged DVD when I snatched up my copy of Think Outside of the Box Office, a new title on guerrilla film distribution — also by Reiss — a propos to something we’re working on in China at moment.

Was I in for a surprise, and to think of all the special features I would have missed! By the second minute of the audio commentary, majordomo-ed by Reiss and Tracy Hanes, his very fetching producer, I had already whipped my Moleskine out and was furiously scrawling notes about aspects we’d like to put into play on our own project, such was the strength of the piece. Stefano E. Bloch, himself a “reformed” tagger, featured masterfully in a bonus section extended interview (positioned in front of a bookcase I’d give an eyetooth to own) waxing staggeringly eloquently about themes like urban gentrification, graffiti murals versus random senseless tagging, gangbanger pieces and sigs, making a living from your gallery fine art, and how all of this comes to a nexus in most large American cities.

Reiss and Hanes, in their own right, describe their own odyssey in the run up to getting the film green lit and “in the can” and about the cascade of tribulations they faced in the various cities they filmed in, sharing with us their experiences of:

• feeling the rush of heading down into São Paolo’s sewers in full Hazmat gear to record to graffiti writer Zezao speak about the blissful peace of mind he enjoys painting metres below street level and about the life prospects for one Brazilian family living amidst the gargantuan metropolis’ human fecal matter.
• sitting with expatriate Swedes Pike & Nug talk about their “bombing raids” in Berlin’s Uenterbahn — with a funny original clip showing a drunken Nug defacing a pristine German underground station using a basic can of black spray paint.
• befriending some of the veteran Bronx taggers of the “Wild Style” crew (featuring Tkid), and what a quotidian existence was like in the Big Apple before New York tidied itself up, making public defacement of property into a felony offence with a 15-year jail term attached.
• heading out into the São Paolo white night with resident favella graffiti writer Wagner, as he climbs up a towering billboard sans harness to apply his name on the advertisement’s fluttering canvas margins.
  

Let’s just say I devoted a whole mess of time to this single otherwise unassuming disc…

The takeaways were many, the lulls were few, and I felt completely justified in my purchase. I suspect Jon’s book will be equally as engaging, and I’ll be back with more insights on my read just as soon as I’m done.

And if I don’t speak to you before then, PF 2010 (for my Czech readers) and Happy Holidays and many joyous, healthy returns for my friends, colleagues, and loved ones around the Globe.