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| Playing Under Projection |
My buddy Nick Dellaposta and I go back, way back. Matter of fact we were in our first band together, *Adorn. Before the dawn of the internet, you either had to sink money into a proper 4-track recording system, or you had to get inventive... we chose the latter. Desperate to record, I discovered that if I cut apart my guitar cable and twisted the ends together with an RCA cable that I was able to record the instrument with my mothers Aiwa cassette deck. Moreover, if I did this while "dubbing" a previously recorded cassette, I could effectively create a makeshift multi-track recording. About three times a week Nick would make the three mile walk to my house and we would record demos together into the homemade system. I cannot overly-express the genuine happiness that arises in me by bragging that despite two thousand, one hundred and eighty miles between us and fifteen years having passed, we're still collaborating on art with one another.
*I use the term band loosely as we never played a single show... or even had a drummer.
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| Nick and I |
About a year ago I got a drunken text message from Nick as I was watching a movie. I ignored it and several thereafter, but upon my phone beeping for the 6th time I read it. He had just written a new song and wanted me to listen to it. Fine. I walked into the kitchen and listened to the song he had just recorded directly into his phone. There is no other way to put it, I cried. My longtime friend had written a song about my life and the craziness I have been through and it moved me to no end. Flash forward to a year later and Nick again hit me up. This time it was to direct the music video for the song based on my life. At first I laughed, after all, the idea of someone directing a song about themselves is pretty far up it's own ass, but after some thought, I agreed on one condition: We had to kill the main character in the music video. We all die, but how many of us have had the chance to direct our own death? When Nick asked who we could get to play such a role, I immediately thought of my good friend, Michael Parks.
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| Nick, Parks, and I. |
I first met Michael Parks (from
Kill Bill,
Dusk Till Dawn,
Then Came Bronson, etc) during the shooting of Kevin Smith's film
Tusk. After a few days on set, it became evident that Parks needed an assistant to help him on set with mundane tasks and Kevin assigned me to be that person. Believe it or not, the first few interactions between the green-haired punk-rocker and the grumpy old man were a bit awkward. However, over the course of a few days we discovered a mutual admiration of cinema and music and formed a kinship that continues to this day.
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Matt's account of the music
video is great. |
So with the concept and the talent taken care of, I needed a crew. I'm lucky enough in this life to have a group of insanely talented folks in the same industry who all share common interests, thus I hit up my friends Andrew Heaberlin and Matt Rowbottom. Andrew is a badass cinematographer from Kentucky who has done everything from his own short-film
Let It Be War to being an Executive-Producer on
Yoga Hosers. Matt on the other hand is the behind-the-scenes producing talent who just finished his new project
Going Dark: A Sith Story, starring
Darren Hayes and
Tim Stanton (from the
He Said, He Said Podcast) . My wife agreed to assistant-direct (shes a saint for dealing with me on set) and with the essential building blocks in place, the rest was just a matter of "getting the band back together" as the kids say. I called up my friends
J.C, Erik,
Mitch,
Joey,
Shaun, and
Cam and we were off to the races.
I cannot thank all of my amazing friends enough for all they have done for me and my stupid projects. I would fight and die for each of them.
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| Andrew Shooting Babies |
We shot and edited the project in 4k, but the problem with the newly budding format is that there is next to no downloadable content for it. The long term solution to this seems to be highly effective encoding codecs like h265,which gives you ample quality with very small format size. The only issue with these is that it takes an incredible amount of processing power and a very good video card to reap the benefits of it, otherwise you're just staring at moving macro-blocks.
So here's our little contribution to the world of 4k, on the provided link below you can either download the highly efficient 4k, h265 video via my website (I suggest playing it in VLC), or if you follow the Vimeo link and click download, it will provide you with the 4k, h264 (easier on your computer to process, but larger filesize) download for free. It also provides you with 1080p, 2k, and other formats as well.
H265 (Right-Click, Save As)
Twisted Knives (Official Music Video) - TO NO END - 4k Resolution
