The EyeOdyssey Lounge

I spent the morning writing an impromptu treatment for a remake of The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari. Considering the context and subject matter of the film beyond its visuals, I reworked it into a political thriller that's made in response to our current conservative political climate.

I partly got the idea when recalling a video that mentioned the commodification of German Expressionism (specifically in the context of Tim Burton films), removing the original transgressive political and social themes of films like Caligari. As a fan of the original Caligari, I contemplated how its original message can be recontextualized in a way where people wouldn't immediately think Hot Topic teen fodder. Part of it was also greatly inspired by Piotr Szulkin's War Of The Worlds film, specifically in how he intended to personally develop the original theme to fit the political climate of 1980s Poland while also matching Wells' original intent when writing the novel. Stylistically, the narrative of the Caligari remake I wrote partly takes after the films of John Frankenheimer. I picture it playing out like the fusion of a Frankenheimer film and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's World On A Wire. Very mute with an underlying intensity and unease.

This film marks the centerpiece of what will easily go down as one of the more surreal filmgoing experiences I’ll ever have. Specifically regarding the connection between the audience and the film. Let me explain.

I was seated directly in front of the most… interesting row I would ever have the chance of overhearing in a theater. On one end there was this German couple. These two guys came in, and the most distinct conversation I could recall was “So, I heard you went to the beach?”, “Yeah yeah”, “What did you see there?”, “I saw the water”, “Did you see the beach?”, “No”. Just a little before them though, there walked in this middle-aged man and his elderly mother. Their whole vibe was like what you’d get if Psycho was fused with Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolfe. For the sake of reference, I’ll be calling the man Norman. Norman and his mother came in and sat just right behind my head (maybe a seat over) and the first thing the mother says is “Who is that weirdo”. “What are you talking about, ma?” replied Norman. “The creep who’s looking at everyone”. That’s about when I found out they were talking about me. Yes, I have a habit of looking when I hear people come into a theater, especially when it’s one that’s just starting to fill up. Just before I could fully comprehend that though, the mother piped up and exclaimed: “Where’s the screen!?”. “Well ma, they’ll probably project it on the wall” Norman said, making reference to the plain white non-textured wall of a museum’s theater space. “What the hell do they think they’re doing showing films without a screen!?! What sort of quality are we dealing with here!?!”. “Well ma, there’s likely gotta be something decent if it’s showing here”. “The amateurs we have to tolerate! Humph!”. Then after that, the mother started ranting about her hatred for Ru Paul circa the 1980s. “Ma, you don’t have to like Ru Paul to like these movies”. Mind you, none of the films in this certain showing had anything to do with Ru Paul. “If you don’t like the films, we can leave” assured Norman.

This little episode finally ceased once the curator came up to introduce the films. The theme of the event was disruption, each short in some way or another involving the disruption of the expectations that a passing viewer may hold. The films shown were Meet Marlon Brando, George Kuchar’s Actress film, an excerpt of a 1970 episode of the Dick Cavett show where he interviews Sly of the Family Stone, a short that marks the cinematic debut of Charlie Chaplin’s tramp character and this Schwechater film that Peter Kubelka directed. There was something in this one minute and thirty-second short that really set off Norman. As the curator ended his opening speech, the 16mm projector was reeled up and he stated that Kubelka preferred to have his films screened twice in a row during showings.

“Why? Just because he did doesn’t mean you have to!”

Looks like we’ve got a critic.


I liked the film, so I didn’t mind the repeated showings, kinda the opposite of minding it actually. I thought it was really well edited and especially stylized for a short from the 1950s. It’s the sorta stuff that would’ve been considered innovative even for the 1960s (and probably a bit later), and Kubelka’s approach to editing reminded me a great deal of Stan Brakhage’s approach to the film reel as its own form of art. With that, I was still also surprised to find out that Brakhage and Kubelka were close friends. I didn’t expect the two creators to be so closely connected.

In abridged form, Norman spent the whole screening expressing his deeply rooted grudge for the Schwechater short. He wasn’t one to hesitate on giving his thoughts, I don’t know who he assumed he was communicating to, as he certainly didn’t have much interest in the ‘weirdo’ who ‘looked at everyone’. The middle short of the screening was the Dick Cavett vignette. When Dick turned to the camera and said “And now, a word from our sponsors”, the screen suddenly went dark. The 16mm projector audibly started up, and there was a surprise second showing of Schwechater. Norman fucking flipped. “Are you kidding me?!?” he said, “God damn it not this again!”. Norman attempted to storm out of the theater, but his mother scolded him. “We get it! You’re transgressive! You went to film school! MOVE! ON!”. This second showing once again had two rounds, and like before, I didn’t mind. The moment the fourth round started, I couldn’t help but laugh at Norman as he continued giving off his own wannabe “serious critic” monologue silently to the small handful of people that were around him. Not laughing with him, but at him. He never screamed, he did that odd thing where people pretend to shout under their breath. Did he want others to hear this, was he rubbing his ego, does he have any control over his verbal outbursts?

This little incident especially soured Norman’s perspective of the showing. No matter what was on the screen, his mind would never leave that beer film. The main exception was when Sly and the Family came up in the Cavett film to do their stuff. Some of the best funk you’ll ever hear, but something else struck Norman and he started mockingly laughing at the music. The laughing was really, really weird too. He remained in this state of aggressively whispering the whole time, so he was like doing an aggravated laugh under his breath throughout the whole thing. You really had to hear it to understand what I’m talking about. The moment the song ended and the (really bizarre) interview with Sly started, Norman went right back to his beer film monologue. Following that, each time the screen would go dark between film showings, Norman would spout out one of his many one-liners. “I would rather watch this than that damned beer film again!” he says to the darkness. Alright then, Norman.

Just around the end of the event, after the digital projector went silent, the curator gave a reminder that there would be a surprise short screening. “Beer! Beer! Beer! the two German men directly behind me chanted. “Beer! Beer! Beer!” replied the few people in another row. “Noooooooo!!!” said Norman. Their calls were all replied to by an epilogue of Yul Brynner politely interrogating the audience. By the time Yul Brynner’s projection was gone, Norman and his mother followed suit. I didn’t realize until the Q&A that they had gone missing. Same with the two German men too, unfortunately.

Leaving the theater, I recalled on the drive back home that the theme of the night was disruption, and that the guy curating it had a history in subversive theater. Now is when I question everything that reality has presented to me.

A frame from “The Death Of A Home″.

What year is this?
It’s been a long time coming that I finally got around to writing another one of these things. It’s three months into 2019 already and I hardly even noticed, made a rude awakening when I looked to the calendar to see that it went from 28 back to 1. With all that, it hit me that I hardly wrote about the progression of any of my current film projects in that period of time. I thought I had a rough idea of how the passage of time worked, as it turns out I know as little about a concept as abstract as time as I do about every other thing in life that defies explanation. There’s a reason why I simultaneously dread everything and nothing after all. I’ve written through many variants of this first paragraph beforehand, each draft starting off with the same “long time coming” comment, which gained further relevancy with each rewrite. Let’s go and cut this ongoing habit before it goes beyond simple procrastination into flat out absurdity.


A frame from “The Death Of A Home″.

Like mentioned with the second production log, we spent most of the December of 2018 haphazardly preparing a forced move that we had to undergo with the sudden gentrification of our apartment at the time. This wasn’t the first time I faced the systematic Kafkaesque horror of gentrification. I was pissed, to say the least, and I did the only thing I could do, I documented it. With The Death Of A Home as it is currently, all the footage from the move itself has been compiled and made into a rough cut, adding up to my first proper feature length film at an hour and 12 minutes. The film is comprised of long shots, with scenes ranging from a crew of biohazard workers cleaning the basement of a black mold infestation that was never reported to the tenants to a sequence where long kept hand-painted furniture is forcibly discarded (tossed down a staircase into the back lot to lead to a rain of multicolored paint shards). The whole film will also be accompanied by a harsh noise soundtrack, I mostly have Merzbow stuff playing throughout as a placeholder. I’ll be shooting on the side some abstract visual sequences for the documentary, communicating certain details of our story that weren’t captured on film. I have a lot of ideas brewing for the mixed media techniques I could use for creating these images in a live action format, specifically ones that return to the sort of trash bag special effects that I used in my prior film concerning the subject of gentrification, Weightless Bird In A Falling Cage.

Setting foot in the new apartment, the first thing we came to notice was the absolutely vacant house next to us. The building was completely abandoned with electricity still hooked up, looked like no one set foot there in years. Having it face the bedroom every day, with our constant visual subjection and time to contemplate we came to the conclusion that something was gonna happen to the building at some point. It was clearly the middle child to an estate that left it to rot. Just in time for when we wrapped up unboxing everything, the building caught fire. At first I didn’t pay much mind to the sound of sirens driving through (it’s an Atlanta custom). It eventually hit me that something wasn’t quite right when I looked to one of the windows to see bright red, Suspiria technicolor light shining through.


A frame from “Burning Fragments: Mode 3 - Winter 2019″.

Did I go out to have a look? Of course, so did the rest of the neighborhood. Made an interesting meet your neighbor type of gathering, to say the least. I also brought my camera with me, and I came back with a metaphorical stack of raw footage along with a slow-cooked pair of lungs, the film is more important though. From that raw footage, I got the visual edit for the short Burning Fragments, a part of my seasonal “Mode” series that was first kicked off by Hard Drive and continued by my currently unreleased Factory Dreams. Burning Fragments is a montage of morbidly humbling sequences, from a roof visibly caving in through the smoking windows to medical staff cautiously carting out a stretcher, prepared for the worst case scenario. No one came out injured luckily, though I don’t mention that in the film (to keep up the haunting atmosphere). Power was cut to the building, the fire was put out and the street stunk of smoke for the next month. I thought it smelt like a smoked rib, one neighbor of ours said it smelt exactly like pot smoke.


A frame from “Factory Dreams: Mode 2 - Fall 2018″.

Right around there was where we thought the story would end, but several days later the building went back up again. This time around I went to one of the firefighters to ask what started the fire in the first place. As it turned out this second eruption was from the ongoing work of someone who had a great disdain to a singular sofa in the abandoned building. The first fire was started off by the arsonist setting this certain sofa aflame, and the guy returned to the scene of the crime to incinerate it for good. Our friendly neighborhood sofa arsonist is still on the run to this day.

Going into rapid-fire mode, some other noteworthy moments of the year so far include: OS updating, film editor street fighting, more OS updating, cool experimental film screenings (as seen in my documentary Moonlight Tunnel), one last OS update for good measure and discovering the new OS is as thought out as a tumble down a staircase.


Kafka’s Supermarket sorta ended up bunched between everything, seeing one quick, sporadic development at a time. The issue with actors still stands, gotta track down some people for the film to act in those pesky performed segments. It all goes smoothly until you’ve gotta spend the time and physical resources of other living, fleshy beings into your freaky unscripted cinematic daydreams.

Around the end of February, I collaborated with local collage artists Steven and Cassi Cline to write the dialogue for the film, collage literature style. We took several different approaches when it came to fully fleshing things out, some were done as experimental writing games while others were the more familiar cut n paste technique. The script took a wide variety of resources, including the FBI documents printed from the internet archive, the prologue of a Georges Bataille philosophical text and a book on nuclear weapons. I was largely the supplier when it came to the process, while I do visual collage stuff often I’m less of a writer (both letter by letter and cut up source by cut up source).

Readings of the literary collages will be interspersed throughout the film with an announcer who seems completely detached from the surreal nature of the scenes he describes. Burroughs’ approach for writing Naked Lunch aside, the primary source of inspiration for this detail comes from my memories of a radio clock that we had during my childhood. I would tune through channels with it searching for classical music, but most often I’d find news stations. Not knowing anything about politics at the time (being 5 to 6 years old and all), the nature of what was being discussed was completely alien to me. With how Kafka’s Supermarket is focused on the nightmarish distortion of everyday life in capitalist America, I felt it was necessary to recreate the atmosphere of those broadcasts that confused me all those many years ago.

One detail that left the production hung for a significant amount of time, as minuscule as it may seem, was the masks the actors would be wearing. The visual style of Kafka’s Supermarket was adapted from my 2017 zine What Brought Me To This Point, an experiment in nihilistic writing that focuses on the mental state of a man with prosopagnosia and a non-specified mental illness. My general understanding of prosopagnosia at the time was admittedly limited, I had just heard of a condition where someone couldn’t recognize faces and something about the idea creatively resonated. From this, all the characters were designed with the same basic facial template, prioritizing the bare essentials of the human face with an emphasis on the uncanny. Kafka’s Supermarket further branches out this aesthetic in using it as a wider embodiment of the lack of individual personality in a capitalist state, where everything is selling to a set of categorized markets that represent the general populace.


A frame from “Kafka’s Supermarket”.

The thing is, human heads aren’t structured like these figures I was drawing.

I spent an absurdly long time contemplating how exactly I could recreate the look of these characters not only with a budget but with a budget without having it look too “store-bought” in a way. The main catch was I was going by realism and not surrealism. At that point, I briefly lost sight of what exactly I was doing. We all make mistakes. I brooded on how I could convincingly recreate an abstract illustration. It took until I started reading the screenplays of Kōbō Abe that sense hit me again when I questioned how it would be done in a theater production. That was when I remember that I’m making a non-narrative experimental film, not something like a superhero fan film where a certain level of suspension of disbelief is expected. Since then I plotted out an alternative that’s simultaneously more affordable than anything I was theorizing beforehand while also being more surreal and true to the theories and atmosphere behind Kafka’s Supermarket (and even it’s predecessor, What Brought Me To This Point). Since then I’ve found myself further experimenting with the fusion of film and theater, specifically the use of minimal props and images to convey a greater concept.

I’ll be reposting cast calls for actors through the next several days, hoping for the best while I also simultaneously pester a nearby grocery store for permission to shoot a short sequence on their property. Productions like this are the ones that leave me realizing the oxymoronic nature in pursuing capitalist chains about the production of strictly anti-capitalist cinematic rhetoric.


A frame from “Empire Of Madness: A Wilderness Within Hell 2″.

While juggling well more than a handful of personal projects (all the films mentioned earlier, a second chapter of Iron Logs and a harsh noise album experiment), I also convinced myself that I can get back into animation again. I was publicly tiptoeing around the idea of a second Wilderness Within Hell film for a while, and now it seems that it will likely be a thing with Empire Of Madness. It’s not really a direct sequel as much as it is a continuation of the style that was first started with Madhouse Mitchel.

Set in the same age of industrial totalitarian inferno as Madhouse Mitchel, Empire Of Madness follows the life of Prometheus after his divine punishment for giving mankind knowledge. Having finally passed physical torture in the complete separation of his physical body, Prometheus wanders the Earth as an anomalous figure that assembles itself in a seemingly manufactured, mechanical nature. With pieces of his blood and flesh inherited by every man and woman with his given wisdom, he is inconsequently responsible for a curse put on all of humanity that destines man to collapse in paranoia and violence. Prometheus is shunned by everyone who crosses his path, seeing him as a sickly demon. Prometheus comes to realize that aside from his physical torture, the true act of divine punishment enacted on him will be the experience of having his own creation slowly destroy itself while it collectively tries to kill him.


A frame from “Empire Of Madness: A Wilderness Within Hell 2″.

I’m simultaneously writing the film’s screenplay while I draw certain visual intensive scenes. Like I mentioned I’m still a bit rough around the edges with writing, so for this phase of production, I’ll actively study Kōbō Abe’s scripts and also the screenplays to an Akira Kurosawa film and Battleship Potemkin. I’ll still in a way aim more to minimalism with how certain things play out, with this series’ influences in Japanese guro art it’s more inclined to create a certain nightmarish atmosphere above all else. While Madhouse was largely anti-systemic rage, this film leans more to bleak existentialism. Bits of the soundtrack are already recorded, the main theme can currently be heard here.

I had a dream last night in which a deeply intoxicated Orson Welles starred in a TV series that was essentially a poor man’s Siskel And Ebert.

Caught your attention yet? Good, there’s more. So, with each episode of this series, Welles would normally be seated in front of a belching fire, left to talk about whatever film he happened to see the night before, with the occasional vague description of a seemingly random theater production as well. He would commonly cover several films at once, circling around in a drunken ramble with seemingly no beginning or end, starting in mid-sentence after swigging down a drink of French Champagne. Each segment would begin with Orson blankly staring into the space beyond the camera, just a bit off center while melting into a horrific looking leather sofa with the fireplace dangerously close to his drinkable molotov cocktail in the making, he would then take a deep swig from the bottle (surely not his first for the night) and wobble his way to facing the camera like a turtle turned over on its shell.

“Bwaahaahhh” would begin one of his many aimless monologues, being the sound he’d blurt out when finally making some feeble means of eye contact with the awkwardly distanced camera, a clear representation of his connection with the audience. There was never really a set subject or theme with his review segments. Instead, they’d follow Welles‘ drunken train of thought as he would trail on and on with half thought out statements regarding whichever miscellaneous bits of media would cross his mind, commonly riddled with mispronunciations and full on butcherings of individuals‘ names. He’d start off with a loose description of “Jim Castanets’ King of a Chinese Cookie”, just to then make a comment on the writing for the film “Leslie Nielsen (and some other bastards) On An Airplane” to then finally mention how earlier that week, he went to see a performance of the “Julia Currencies'” play “Some Many Colors” (intending to mention the play Living Color, a production that was written by my mom Juli Kearns).

Each review would end with Welles‘ eyes suddenly showing a slight glimmer as he barks to the camera - “Oh, and I’m making a new film!”. The feature of his was an autobiography titled Here Under Protest Is Beef Burgers, in which Orson would use the film’s running time to cover his fall from grace and “the injustices (he) would face when having to deal with incompetent creative amateurs”. His descriptions of the work would commonly devolve back to drunken rants, and a slow crossfade would give way to the next review segment, starting off once again with Welles‘ trademark swig from the bottle, sometimes to be followed by a guttural belch.

Seated in front of a television playing reruns of this program, the complaint “I’m sick of how they take these people who are at the low points of their lives to make disposable entertainment from them” was the last I heard in my head before waking up.

********************************** Author's Note (January 8th - 2019) **********************************

I know it's a bit underwhelming to start the new year off with a repost, but I just realized now that I never backed this entry up anywhere, and losing it would be a damn shame. Will have some proper posts up here again in a short while.

The Italian cannibal films following Cannibal Holocaust sorta devolved to becoming like the metalhead’s equivalent to those reality shows where city folk are thrown out in the exotic wilderness just to eat bug anuses and whatnot. There’s no denying it, all the films are lacking is a cocky narrator and a scoreboard ramping up and down with each gore scene.

The most honest depiction an artist could give.

I was aiming for something a bit like the unknown comic, but midway through I recalled a bizarre video I uncovered while misspelling “Spectreman” on YouTube where I got someone’s microbudget remake of the Japanese series. The characters were all wearing cardboard boxes with squared easter island expressions either drawn or cut into their primal masks. The soundtrack was a Tarantino scale budget bomb of licensed songs, mixing the discographies of Dick Dale and Steppenwolf, so obviously it would be blasted in the living room speakers as background noise in someone’s third generation VHS short. It was part of a series. There were at least 4 films in the saga, going from untreated color to purple-tinted black and white.

Let's hope the Flickr gallery embedding on this works.

The complete set of illustrations that I drew to Drawkill’s Goretober prompts. Had several ideas that didn’t make it through where they could be done on time, but was able to finish more of these than I initially expected (especially with all the film production antics going on, both on my original projects and work for hire type stuff). Got a bit quirky with these in a way (especially with Christmas Over Tokyo), but happy with how they came out.

Figure At The Base Of A Crucifixion: Prompt 01. (Pins And Needles)
Senseless Fixation: Prompt 02. (Sensory Loss)
Weaponized Dreams: Prompt 04. (Flesh And The Machine)
The Colony: Prompt 08. (Infection).
Christmas Over Tokyo: Prompt 14. (Blood Blood Blood).
Man Bites Dog: Prompt 15. (Animal Instinct).
Frankenstein’s Nightmare: Prompt 19. (Dismantle Instructions.)
Reconstruction Of A Fallen Angel (Frankenstein Version 2): Prompt 31. (Scientific Diagram).

This is my attempt at doing a by ear rerecording of the song that plays during the finale of Hiroshi Harada’s 1992 underground classic, Midori. With the initial controversy Midori faced on release, it was said that the masters of the film’s soundtrack were destroyed along with most known 16mm prints. The score was written by J.A. Seazer, an artist who already gained a notable following in the art scene from his collaborations with Shūji Terayama and his Tenjo Sajiki troupe.

This technically isn’t the first time I attempted reconstructing Seazer’s soundtrack. Before this, I did a set of tracks in early 2017 based on the film’s score as part of my now defunct Vaulting School side-project. I was working in Garageband at the time (a software with a much smaller range in synthesizers), and the reconstruction of the ending theme especially took a blow from my limitations. My deconstruction of the track at the time was also inaccurate, I didn’t put as much time into it as I did the themes accompanying the mutation scene or the opening credits. With this new version I spent a morning to a late afternoon piecing things together note by note, seeing how the song was exactly written to get the closest reconstruction possible, this track was the final result. All the talk of accuracy aside, I couldn’t help but put a slight improvisation in the mix by the very end, as the track didn’t exactly conclude as much as it faded out with the scene.

Yes, I am slightly obsessed.

This is a continuation from the Kafka’s Supermarket production log I wrote back in November. As I don’t want to repost the same old production log that ravingly promised a deadline that was set in late November, I’ll cut and paste the relevant info on Kafka from that post as a footnote to this update as basic context for any new readers.

********************************** Production Log #2 **********************************




As the year begins to draw to a close, I regret to inform that Kafka’s Supermarket will not meet its completion goal, and that production may go on into 2019. This is as much of a bummer for me as it is for those who’ve followed its progression. I’m going to be fully transparent in this update of the current status of the short along with some circumstances that both resulted in the film’s delay along with the unintentional birthing of a whole new film project.

The current edit of Kafka’s Supermarket is around 70% completed, with nearly all sequences without actors edited and finalized. Aside from a missing end credits theme (ideally a soundalike of Coil’s Amethyst Deceivers), the soundtrack is also fully rounded out. The main current barrier in Kafka’s production is the lack of scenes involving actors. Taking some inspiration from David Lynch’s early films and Derek Jarman’s super 8mm shorts, Kafka’s structure is set to prominently feature transitional scenes of actors performing in segments that verge more on performance art than they do traditional filmmaking.

While Atlanta is currently booming in its film scene, it‘s still stuck in a prominently mainstream leaning with little space for an underground community. Most experimental creators are pushed off to their own corners, hardly able to reach out to one another through the endless walling of no-budget romantic comedies and amateur horror flicks. I do feel to some extent that this does leave a good potential for creating a local ripple in having films that are truly different, but at the same time it makes is significantly more challenging to find other locals to pull into your own projects.

Stylistic differences aside, a more significant barrier was placed in all film efforts in late October when we were alerted on Halloween night by mock trick or treating lackeys of our landlord that our apartment complex would be renovated and converted to a set of condos. This is not the first time we experienced the consequences of gentrification first hand, back in 2016 we were run out of our apartment of 10 years by a crew that made our lives a living hell. Now late into the stages of moving, I can say as scorpions crawl out of the floorboards of my flooding room that our experiences with the team running us out now are no different. Trust me, I’m going somewhere with this.

While Kafka’s Supermarket underwent a delay with this recent development, another film I was tinkering with practically skyrocketed. Ever since our first major move in 2016, a lot of my projects started to develop an underlying theme regarding the gentrification of Atlanta, most prominently with Weightless Bird In A Falling Cage. Though the themes were vaguer in my prior shorts, with what’s happening literally as I write this I have a cynically pictureesque image to point my camera’s lens to for the project that’s become The Death Of A Home. Much more sporadic in nature, though already over 30-minutes in length, The Death Of A Home is currently the blunt archiving of the beginning of the renovations and how it factors into the overall shift in population that Atlanta has faced in the recent decades with the spike in gentrification.

The Death Of A Home is more angered tonally than some of my other films (for rather obvious reasons), which is saying a lot concerning the whole attitude that Kafka’s Supermarket holds as its sister project. It essentially dwells on the subjects it archives in a guerrilla documentary fashion while still holding the tonal aggression of my experimental shorts. The climax, which I edited a little earlier this week, acts as a take-off of Stan Brakhage’s The Act Of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes in its depiction of a building being torn out by a biohazard crew as part of the building’s “autopsy” after the death it experiences in its intentional mistreatment from a landlord intending to run out his tenants. Like how Brakhage’s film depicts the dehumanization of a body in its autopsy, the climax of The Death Of A Home depicts the process of a household being stripped of all artificial sentimentality or emotional connection, rendered to a pile of scrap wood by the end of the process. It shows the underlying destructive nihilism and greed that roots itself deeply in late capitalist era conservative America in the image of the mutilated cadaver of the necessity of shelter.

********************************** Kafka's Supermarket (As Described On November 4th - 2018) **********************************




Kafka’s Supermarket is an avant-garde collage styled exercise in dystopian imagery, showing the dystopia in modern American commercial life and media stagnation. It follows a modern society obsessed with violence, sexuality and their macabre combinations in throwaway tabloid media.

In October, I collaborated with Tumblr artist Lorelei Nuyts for the film’s production. She modeled and rendered the backdrops that are used in the film’s hand drawn sequences along with several shots of a city the can be seen in the “billboard landscape” sequence. Her contributions to the film’s production were really great, especially given the minimalist directions and concept art I gave her. A version of one of her backdrops without all the effects I’ll be throwing on top of can be seen below.

As of the 4th of November, several small enhancements have been made with the film’s current working cut. A character giving a lecture in the hand drawn sequences now has highly contrasted footage of a public speaker laid over his frames, giving him a more pronounced sense of motion amidst the listeners. Several brief montages of photo collages have been added along with some live action cutaways depicting architecture in motion. Intending to include audio collages of inaudible conversations in future cuts. The current edit is now roughly over 17 minutes, though there are moments of dead space where acted segments are needed. Briefly considered extending the film’s title to become part of a series in a similar vein to the Thinklematter Visual (TV) shorts or Hollis Frampton’s Magellan series (i.e. Straits of Magellan: Magellan at the Gates of Death, Part I).

From "Straits of Magellan: Magellan at the Gates of Death, Part I".