I was brought on, semi-last minute, to direct The Uncluded’s first single from their upcoming album. The song is called “Delicate Cycle”, and the duo is comprised of old friends Aesop Rock and Kimya Dawson.

I directed it with my best friend Ben Fee, my usual DP Drew Daniels, my usual SF crew had my back, but this time we also flew up to Portland for parts of it, and recruited some new family members, and we were tasked with the challenge of dealing with a huge cast everywhere we went. More on that later. For now, here is the video:

About a year ago, Guru Khalsa and I co-produced and directed a ballet piece for a very talented dancer by name of Victoria Ananyan, who was a principal dancer at SF Ballet at the time. She’s since then done big things in Mexico and Amsterdam.

The piece was called Krounk, or Crane. As a tribute to the composition of poetry by Komitas, an Armenian priest from the last century, who’d slowly gone mad after surviving and witnessing the genocide of his people. Victoria herself is a survivor of war and famine as a child, so the works of Komitas carries a special connection. It was choreographed by Noemi Araxi, a fellow Armenian dancer and choreographer with a school in the Bay Area. The two lovely ladies, though differ age, share both extreme dedication to their work and zanily romantic outlooks on life. I was thrilled to spend the day with them.

We spent the day shooting in the dance studio with a few small lights and a skateboard dolly, then finished it during  magic hour in The Presidio, with the help of Matthew Washburn (my DP for Magic Clap), who manned camera C. The idea was to have a dancer imagine herself in the wild as she put on a very private and personal performance by herself in the studio.

I did a campaign for Robert Mondavi some time ago with Eric Wolfinger and the usual suspects. It involved a lot of epic cumber so we could improvise freely when it came shooting and still yielded shots that were both perfectly lit and but still felt fancy free. It spanned over four days in some of the most beautiful corners of Big Sur. Here’s a little taste of it, for one of the ads that never officially launched, set to the music of Grand Hallway.

And, far more recently, Eric Wolfinger started a column in local tastemaker magazine 7x7 called From Scratch, where he delves into processes for foods and drinks that fascinate him. He’d met Mama at the Slanted Door Commissary when he shot Charles Phan’s Vietnamese Home Cooking. She was his aunt who ran a little commissary full of mamas ‘round her age and shape, and each morning they made 3,000 delicious buns, rolls, and tamales from scratch. Here you go:

Drew and I have signed a pact to make as many films together as possible.

In October I was hired to shoot a music video for Santa Barbara-based Anastasia’s single, Extranjero. It’s an appalachian tune where the pulse of the song quietly builds into something very kinetic. And we’ve crafted a music video in which an Amish girl runs through the forest, with Amish bounty hunters hot on her heels. Here are some stills from the shoot:

So, be on the lookout. It also features the stuntman/actor/director/filmmaker extraordinaire Eric Jacobus. We’ve done a lot of really elaborate fast dolly shots through the rain and mud, and we can’t wait to share this with you!

My frequent partner/ collaborator Eric Wolfinger and I were commissioned by Calphalon to do a series of interactive recipe videos that showed off their pots and pans. We turned his kitchen into a beautifully lit and noisy studio and got to work. You can watch the first two videos of the campaign here.

Calphalon YOURSET Porkchop Recipe from Eric Wolfinger on Vimeo.

Shooting food with Eric always borderlines backbreaking, because he’s got such a high standard on what food should look and sound and feel like. The trade off is that we always get to eat what we’ve filmed, and he’ll never agree to photograph food that doesn’t taste amazing.

Enjoy the first two, there are more to come, and I’ll see if I can update this post in a few days with just the videos, just for you guys.

I know I’m pretty overdue for an update, let’s kick it off with a Pitchfork premiere of a Cycles of Gehenna music video, edited by Ben:

From my facebook post, a little behind the scene rambling:

My best friend Ben Fee and I directed a music video for Aesop Rock together this summer called Cycles to Gehenna. It was an arduous production with all sorts of craziness and logistics and math, but at the heart of it were four dancers (and one choreographer) we’d casted, who put their trusts in us and really just dove into everything we asked of them. We shot through four 12+hour days, and we were at San Francisco’s infamous Armory until about two A.M. 

We had one last little bit to do with Aesop Rock and we were going to wrap the production, and while I was prepping with him, Ben Fee and the girls fell in love with the hanger and decided to fit in one more dance sequence. When I entered the hanger, it was completely dark except for the one 4k light we’d placed earlier, there was no music, and the entire crew was silent, all you could hear were the footstep shuffles of Sati Harutyunyan and Avery Oatman. It was a magical moment, and one of the few moments in that production where we felt like we’d beaten logistics and we were free to be filmmakers and dancers.

I’d put some of my favorite shots into the music video, but Ben was so in love with the footage that he’d decided to cut a video with just the dancing girls. First he’d only wanted to do it as a present to Aes and the girls, but the label took a liking to it and now it’s on Pitchfork and other sites for everyone to see. 

That music video shoot truly contained some of the soul-crushing defeats I’d endured in my short time as a music video director, but damn it all, we got the shots we came to get. And they were beautiful, and the crew was wonderful, and the dancers were faithful, and my partner Ben was a friend. And Aes was a sweetheart. And the rental houses were family.

And sometimes, in filmmaking, getting the shots means we’ve defeated our defeats, and now we get to choose how we want to remember our shoot.

IMVDb.com had a little skype session with Ben Fee and me about the making of the video, where we got into some literally sordid details surrounding the shoot. Check it out if you’ve got a few minutes! 

Thought I was all done with music videos this summer, but Boots needed a music video, and I’d been a fan of The Coup forever, so I just had to do it. 

We were on a very tight deadline and budget, so we hit the ground running, rallied the family, and just had fun. The Rolling Stone premiered the video today: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/videos/premiere-the-coup-the-magic-clap-20120830

Youtube version:

Thanks for the good memories. And I’d like to shout out to Matthew Washburn for taking over the camera on this one. The boy built his own handheld steady shot rig and never looked back.

My best friend Ben Fee  drove up from LA for this one. The family behind my recent shoot all came back as well. We shot on Treasure Island and at the infamous San Francisco Armory. Long grueling days of crafting pretty imageries, hearing pretty girls giggle, and having everything else in general spiral out of control. We held it together though - the crew put up and carried us through together.

I met Armenian choreographer Noemi Araxi sometime in June, was excited to do a passion project for her, and decided to steal a few of her students for some Armenian-flavored classical moves. Aes wanted motorcycles, so I recruited two buddies, and here we are:

photo by Rick Marr.

This was my second time operating on a Red, though Ben did most of the operating, while I did most of the editing.

Enjoy.

You’ve made it! the NPR premiere of If I Be Wrong, directed by me and starring Wolf Larsen drops today.

my little statement I had to write for NPR:

My dear friend and anti-muse Wolf Larsen asked me to make a music video for her. It was nerve-wracking. In the four years I’ve known her, I’ve heard about the most impressive feats by some of her closest friends, many of which through traditional news outlets. Her friends make the TED Conference look like The Gathering of Juggalos¹, and I know for a fact that she’s got at least ten filmmakers ready to knock a music video out of the park for her. I specialized in Hong Kong style fight choreography and naturally-lit food cinematography, neither of which grabbed her. She asked if I was up for a seven-and-a-half minute number titled “If I Be Wrong”, a song about a complicated breakup, honoring the confusion, second guessing, and the ultimate trigger-pulling that breakups were made of. I’d only been in one relationship in my whole life, and that one lasted maybe four weeks, with a very happy and amiable end, but I’d read a few novels and had a functional grasp of what she was talking about.

This much I knew: I wasn’t going to take this one easy. A tough song about a tough breakup dictated a tough shoot. I had the elements lined up against me – the length of the song, the lack of any budget, the quick turnaround, the total unavailability of the singer – I had no interest in making any of this easier for myself. I began pitching concepts to Wolf; she demanded, again and again, that I’d keep it simple. I would like to, I said to her, but it was going to be hard work. If shooting stunt guys and sexy chefs taught me anything, it was that stories weren’t merely told through lights, makeup, and acting- they were also dictated by the process. An film production of any kind is comprised mainly of a series of banal tasks – somebody walks to a place, picks a thing up, looks at a person, says a sentence…etc., and it takes a very focused director and disciplined crew to stay on course from one shot to the next, so the story may shine through in every shot. While developing that skill, I relied on the process itself to substitute for Wolf’s lot.

And the rest fell in place. I dusted off a concept that had its origin as a visual gimmick for a hip hop video, kept the parts that still interested me years later, pitched it to my trusty producer Eric (who underwrote half of the budget because how Wolf’s voice steadied him), roped in the antique shop owner Jon (whose space, I have to admit, did make everything a bit easier), then enlisted a Bolivian documentarian named Tupac, a pair of Spanish lovebirds who were projection experts but were parting in two days, a dancer who could fall asleep on any surface, a trio of classically trained musicians who were brothers, an eight-year sober single mama who didn’t know how good an actress she was, and a couple more friends who didn’t know what they signed up for - and turned it into an improvised dance between a projected dancer, a weary woman, two cameras, one projectionist, and as many objects and items as we could, for three very cold and very long nights. There were also a last minute flight to DC and a two-month long editing process, all of which amounted to this video right here. It contains no computer-generated effect, though it’s got plenty of artifacts from a tough shoot, as well as a very earnest dilemma, sung by a tough, tough girl.

That is why I can say this video is my favorite thing I’ve done.

Boom, y’all.

Here’s a link to the clean version: 
http://www.mtv.com/videos/aesop-rock/809893/zzz-top.jhtml

This video came out of sitting next to Aes (I was his “sit-in” double for a video shoot by new friend Isaac Ravishankara who made this last-minute music video for Aes’s Zero Dark 30, with like effects and everything) - and we got to talking about Chinese food and kung-fu movies and he got all excited when he saw my Hand Over Fist fight and I took it for a grain of salt but he actually followed up about a week later and one very grueling month later, here it is. I hope you enjoy it. There isn’t nearly as much choreography as we’d originally planned, but when you shoot fight scenes, the set up shots always take a day (just like getting people to pose and stare at each other and stuff) and you usually get your best stuff on the second day. Our two-night shoot was like two first days, so we had to just cram a lot of stuff in a tiny time window (between 2-4am each day) - the stunt guys killed it. Vlad the fearless choreographer and I have been fans of each other for about ten years now, so it was good to finally do something like this. I’d known him since he was a funny Russian kid in high school, IMing me obscenities and talking about obscure Hong Kong movies with me. Good to see him full grown and taking knives to the belly. His new fight - Men in Suits - is one of the best things I’d ever seen. I had the idea of catching knives via bats for some time now, and never knew for sure if the gag could work until long after I shot it when Alan Cecil worked out the composites and I cut together the swish pans. That was a huge gamble that could’ve fallen on its ass quite easily.

That’s Zumbi (of Zion I) and Patti, during a rehearsal take.

Here is the full credit:

Most of the peeps were long time collaborators. Felt good to be building a fam. Feels good to know that unless I get hit by something or struck by something, this is probably just the beginning of a long series of Projects That Cost Sleep Friendship and My Own Money. If any of my collaborators is reading, I like to thank you. If anyone else is reading this and enjoys the video, I’d love to hear from you. Even if you’re a hater.

Now onto the next video!