Last night we took little Stella home from the hospital. It's great to be home and amazing having an infant in the house with us. Of course I've got my camera rolling on her all the time, but this is not a daddy blog and how many of you people searching for live rock shows, contortion videos and stuff about Tookie Williams are going to stick around for videos of my baby? If you are interested, I've got another blog set up for that here. So, how do I segue this personal stuff into another live Ween clip? Oh, I know... this next one goes out to all the doctors and nurses at California Pacific Medical Center. You rock.
Today my feature film debut, Washington Interns Gone Bad, is making its European premeire at the Tromanale Alternative Film Festival in Berlin. One of my favorite independent production companies, Troma Films, is sponsoring this festival to run alongside the Berlinale Film Festival, much like they run Tromadance in Utah during the Sundance festival. I am very excited about this because I've always thought this film would play very well to a European crowd. I'll post some updates on the official film website once I get them from my producer/star who has been spending the last month in Germany gearing up for this. Here's the official 2 minute trailer. Enjoy.
Another one from the 5/22/00 show at the 9:30 Club in DC, another one of Gener's classic bitter breakup songs. I had this houesmate back when I lived in New Paltz who decided that this was her song and whenever we were listening to Chocolate and Cheese, she would make us all stop talking whenever this one came on.
The more video I shoot, the more I add to my demo reel. Here's the latest version. This weekend I was able to score a 14" NTSC monitor for free that somebody was giving away on craigslist. My video card has an s-video output, so once I get an s-video to RCA connector, I'll get this thing hooked up and hopefully this could help with editing, though I may need a better video card for this.
Here's one of the very first videos that I put together when I first got my camera. My buddy who worked in the IT division had some old monitors to get rid of, our friend in research was captain of the softball team, we were all fans of Office Space, so there was only one thing to do.
Ween closed out that 5/22/00 show at the 9:30 Club in DC with this Spaghetti Western epic. This is a song of bloodthirsty revenge and betrayal which you could just picture being acted out by Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef, set to a haunting tune that could have been written by Enio Morricone himself.
Dave at Weezil Breezes was kind enough to rent my blog this week. He's an Arizona dad / musician / writer with several blogs and this one has his personal stories and observations. Please go pay him a visit by clicking that Featured Blog thumbnail in the right column. It would be nice if at least one of my blog renters got some decent traffic out of this.
Today's video is a behind the scenes featurette from my first film, Washington Interns Gone Bad. This was shot on one of our final days of shooting in the spring of 2002 and I think it captures the chaos of no-budget underground filmmaking pretty well. I found inspiration to make this film dancing on the bar of an Adams Morgan dive one night. These two girls were drunkenly dancing on top of the bar and they reeked of a Capitol Hill internship. This was also right after the Summer of Chandra which turned into the Autumn of Osama, so the political climate was a bit insane to say the least. The screenplay came together in about a month. I was writing it on my Handspring Visor wherever I was whenever inspiration struck. It took about a month. It took another month to crew up and cast it. Then one month of furious shooting before two lead actors moved away, and another two months of less than furious shooting, and a whole summer of editing. It opened to huge sold out crowds in DC, and has since played at a few festivals, including the upcoming Tromanale in Berlin, Germany. Everything I know about making movies I learned by making mistakes on this one.
This is from the 5/22/00 show at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC. The first time I ever heard this song was the first time I saw Ween live. It was at Tramps in New York City sometime in the winter of 95 on the Chocolate and Cheese tour. I wish I had a camera for that show! I can't even find an audio recording of it. They played for over 4 hours and probably played every song they had. But you can download a torrent of the DVD of this show. It's over at browntracker.
I'm amazed that I've made it almost 3 months without having to re-run a video, but it seems that I've gone and used up most of what I already have captured and encoded. I'll try to get more fresh posts up as soon as I can, but for now, please enjoy this classic. It's been almost a year since I made this film. It was made to enter into the Radio Alice 3 Minute Film Festival, but it didn't make the cut. It's been in a few festivals since then, so screw you Radio Alice! You've got a funny morning show, but you play nothing but wuss rock the rest of the day.
Welcome to my Video Blog. I'm Jason and I will be your host. Armed with a couple of cheap camcorders and some PC Editing gear, I try to capture a little slice of my life. Sometimes I make movies. Sometimes I shoot at events. Sometimes I shoot random stuff that looks cool. Sometimes my footage is extremely cool. Sometimes it's mindnumbingly dull. Usually it's somewhere in between. All video content on this blog is shot and edited by me unless otherwise noted. Here's a short trailer you can watch. Thanks for visiting. Enjoy.
