Partnerships and community engagement are cornerstones of the Lower Boom ethos, they take many forms. Here are some examples.
Warhol Goes Boom. In conjunction with the Portland Art Museum's Warhol Print Exhibition we shot 20 Andy Warhol style "screen tests." For the tests a subject sits in front of a camera for the length of a small 16mm reel of film, about 3 minutes, and do what ever they want to do.
We set up a studio in one of the Museums elevators. Random visitors to the Warhol exhibit could sit for a screen test.
We would sit them down, call "Action!" and they would look at this scene and "perform." That is Scott Ballard running the camera.
Meanwhile, in the auditorium, two projectors ran Warhol's actual screen tests side by side with six of ours we had shot earlier for the exhibit. Above, Warhol is left, Lower Boom is right.
Here is a snippet of one of the tests. Later at an event for the 43rd Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival, we ran all the tests together as a single film while musicians Shawn Parke and Kim Henninger performed live to the scenes.
42nd Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival. I designed the posters and some marketing collateral for the festival. Here are some of the posters hanging down town.
"Focus on the filmmakers" was the theme in this year's fest. So the six main posters each depicted a Northwest filmmaker at work. The bottom three posters were for a camera and equipment expo that ran concurrently with the festival. I drew the camera.
The six filmmakers featured in the posters each made a video promo short for the festival. The question each short answered: "What does it mean to be a Northwest filmmaker?" I created these title cards for each video.
Joan. To open the 42nd Northwest Filmmakers Festival, we made this short film, a "cover" of Carl Theodor Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc. Here is a creepy snippet of the film.
We also released a CD of the film's score by Mark Orton. I designed the package.
Indie Filmmakers Meet VR. We thought it would be fun and interesting to get the two worlds of Virtual Reality technology and indie filmmakers together to mingle. Most of the seminars and presentations we’d been going to and seeing related to VR were very tech and gear-focused. In fact, when we tried to talk to fellow indie filmmakers about it, there was a collective ‘meh’, or ‘what’s VR’ or ‘I don’t get it’. Our point of view is that no matter what the coolest tech in the world is, it is going to be limited in real-world impact if you don’t have the storytellers and artists involved. So we held a series of four events, all with a different particular focus, but all ultimately about exploring narrative storytelling in the worlds of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, and all designed to get a diverse group of creative thinkers brainstorming or at least thinking out of their comfort zone.
For the first session we invited a technology expert from local VR/AR company Dot Dot Dash, Pinky Gonzales, to present the narrative storytelling possibilities of VR to a diverse group of Portland creatives. We followed that with a very lively discussion of the possibilities and pitfalls of the technology in the narrative space.
For the second session we invited the same attendees to experience two narrative Virtual Reality projects. Dear Angelica, from Emmy Award-winning Oculus Story Studio and Pearl, an Oscar-nominated and Emmy award-winning short film directed by Patrick Osborne. Again we followed the screening with open forum discussion addressing much of the same issues as the first, but with the benefit of having experienced two well-done examples of VR storytelling.
The third session then focused on actually developing a story in VR. We invited a local filmmaker to present a story idea and related key art to both traditional TV/Film producers, and VR experts. We wanted to dive in with these VR and film producers to see what VR narrative production “looked like,” and how the different expert domains could collaborate effectively.
Finally Lower Boom invited Eric Darnell to Portland to present at a Design Reality event, co-produced by OMPA and Design Reality. Eric is the Chief Creative Officer of Baobab Studios. Baobab is an Emmy award-winning top VR animation studio that has been named to Fast Company’s list of Most Innovative Companies in the World. Darnell is the creative genius behind the Madagascar animated franchise. Darnell joined us on May 29th, 2018, and presented The Nature and Challenges of Immersive Storytelling, a presentation on how to craft engaging stories within VR and immersive technology.
Post-Truth Project. Lower Boom in concert with Open Signal invited local media makers to submit proposals for original work on the theme of “post-truth.” A jury selected five projects by regional artists and granted $1000 stipends to each. The finished pieces were presented at a very well-attended screening on Friday, Nov. 3. Selected works:
I Am an Alien, by Garima Thakur, a hypertext non-linear web-based project that plays with the language used on immigration Visa forms like the I-99 and DS-160, which describes an immigrant’s status as an “alien allowed to work.”
Crop, by Niema Lightseed, a multimedia exploration of transtemporal slavery via poetry and video that raises awareness of modern slavery.
Nemesis, by Dawn Jones Redstone & Brenan Dwyer, a short comedy film investigating white male fragility through a single Scrabble match.
Ineffable Glossolalia, by Tabitha Nikolai, a virtual environment exploring a historical Nazi book burning, and the clumsy and painful efforts to restore the sense of self lost there.
The Connective Unconscious, by Carl Diehl, an interactive electronic art installation that dramatically enacts the construction of online “truths.”