Well I’m just very pleased about this. The Downtown Film Festival Los Angeles has given my film, Yellow Plastic Raygun, the award for Best Experimental Film. I was having quite a nice week attending various parties and screenings at the festival. Its use of multiple locations in the heart of downtown Los Angeles gives one a real sense of taking part in the life of the city and being involved with something that’s helping to foster the exploding art and film scene in downtown. Most of the short films were screened in the new Civic Center Theater at the intersection of First and Main Streets, in the shadow of the famous City Hall tower that has appeared in so many crime shows and film noir classics. I attended the screening of my own film this past Saturday evening and was amazed at seeing it large since I had put so much work into it on small monitors. What’s great about the Downtown Film Festival is that it shows a wide range of filmmaking styles, crew sizes and budgets. They show films made with lots of production resources right alongside films made by individual artists working with inexpensive HD cameras and even cell phone cameras. I am very proud to have won this and I look forward to more great festivals in downtown Los Angeles from the people who put this together.

Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

You can watch in resolutions of 360p, 480p, 720p HD, and 1080p HD. I think the best compromise for quality and loading speed is the 480p resolution. You can also watch it in HD on Vimeo.  Visit my YouTube channel for more films.

I may do a part two of this film. For now, this is the film in full.

The film is science fiction because it concerns the use of memory images for time travel. The powerful imagery of the singular event – the horrific event – is etched forever in the mind, yet it becomes fluid and its influences cannot be entirely trusted. What led up to the singular powerful event? What course was set following it? In what way would the entire world be different if the event had been avoided or not seen? Not recorded? If, as scientists say, the fundamental particles of existence change location or cease to exist when observed or not observed, then what about events in memory? Or events simply residing in the past?

If one asks ‘why are we here?’ Well, I think the answer is obvious. We are here to remember things. We are memory.

It’s difficult to see a star clearly if one looks straight at it. Looking just off to the side can clarify the star in one’s perception. Going back in time to recover something lost is very much the same. One is sometimes forbidden to look directly at the object sought. One must keep one’s gazed shifted slightly or risk losing the memory entirely. This principal has been understood for a long time.

So putting one’s eye on something like a yellow plastic raygun, or a car, for example, might in fact sharpen one’s vision and allow an accidental recovery or a transfer to take place.

Odd thoughts? Yes, well maybe so. Very much like the thoughts that run through one’s mind before sleep completely obliterates consciousness.

The film uses a mash-up of archival footage, drawings, digital painting, new video and video I shot many years ago. The imagery is very layered and attempts to duplicate the way images move through my mind as I circle around my ultimate objective which is sometimes nearly unknown. There are a multitude of connections and meanings to be drawn from the sequence of images. Some meanings might be very obvious, others would be almost impossible to predict.