Puppets, a Cinematic Gateway Drug


I love movies; I've reviewed them, scored them, attempted to write them, and after last weekend I can say I've directed them. As you may know I'm currently enrolled in Graduate school through University of Denver online. Last Sunday I worked six straight hours on homework and after I was done I felt restless, and football was not going to cut it. Marieta suggested we run some errands, but that sounded like it would make matters worse. So she asked me "What do you want to do?" Gazing off into the kitchen only one activity came to mind...

I wanted to make a movie.

After texting a few friends only my buddy Hogan was available. You think that would douse my filmmaking flame but Hogan is the perfect man to tag team a film with. I grabbed my gear, drove out to his place and drove off without a single plan except for the fact we were going to work with puppets.


Now when you hear puppet movie your first inclination is to think this thing is gonna suck- DON'T! With Hogan's long running obsession with collecting zany things, my camera skill and our joint creativity we made... a MASTERPIECE! Yes I am being a little over-the-top but it is far better than you expect. What's it about? Three puppets and a gambling debt. Think Pope of Greenwich Village but puppets and only 6 minutes long.


Shot with the same speed and zeal as a Robert Rodriguez's "guerilla filmmaking" but with puppets that have the polar opposite temperment of Jason Segel's muppets. There isn't a trailer, no big release, just six minutes of puppet "art." When can you take in this puppy? Sit tight kids, there is still some scoring and sound design to be completed. Mark your calendars! "Master of Puppets" February 2 - Youtube - 7 PM,

Update - The film is out. Watch it here:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This book should not exist

Image
It's late on a mid-October 2015 night and I am struggling with whether I should buy a $1,200 last-minute ticket to California to be with my family for my mother's emergency brain surgery. A week prior everyone was together in my house for an adventurous weekend climbing a wind turbine and celebrating my grandmother's 90th birthday, now we are on the eve of my mom going under the gamma knife for emergency brain surgery. Turns out she has a size-able tumor growing on the surface of her brain.   It's a bit of miracle that the tumor was discovered in the first place as my mom's routine cancer screenings didn't usually include brain scans; however, she had been complaining of blurry vision and balance issues, plus she had become quite irritable having been pushed to take FMLA from work to deal with what she thought was post-cancer "brain fog." Thankfully her doctor had the good sense to add it all up and include her brain in her next cancer scan. Sure enou...
Read more

Finding "Clarity" in 1999

Image
I distinctly remember Tuesday, February 23, 1999. I was still living in Iowa and immediately after school let out I road with a friend to Best Buy so he could pick up Eminem's freshly released second album. Always down for a hang, I road along as there was one album I had read about and wanted to see if it was in stores. That album was Jimmy Eat World's Clarity . On the ride home I didn't bother asking to put in my purchase as my friend was not a rock fan. So for the next hour or so of cruising we blasted Slim Shady at painful volumes. For those uninitiated, this was the "Hi! My name is (ticka ticka) Slim Shady" album. I was indifferent to rap so it got a little long and tiresome by roughly the third time through the album. When I finally listened to Clarity it underwhelmed. Nothing on the album is lyrically hook centered on kinetically riff focused like later Jimmy Eat World releases. For a 16 year-old ska and pop punk super fan, Clarity go...
Read more

My Favorite Creative

Image
As I type this two drastically different things are happening; I'm in California for a film festival and my mother, Linda Boberg, is lying in a Des Moines hospice bed. In fact she started hospice care the day I flew out here. As you can imagine, I'm experiencing quite the emotional tug of war. When you have a kid you commonly examine where they get certain traits. I've always been able to parse that I get my emotional, empathetic tendencies from my mother and my pragmatic, compartmentalizing skills from my Dad (another raging tug of war at the moment). This list could go on forever, but one thing I've never fully understood is where my creative drive came from. Now with the writing on the wall, it's obvious my mom flipped the creativity switch. It wasn't until my Mom self-published a novel at 65 years old that I understood how creative she is. In the last three years she's self published half a dozen books and written many more. Her first bout of cancer in 2...
Read more