My short film.

    Experience the monochromatic life of a gentleman puppet as he navigates office furniture, elevators and a burning childhood all confined within a maze of floors in a bottomless skyscraper. Like a vertical timeline, each floor represents a different point in his life. With the aid of an off-kilter elevator operator, he journeys though his existence with the horrors of his past following closely behind.

    With Citadel, the story had to go deeper and have more levels of meaning than my previous efforts. But I didn’t want to lose the creepy, comedic, dorky charm of my earlier videos. On the surface, the story is quite absurd, but every moment and every line plays its part. The dialog is very plain and stilted to remove any sense of comfort from the characters.
    My music and short films generally build to a climax. Is this film, however, I wanted the opposite. The world gets quieter and more sparse as events play out. The character seeks silence and in the end, it is given to him.

    Writing the dialog was a particular challenge. I wanted it to work two ways. It could be taken at face value and relate to exactly what was happening on screen, or it could be applied to the bigger metaphor of the film. I added and deleted a lot of dialog while filming. It was difficult to know which lines worked best until the shots were finished and edited together.
    After the dialog was written, I sat down and badly drew storyboards on random bits of paper I found around my studio.
    The puppets were all controlled by me, one at a time. The dialog scenes between multiple puppets had to be precisely choreographed to prevent them from talking over each other. A lot of trial and error was required to get things to work properly.

    I used the puppet version of myself from my previous video, The Untitled. I wanted him to turn from the abstract horror in the last video into a more sympathetic character. His voice became more natural and his actions more human. I also gave him a fancy button-up shirt. The other puppets were based on some of my friends. I photographed them and altered their faces dramatically to create an irregular, quirky cast of characters.
    While a handful of set pieces were built, the majority of the locations were rendered in the computer. The opening shots of the puppet in his cubical were filmed on a set. As the film progresses, the reality fades and the artificial locations take over. In the final scene of the film, we are left with only a small pathway in the darkness, then the cycle begins again.

April 22nd – May 13th, 2012

Come to the Cranbrook Academy of Art 2012 degree exhibition and see my new video and installation.

This is a strange, dark, creepy video I made a few months back. It took a week to make from start to finish. I started by taking photographs of my face. I exaggerated my features and flattened my face out using Photoshop, so it could be printed on a piece of paper. The flattened face was then placed on top of a cardboard skull. The resulting Matt puppet was relatively creepy.

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Here’s a new song I made. It’s a bit different than my other music. I was just experimenting with some Latin and African instrumentation as well as some good ol fashion synths.