Computer Plumbing Central

Another large construction for GASA occured this past June. After a year of courting Ms Paige Shuttleworth for the role of the GASA computer plumber, we finally found the right time and spot to build the set and shoot the scene.

Paige's virtues shall not elude you, reader. Aside from those virtues easily extracted from the above photo, go 'head and table another in that both of her outfits used in GASA were made entirely by her, for her. She is a master at sewing and fashion design.

This set is a close second in terms of time/effort in building to the white laboratory posted about previously. We wanted to acheive more "steam punk" than "cyber punk". Paige's character works as a "plumber" of sorts, sending the two lead wretches to various "virtual" testing grounds where they unwittingly experience more pain than pleasure through psuedo food fetish S&M scenarios. Paige is central to the movie, and her character is less one dimensional than all others, as she is, in spite of incredible Glam Rock style and good looks, a working stiff and ground down by the steamy tomb room she stations at.

Set-


There is a smoke machine on the left by the bicycle rim. We take "steam punk" literally and there is occasional gusts of "steam" pouring from the wall to achieve Fritz Lang or Jules Verne style sci-fi energy. The set was built right in Dan's studio in the H+H building. We liked the idea that Paige's console for operating the whole thing was a big, dilapidated organ manual.

Thanks to my lovely and insightful wife Jackie for being our camerawoman and logistical inspiration. It was unbearably hot in Dan's loft and the three nights we shot footage were grueling. Baltimore warehouses in summertime will forever stand in my memory. It's a very memorable body sensation, that sauna like climate.

Jackie took all of these pics. The four of us had fun in spite of the temperature....expecially "choreographing" the fight sequences. As stated previously, Paige's plumber character is very abusive to our "wretch" characters. Like in every other scene in this movie, our characters have no hope of even getting a shot in as we are kicked, whacked and otherwise bullied.


The above pic shows how we achieve our type of "movie magic". This was a long tracking shot of Dan getting "punched" and a "fist POV" of him flying 10 feet into a wall.

Here are a few varied pics-

It needn't be said that the butt figures prominently into GASA. Below note Tom testing out the "butt whanging" mallets.

I am relieved this shoot is over. Thanks Paige and Jackie. The end - for now.

Dangerous Radiation/ Flipparoos/ Faux Fu

GASA has many "fight scenes". We have been influenced by a great many Hong Kong and Bollywood fight sequences, not to mention some of the glorious things available on youtube. I'm not sure frankly what the appeal of violence is for us (all of US....humans?). There is so much violence out there intended for comedic purposes...well, it's interesting. prat falls, larry, moe, curly, wile e coyote, etc....it all seems pretty painful....yet amusing. Perhaps, even though films ask for "suspension of disbelief", what they also ask is "suspension of belief"....i.e. this isn't really violence....now LAUGH.

part of the appeal, in my humble opinion, is the lack of credibility of many films.

for a particular scene in GASA, our doppelgangers (played by the inimitable two can ladies Jessie Unterhalter and Emily CD) seek us out, challenge us to a duel, kick our asses, and eat our souls. We needed a place to shoot this scene, and since the scene occurs "outdoors" (more on that in a sec) it needed to be color-flipped and altered.

so, firstly, the location we chose for this scene was a "PCS base station" (cell phone signal receiver/amplifier/transmitter) atop Dan's warehouse, the H+H building. it is quite convenient to have a loud, humming 60hz, current sucking, high voltage SCI-FI-begging-to-be-used setting just up a few fire escape flights from Dan's living room.

We went up to scope it out one day, and instantly fell for the thing, knew it was perfect for our purposes. but of course we got to it by climbing up the fire escape.....if we'd gone up through the locked door at the top of the stairwell, we'd have read the signs saying "DONT ENTER! HIGH RF RADIATION. HARMFUL" etc.

We got a bit freaked out that we'd just been all over the place for the past hour and had a good old time in high energy radio fields. I calmed down later in the day when i started googling RF facts. Apparently no link has been made to cancer...........yet. However, like it's big sister the microwaves, radio waves with a lot of amplitude can heat up organic tissue really fast. one article i read said that if a human stood directly in front of one of those rectangular cell phone antennas that their eyes and testicles (ladies excluded) would likely heat up and explode in less than 30 seconds. The rest of you would get 2nd or 3rd degree burns pretty quickly.

So, when we went back up there a week or two later with our doppelgangers, we kept a nice distance from the antennas.



For particular reasons, we want the "outdoor" scenes of the movie to be "color altered". Each scene shot outside will get it's own color palette.

On this particular day, there were storms in the area and grey skies. we had previously been very pleased with the huge spectra of gorgeous color we'd gotten through HDDV in our previous shoots. THe footage from our PCS Station shoot were awfully dull- a result of the heavy overcast and low grey light. Ultimately, it didn't matter, because Dan was able to do this great, spacey, foreboding and creepy color scheme with brilliant pinks and purples.


We did our best with the Kung Fu.




This particular scene is a "sword fight" in the tradition of samorai "jideigekei" film. but obviously - retarded, goofy, and pseudo-futuristic.



Below are some "power pill taking" pump up Rocky-esque training scene stills.




Lastly, a head butt to help your day along.....

Doppelgangers

Last summer Snacks generated the great/terrible idea of having a portion of the film centered around a conflict and subsequent "kung fu war" between the two stooge lead characters (played by yoursss trulysss SSSnacksss) and their "doppelgangers". This was based on the suggestion by Jessie Unterhalter and Emily C-D, also known as the artist collective "Two Can", that they somewhat "mirrored" Snacks - by virtue of their "art duo-ness", as well as by eerie physical parallels.

Emily and Dan exude certain Anglo/Celtic wirey-ness, skinny and pale, suggesting lack of vitamins.



Jessie and Tom exude a certain swarthy, greasy Mediterraneaness, with big brown eyes and er...."powerful" nose shapes.



The idea turned into an obsession and the theme emerged - "doppelgangers". Snacks' doppelgangers are females (and approximately 10 years younger at that). Who is your doppelganger? We don't necessarily have clear or huge ideas about "duality" "polarity" "multiple universes" etc etc. But The idea that Snacks' doppels are not "identical" is very suggestive and opens the mind to so many thoughts....

We shot a huge scene (to be documented here soon) in this past autumn in which an entire nightclub "sub-routine" (existing in the large computer program in which most of the film takes place) is intended as a Dionysian blow-off valve for "doppelgangers", which have some sort of role in the "binary" computer universe.

The intent is not to be heavy-handed, but it is nearly impossible to avoid the implications of doppelgangers. Once we put the "casting call" out around Baltimore for "doppelgangers" to populate our "nightclub" scene....people out in the art community instinctively knew that we were asking for "spiritual" doppelgangers and not "identical twins". They arrived to the shoot with every gesture expressing they "groked" our gist. The meaning and implication of "spiritual doppelgangers" far exceeds what is possible when think of duality as mere "mirroring".

Again, we hesitate to be explicit about our thoughts regarding this overwhelming thematic idea....but suffice to say, our hope is that it will be implicit at minimum that one considers that implications of "non-mirroring" dualities and assymetrical binary languages when viewing "GASA".

These photos were all taken last year in the early spring, prior to shooting the film, while we were developing the plot and theme ideas for the film. Practice for the doppelgang events ahead.....

Sage Cuttlefish

Casting is something Snacks does not take lightly. Evidence: Paige Shuttleworth/Moore, cast as the conflicted, though of course mean and sadistic, computer plumber. This is possibly the most important and "nuanced" character in the story, aside from the wretched goons portrayed by Snacks themselves.

We have only just begun our shots with Paige, though what has occurred has been quite splendid. We spent a small portion of an afternoon doing an "elevator scene" at the H+H bldg.

Some phone pics, pardon the low reso....

CUPCAKE SHOOT (DAN emerges from the far end of the bakery black hole)

if the above image doesn't haunt your subconscious, then you must be a dreamless brute with no sense of eroticism.

I can't recall the exact date by now, 8 or so months later, but sometime in late july or early august last summer Snacks engaged in the "cupcake shoot" - the first of the "vignette section" of the film. As of now the structure of "GASA" is divided into two parts, the first involves the "kidnapping and utilization" of the main characters, two stooges and bureaucratic lackeys played by Tom and Dan, and the second involves a sort of "cat and mouse game" between the stooges and their "doppelgangers", played by Emily C-D and Jessie Unterhalter.

The "vignette sections" of Part One are a run of what we consider 8 semi-independent "music videos" which demonstrate Tom and Dan in separate "subroutines" testing the pseudo-fetishistic and mock hedonistic properties of a virtual reality computer program.

Each "vignette" may exist on it's own, once the film finally takes to life out there in the world. In some ways the film is intended to be mostly modular, with the narrative vaguely described through images and sound, but the "modules" could be swapped or isolated as needed. Therefore individual sections can serve as "verses" to an epic poem....but in themselves could be self contained and eliptical.

Thanks go to Evan Moritz, Caitlin Murphy and Tim Paggi of the Annex Theatre for their assistance with the shoot. Likewise, Jen Kirby supplied a powerful performance as the cupcake medium. Frida Mohr and Kate Porter provided invaluable support via baking, cleaning and general help throughout. Also, thanks to Ami Dang for providing us with saris and Indian textiles from her personal collection.

As with many of our shoots, this was planned and "baked" on the 5th Dimension, H+H bldg Bmore. We hung the fabric and set up lights over the course of a week or so and did the shot in one concentrated, sweaty evening. Tom did most of the camera work and direction, and Dan, as you shall see, was the nearly nude STAR. Evan and Caitlin endured the heat deep inside the Saris. One wonders how Indian women cope with the heat of their country while wrapped in those fabrics....


Ami Dang has an impressive collection of saris, both from family and also from shopping in Delhi and Punjab on her periodic music trips to India.



Ms. Kirby appeared voluptuous and mysterious in her role. The scene was staged as a "ritual sacrifice", led by Jen. Dan, of course was the lamb in the slaughter.

Evan (below) and Caitlin were faceless henchmen, sari burritos, culinary fusion.




Frida was our "cupcake tech". There a lot of "cupcake strobing" effects in the clip. What amounts to 5 second stop motions animations of cupcakes dancing around on the gurney-top took quite some time to set up. It was exacerbated by the warehouse night humidity and heat.


i think we used a total of 40 odd cupcakes. Is it puerile have these mammarian delicacies served by a chesty young lady, and then have her wreck them all over our protagonist, mr Breen?




I can't remember why Evan was smooching Dan when he had cupcake meat all over his mouth and face.....

hungry maybe.....



the end.



We came close to an edit of this scene while working at STEIM in Amsterdam. As stated before, it's i sort of "music video" on it's own, and this may be the first "leak" of the movie we put up on youtube or similar. Currently we're shaving and tidying the scene. Stay tuned.