There is a constant, nagging little voice in the back of my head that is always saying the same thing:

“Make something.”

As often as I can, I oblige. It keeps me inspired, it helps me find new techniques and explore new ideas, it gets that voice out of my head for at least a short time. The results aren’t always great. In fact, rarely are they great, but I keep doing it for the simple reason that making is part of things. It just needs to be there.

In the spirit of unfiltered, random creation, I’ve put together the Unender Visual Stream, which is basically a place for me to post things that I’ve made, which have no other purpose than to simply exist. A lot of them are photos I’ve taken with different cameras, some are hand-made, some are techniques I’m exploring in Photoshop. I’ve been doing it for a month or so now, and here are some of my favorite bits of creative ephemera.

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Back in April I started working on another packaging project for The Criterion Collection. This time it was for the Guy Maddin film “Brand Upon The Brain!” It was a lot of fun and, as usual, everyone at The Criterion Collection was great to work with.

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Jason Hardy and Justin Kemerling. Photo by Ian Whitmore.

Looking back on The Sprinter today, I still feel very proud. It was a pure expression and born from the DIY music culture that we loved so dearly. It was something that we didn’t understand but that we felt compelled to do, and I love that feeling. We did it for us, for the love of expression, for our very own amusement with no regard for the conclusion. And my life has been better because of it.

After completing The Sprinter I felt inspired and empowered to learn about and experiment with many forms of artful expression. I also found greater delight in experimenting with old formats and processes. As a whole, It reinforced my love of creating and communicating, regardless of the medium, and inspired me to progress as a creative generalist.

Once we finished The Sprinter Justin and I saw no reason to stop there and we have collaborated on projects together ever since. The only question that remains is when Justin and I will do another film together. I don’t have an answer to that, but I feel pretty confident that it will happen.

After finishing The Sprinter Justin and I split the duties for the DVD production. Justin conceptualized the packaging design and I designed and programmed the DVD menus and functionality. We collaborated back and forth and eventually produced a bunch of copies which we sold on The Match Factory and at the various film festivals and art shows where The Sprinter was shown.

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So we developed the story, filmed all of our footage, recorded and produced the soundtrack and were ready to start editing the film.

The first step was digitizing all of the 8mm footage, which was an expensive and time-consuming process. Basically, as far as we knew, there was only one place in America that would process the film and it was in Kansas City, so we sent it there to be processed. They sent us the processed reels and we mailed some of them to a place in Minneapolis to have them digitized. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the names of those places. All told, I think it cost us around $300 to process and digitize all the footage.

Once we had all of the footage digitized we burned a rough arrangement of clips to DVD to watch and contemplate. We got a copy of Final Cut Pro and sat in my downtown Lincoln apartment putting it all together.

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Joe Heider – Drummer.

As I mentioned in earlier posts, the format that we decided on for the film was basically a linear narrative divided up by bursts of quickly edited, noisy imagery. The linear narrative would have musical accompaniment while the short bursts would be put together with layers of noise recorded with our dictation recorders. The noise part was pretty easy, but the music was still up in the air.

Around this time I had started playing in a band named Call In Call Out. Our drummer Joe Heider was very good and was a natural when it came to free form playing. I knew that Justin and I could riff off of one another and I thought that he and Joe would work well together. So on November 30th, 2003, we took the computer to the Call In/Out practice space and set up our gear to record. We had two separate tracks to work with, so we put the drums and bass on one track and separated the guitar on the other track. We pressed record and Justin, Joe and I played music for 2 hours.

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Driving 07 – Excerpt from our 2 hour session.

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As I mentioned in the previous post, “The Sprinter” is divided into two basic shot types. There is the mad bursts of erratic imagery and noise and there is the linear narrative of the man acting out his ritual. In this post I’ll talk about filming the linear narrative of “The Sprinter.”

The day of the shoot was beautiful. Justin and I went to Ringo’s house to pick him up and to give him his wardrobe, which consisted solely of a white button up shirt. His own, high-water pants and worn in shoes would work fine. We asked him to shave. He obliged. Then we started filming.

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Back in February I had the opportunity to contribute designs to one of my all-time favorite companies, The Criterion Collection. I’ve always been a film buff and if it wasn’t for The Criterion Collection my knowledge of film would be much, much smaller. So when Sarah Habibi contacted me about doing some design work for them, I jumped at the opportunity. This first project, for Jacques Tati’s “Trafic” came right as I was set to move from Chicago to San Francisco, so it was a little challenging working it into my schedule, but totally worth it.

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›› Random PhotoBooth pictures of me posing for the camera while getting older and making graphic designs on the computer.

Today is April 20th, 2008. That is a fact. It means that we (Sue and I) have been living here in San Francisco for 79 days. It also means that I haven’t updated this blog in a long long time, so I thought I might write a bit about how I’m doing. Or maybe its better to touch on what I’m doing. Certainly an easier thing to recount. So here is what I am doing now and what I have been doing these past 79 days. (more…)

I know how this looks. Let me explain.

In February of 2007, nearly one year ago, my wife Sue and I moved from Lincoln Nebraska to Chicago Illinois. The Windy City. Chi-town. ‘Cago. We left behind our beautiful huge two bedroom apartment with a yard, our friends, our family and our home for a new life in the city that works. We got a small one bedroom apartment and I started working at Energy BBDO. Now here we are, nearly one year later, and in two weeks we are going to move again. This time to the city by the bay, San Francisco. (more…)