the lichen were confused
March came in like a lion and went out like a lion in lamb's clothing. You would look out the window and the sunshine would cheer you, until you actually stepped outside and realized that it was still 40 degrees.
Not today, though. Today it is snowing, blatantly, as if yesterday's pagan spring ritual never happened. This state is doing everything in its power to drive me away.
Fortunately, today I have just what everyone needs: an update to the Happycat Ranch page at Nik's site. Most of these films have involved both Nik and me in some capacity, though the definitions often get pretty nebulous. Nik's explanation is probably the best:
Started with a bottle of brandy in 1996, HCR serves more as a philosophy than a production company. Maybe it's a game... I'm not exactly sure. If it is a game then here are the rules:
1) Your script has to come fast. Fast as in: quick. Really, really quick. Less than half an hour is good. Five minutes is excellent. No script is even better.
2) Your budget has to be low. Thirty dollars is good, ten dollars is better and a bottle of gin is best.
3) You produce your film quickly. An evening or an hour is pretty admirable. Our record is currently fifteen minutes.
The occasion for the update is that Roommatey Again: The Strange Case of the Gay Pirate Penguin (Windows Media Video; 6.37 MB) and Nik's Closet Theatre (Windows Media Video; 6.08 MB) will be shown later this month at some small Tucson film festival behind a sandwich shop.
We shot Roommatey Again over one evening in July 1999 at my Reno apartment fifty feet from the Pub n' Sub, which has the best beer garden ever. This film involved a gay pirate penguin because penguins are funny, and Nik and I have a bad restaurant habit of using pirate talk to describe our food, and because... well, the penguin was just gay. Nik wrote the first page of the script, then I took over, then we shot the film in a couple of hours using an on-loan Pixelvision camera connected to my television through an aggregate of cheap cables and adaptors manufactured in Asia and purchased at the local Radio Shack, where Connie behind the counter was very nice to us.
I did Nik's Closet Theatre by myself in May 2001. Nik and I were drinking whisky and I pointed him to the Thai Elephant Orchestra (found via Geegaw, 4-3-01), and Nik was so taken with the music that he decided to edit it into a scene from an in-progress film. This left me with nothing to do for a half hour, so I took a digital video camera into his closet and made a short film entirely within its bounds. Fortunately it is a large, well-lit closet stocked with many interesting items, most of which came into play at some point—it's sort of a whisky-addled assault on all the conventions of narrative cinema.
This is no April Fool's joke. Cheers.
