Festivals : Indie Grits 2019 - Late Night Mixtape
While much of the Indie Grits Fest focuses on thought-provoking and challenging issues, the Late NIght Mixtape block provided a chance for the abstract and lighter fare to showcase. The crowd came in droves, and the work was certainly memorable on many levels.
Like This/Like That finds director Tommy Heffron focusing on an individual in what appears to be an access television studio. As he addresses each camera, he resets himself, then makes a truly awkward smile, requesting verification of the smile by asking, ‘like this like that?’ after each attempt. The editing and pacing begin to take on a Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! feel, gradually upping the insanity levels until they peak. Definitely a great way to start the block, as it was a perfect tone-setter.
Boo Hag’s Pop the Clutch, directed by Winston Warner, was one of several music videos in the block. Boo Hag’s sound is a bit on the lo-fi garage band side, which works perfectly with the psychedelic, nearly epilepsy-inducing visuals. Images warp into one another under a blanket of deep greens, purples and blues that blanket the entire proceeding.
No Good Deed, created by the team of Ethan Hanson, Caroline Mobley, Amy Brower and Jonathan Furnell Columbia, was the first narrative, non-experimental short of the block. The entire thing is void of dialogue, although there are plenty of sound textures to give it a real world feel. The story itself is a wonderful turn on the adage that is the title, with the main character’s altruistic efforts being met with a fate that was both surprising and, in hindsight, set-up perfectly to be an inevitable conclusion. Very powerful work for clocking in at only seven minutes.
Luke Pilgrim and Brad Kennedy’s The Amazing Anti-Fart Formula was the standard release that the crowd needed within the flow of the Late Night Mixtape selections. While quite silly, it is not so at the expense of the triangular admiration plot that it embraces wholly. The short features masterful camerawork, very well-placed use of origami, and some of the best visual effects ever put on the screen to portray flatulence.
Space Coke took us all on an uncomfortably wild ride with their music video for Corpsewood Manor, directed by Steve Daniels. Easily (in my opinion) the most disturbing of the bunch, it features a man that would turn heads on the street alternatively skipping through a graveyard and humping whatever he can get his hands on. It’s in the final moments that things get truly and wonderfully skewed in ways that you cannot unsee.
Ony Ratsimbaharison’s content generation is one of my favorites from the block. Taking the form of an educational video, famous obscure clips from the internet are curated and formed into something new, and the way it is all cut together presents a coherent ride through a sea of random madness and hilarity. Definitely a refreshing twist on clips that many of us have come to know and love while traversing the world wide web.
Future Song, an intimate music video from Odile Postic, features random oddness from the mind of the artist, including a stork delivering an infant Jesus on a website, a second browser window featuring an overwhelming amount of green and an invisible harp, and a candid shot of the artist at her desk, on her computer, with camera in tow. This one was very mellow, the strangeness was more subtle that what preceded, and ultimately, it served as a nice moment to relax and catch our breath.
Party, a brief but delightful candid short by Chandler Yonkers, centers around found footage of a group of friends drinking out in the woods. Things start relatively light, but as the spirits flow, the cameraman begins to stir the pot, getting priceless and hilarious reactions from his friends. This one definitely put a smile on my face.
Infinitikiss and director Henry Moonrod’s collaboration for Pas, an animated music video featuring memorable black and white animation, finds a 3-D rendered figure journeying through a void and being warped into different versions of himself, eventually discovering a collective in the sky. The electronic music for the short sets the mood perfectly, and the brief exploration is vivid nonetheless. This one is perfect late-night music video fodder.
Oddly enough, the Late Night Mixtape block featured a pair of short films centered around flatulence. Space Wind is the story of two explorers traveling through the universe, and we drop in on their meal time (and possibly an experiment in progress). The pair choose beans, and are given a bottle of G Astro Pills, which we eventually find are used to color-code and identify space gas. The entire set seemed to be made of felt and fabric, even down to the beans and the bird that joins the duo on the ship. Even with minimal dialogue, the short definitely sticks in your mind.
The night was anchored by Big Mouth Billy Bass, an insane but oddly touching time-traveling story by director Chris Dead. A mysterious gift is delivered to a doorstep on Christmas, and the recipient is shocked to find that it is a Big Mouth Billy Bass singing fish. The gift, however, turns out to be more than meets the eye, and the story veers into parallel lines of science-fiction setups and mistaken identity. The journey is a memorable one, the path of the narrative is unpredictable, and the end is truly rewarding.
