For those of you interested, a link to the free download of the track is here: http://soundcloud.com/francesconovara

This was also one of those projects where I put the cart in front of the horse. In this case, the cart was the concept and then footage of the dancers, and the horse turned out to be Francesco Novara (Francesco, you may edit this on your own blog to read “Italian Stallion”). Having the idea to attach the cameras to the dancers on a flight out West, I couldn’t wait to throw it into production (literally, as you’ll see). So regardless of the fact that I didn’t have a musical track for this video, I shot the footage anyway. Once complete, Francesco Novara came to the rescue creating this beautiful piece of music. Vocals by Violette topped it all off.

Thanks to MTV’s NextMovie.com, CBSNews.com, NYMag.com, laughingsquid.com, BuzzFeed, and BoingBoing for featuring the video. And also a special thanks to the very new DailyDot.com for the interview about the project.

The deliciousness paid off with a front page feature on Creativity-Online.com this week.

Editing/Coloring completed by Tristan Kneschke, with a special thanks to Pleasant Post for the generous use of their coloring facilities. Intro illustrations provided by AJ Purdy.

Had a chance to team up with Andrew David Watson, who is a wonderful DP and good friend of mine, on this video as well. Every time we meet up for a shoot or test shoot, I seem to try and mess up his beautiful images. This time, the “foggy” effect in the video was added by throwing a 25cent plastic bag in front of the lens to film the footage of the city. Now how’s that for efficiently using thousands of dollars worth of camera gear?

So far, it’s stayed at number #1 on www.mtvU.com for a few weeks now, and love keeps coming in from features on sites like NahRight.com, theFADER.com, videos.antville.org, and more.

Final videos can be seen here.

I’m also quickly finding that since their name contains an exclamation point in it, it’s very difficult to either A) write a sentence where I too would like to use an exclamation point, or B) finish off a sentence using their name in any way that is less than ecstatic.

While I’m a live action/low-fi effects guy and not an animator like many of their directors, perhaps I’ll finally be able to bring my “flying tongue kid” test animation idea to life sometime this year {exclamation point} I also must sincerely say that I’m very excited to be working with the creative director John Andrews and alongside some very talented people on the roster. Will be a great pool of people to continually learn from.

In my path I saw this dirty tissue resting perfectly on top of a decaying twig of sorts, to make a little rose. To my excitement, and the bewilderment of those trying to walk past me (and perhaps those reading this), I then ran to catch a green piece of paper that blew past my way. Grass! And then, my “rubbish rose” scene was complete.

my delayed airplane’s cockpit-

film crew while driving along in Florida-

and, rather unsuccessfully, on a sexy pose of myself. For those of you who have not seen me in person, let me reassure you that my body is not freakishly disproportionate, but that this is rather a side effect of the “digital stitching process”-

My local watering hole of choice is a few blocks away from my apartment, on the walk home I successfully drew smiley faces on almost every car. I say “almost every” solely because of the one with the flashing blue Viper alarm light that I didn’t care to get tangled up with. I contemplated gathering forces with others to cover the entire city, but chose to return home and watch this video over and over again instead.

I fly, I ride a train, I hop in a car, I drop off my bags, and then it’s off to the festival an hour later. To kick off the festival there is a video by Francis Ford Coppola on the region of Basilicata (the region in which the town of Maratea calls home). And up next will be the work that I created for the festival. Who would have thought that my inability to properly pronounce words in Italian would have progressively be turning into such a good career opportunity? Well, Arnold Schwarzenegger did it in America, I mine as well capitalize on it in Italy.