My dad used to tell me about capping video with a camera. You got one vantage point, and that’s it. If you wanted to move it, you have to do that with your hands. If you wanted a second view, you had to get the actors to do the whole scene over again. Can you believe that’s what they train you on in the academies? Sure, it’s classic, it’s old-school, and it’s great to get an appreciation for the traditional way of doing things. But even the biggest auteurs have all moved to fog.
Tag Archive for 'futuristic pipe dreams'
The copyright industry is not going quietly. The legitimacy of its monopolist and consumerist practices are still upheld by policymakers and panicking creators who haven’t seen any real alternative in action. I humbly submit my silly cartoon about people with inanimate objects for heads as a first step in that direction.
Your Face is a Saxophone is a surrealist satire of the advertising industry, which makes fun of actual companies and brands. It tells the story of the staff of Buzzword Marketing, and their dealings with the absurd demands of their corporate clients. Also, everybody has inanimate objects instead of heads for some reason. It’s either an artistic statement on how consumerism objectifies us all, or an excuse for us to not have to animate their mouths moving; you decide. As a bonus, Your Face is a Saxophone is Public Domain under CC0.
My friends and I formed Plankhead to produce the series. At the beginning of 2011, we released the first full-length, 25 minute episode — a pilot that we pitched not to a TV network, but to the Internet. We were able to raise enough money from individual donors to make a second one, which came out astronomically better than the first. Naturally, we’d like to continue the series — we have five more episodes planned, and we’re starting on the third in the next few weeks. But this isn’t just yet another crowdfunded indie project.
Your Face is a Saxophone started out as an assault on advertising. Since it began, I’ve realized that the problems with advertising are just one part — along with the copyright monopoly, unchecked greed, the pursuit of censorship, and other problems — of the holistic problem that is the ancien régime of the corporate entertainment industry. Much like these motivations, Your Face is a Saxophone is a part of a larger whole; a prototype for how to produce, promote, and proliferate culture in complete opposition to the problematic habits of the copyright industry.
I certainly hope you find the show entertaining. But even if you don’t, let me explain why you should still help it succeed:
Continue reading ‘Why You Should Support Your Face is a Saxophone’
I Admire Steve Jobs the Way That Teddy Roosevelt Admired Elephants
Steve Jobs is a majestic beast, and I would like to shoot him with a blunderbuss.
He is a visionary and a genius, a rebel who lets nothing and no one stand in the way of his dream of the future. If only his vision of the future were less cynical.
Continue reading ‘I Admire Steve Jobs the Way That Teddy Roosevelt Admired Elephants’