Filming a low-budget short film, part 2

Harmony Korine described his latest "film" (he never says "a Harmony Korine film" or "a film by Harmony Korine", he says: "film by Harmony Korine"), Trash Humpers, in kind of a cool way:

[Trash Humpers] is more like an artifact, its like something found somewhere and unearthed
an old VHS tape that was in some attick or buried in some ditch

(I left his misspellings in.)
I missed TH when it screened (with, from looking at some video on YouTube of it, a really interesting post-film Q & A session via Skype w/ Korine) in San Francisco recently (June 2010). But Korine's description of it (above) reminded me, in the midst of this new short film I'm trying to complete, that I've made some short films in the past -- shot on analog 8 mm and converted to VHS, where I used 2 VCRs to make a version w/ a soundtrack (Humpers was edited on 2 VCRs as well) by hooking up my four track to the 2nd VCR. Very analog and very primitive, but I made 3 films: What Took Millions of Years to Evolve Can Be Destroyed in Seconds!, Clownmonkey, and Piglicker. All three fit snugly into the "personal/experimental film" category: there're no real plots, characters, dialogue -- just shot footage mixed with sound to create little textural worlds in themselves. I screened one or all of them for a small group at my house once. It was fun.

Now, I don't know where the VHS tape is. It's in storage, or in my small cluttered apartment I share with my wife and 3 kids. It's essentially that "old VHS tape that was in some attick" Korine is describing as an archetypal film, which, when found, someone pops in the VCR (or converts to digital) and watches, and scratches their head, and is disturbed a little (my films) or a lot (Korine's).

I don't remember all of what's on each of my little films, but I know I put my hirsute, tall friend Schuyler in a too-tight clownsuit for Clownmonkey, gave him some beer in a mug and a cigar, and had him just stand by a busy road at rush hour, and filmed him (among other things). I had him wear a bloody skull Halloween mask and play a child's drumset. I sent a copy of this film to Crispin Glover and his assistant told me she gave it to him.

Piglicker gets its name from an actual pighead I bought for nine bucks from a Filipino grocery, intending to cook as per phone instructions from my Filipino then-father-in-law, but got too heebie-jeebied and just set on a fence, where my cat gave it a good lick-down, and I rolled film. There's a cool part where my then-sister-in-law self-consciously realizes she's in the frame as my cat licks this grotesque pighead (with eyes, internal brains, etc) and she leaves the scene. I really like that part where she steps out of frame, with a wry smile on her face.

My short VHS films are a mixed bag of humor, some beauty (I hope), and horror (not hokey Hollywood horror, but the horror of the everyday). I think they deserve a resurgence.

Just have to find them first.

In the meantime, onward with the digitally-shot and edited new short film, Please Let Me Eat the White Peaches.....

Source: http://thedailyhologram.blogspot.com/2010/08/filming-low-budget-short-film-part-2.html