Sirocco Research Labs

Archive: Work In Progress

• Sirocco Mystery

  How would one make a director’s reel inside of the Sirocco Research Labs?

  

  We’ll see.

  Published May 14th, 2011 by Jimmy Marble

• Working on the Stuff

  We’re deep in it these days:  Build­ing the sets, build­ing the lights, build­ing com­rade­ship.  This time next week, a music video is going to exist in the real world.  That, I believe, is cat­e­gor­i­cally exciting.

  Take a look!

  
  Acci­den­tally draw­ing lions when try­ing to paint a wall.

  
  
  Build­ing confetti.

  
  Adi look­ing like a mil­lion bucks.

  
  
  Invent­ing a feather tree.

  Stay tuned!  I think this is going to turn out well!

  Published February 10th, 2011 by Jimmy Marble

• Calm Before the Good

  Jan­u­ary 31st, 2011

  Dear Jour­nal,

  We are work­ing on two music projects in Feb­ru­ary.  As it sits, the plan is pretty well mapped out. What I like is that in just a sec­ond, all of our new ideas will exist as mov­ing images. I can feel the calm before the storm, and I like every­thing about it.

  

  Adi mid color test

  We’ll see what it looks like when we’re on the other side.  Everyone’s excited.  This is a rocket ship head­ing toward good.

  Best Wishes,
  Jimmy

  Published January 31st, 2011 by Jimmy Marble

• Guerilla Moviemaking

  This past Sat­ur­day we woke up at 6am, ate eggs, and spent the day run­ning around the neigh­bor­hood, draw­ing on walls, crouch­ing in alley­ways, and throw­ing con­fetti into the air. By sun­down we had shot a movie.

  We spent the rest of the day’s energy on bur­ri­tos and ping pong. Con­sen­sus is: being out­side is awe­some, think­ing on the fly is awe­some, play­ing the Fugees dur­ing mos shots is awe­some, and also so are friends. Throw­ing Pop Rocks at your friends’ cars isn’t always a good idea, but some­times can be a fun trick.

  Look!

  

  Adi on set

  

  Sarah Fang!

  

  fire­ball pile

  

  we ain’t got no permit

  

  “can we hold hands in the light of day?” “not legally.”

  We can’t wait to show you the movie!

  Published January 10th, 2011 by Annie Murphy

• A Lighthearted War = in da can

  

  Today was eas­ily one of the best days of 2011.

  Even cops were smil­ing at us!

  Published January 8th, 2011 by Jimmy Marble

• Life Lessons of an Intern

  Les­son #1: Sweat­ing for geometry

  Fly­ing over Cal­i­for­nia, I noticed how much we humans love geom­e­try. In a world of gra­di­ents, geo­met­ric shapes and pat­tern give us the com­fort­ing feel­ing that some sort of order exists in the universe–they’re kind of a visual equiv­a­lent of reli­gion. When we look at them, they say “out­side of these four right angles is the vast­ness of infin­ity and bil­low­ing chaos, but in here, in here I’m 100% square”.  Out the plane win­dow en route to Sirocco, there was this warm embrace wait­ing for my eyes:

  

  Just look at that and tell me you aren’t in love

  Com­ing into Sirocco, my first task was wait­ing for me: build a bed. When it came to beds, I and most peo­ple I know have been oper­at­ing under the assump­tion that we sleep on what­ever Swedish design­ers tell us to—would you like the RYKENE or the FLORÖ?  In the SRL though, every­thing was built by hand, includ­ing my allot­ted space to sleep, which was a hard­wood floor until I made it oth­er­wise. Luck­ily the Labs are some­where between a lum­ber­yard and a preschool, with end­less stacks of wood from old sets and rack over rack over rack filled with every mark mak­ing tool you could dream of. The tools were there; all I needed to do was build.

  

  For the first time in my life, I was forced to build my space for sleep and pri­vacy which felt like a small scale ver­sion of build­ing my own house. And because a sta­pler has been the most indus­trial tool I’ve used over the past ten years, the saw­ing, mea­sur­ing, drilling, and screw­ing I had in front of me made the road look that much longer.

  I spent my few hours in the labs sketch­ing what it was I would be sleep­ing on for the next month. There was no dead­line or due date, but my cur­rent hard­wood floor-bed brought an urgency to the process. In most art forms, you have the time to draw and erase, paint then paint over, add and remove—a process more of exper­i­men­ta­tion than plan­ning. With no place to sleep, I had to scrib­ble out some ideas as fast as pos­si­ble so I could start mak­ing said scrib­bles into a structure.

  

  My first few ideas were a bed in a box (felt too much like a cof­fin), bed on a box (fine, but just a bed on a box), bed with long legs (get­ting there), bed with legs and a mouth desk (still too open) , and bed with legs, desk, and fort fab­ric (per­fect!). After the rough idea of my bed was sketched out, the build­ing process was a lot sim­pler than I thought it would be. I’m still torn as to what my favorite part was, either the 8-year-old-fort-building feel­ing or going to the gar­ment dis­trict with Mar­tin to get my fabric.

  

  I decided to fol­low my heart, and it took me to polka dots

  

  All together:

  

  Such a direct hand-to-mouth rela­tion­ship was really excit­ing; hav­ing grown up in a world where actions are always ten to twenty degrees removed from their con­se­quences (e.g. how a come­dian can feed them­selves with­out ever hav­ing seen a plant), build­ing my bed felt like farm­ing my own food. And while the actual con­struc­tion was eas­ier than I thought it was going to be, the direct man­ual labor that went into my bed made me feel like I earned a place to sleep for the first time—tonight I won’t be sleep­ing on a mat­tress and frame, I’ll be rest­ing on sweat and determination.

  So as you can see, my first week in the labs was hardly about beds. Bed build­ing was really one task that embod­ied two dif­fer­ent lessons. The first was straight from the heart of Sirocco, a les­son about per­sonal agency and hid­den imag­i­na­tion — learn­ing to close your eyes and use your hands to make what you see under your lids. The sec­ond was about our need for def­i­nite lines and shapes; because in the end, my bed became another exten­sion of this geom­e­try we so love. Before, my bed was a sleep­ing bag dot in a prairie sized room in an infi­nite city.

  

  But, by assem­bling together an assort­ment of hard and opaque objects, I now have my own geom­e­try to crawl into that says “out­side these angles is the vast­ness of 15 mil­lion peo­ple and bil­low­ing smog, but in here, in here we’re 100% dreams”. Until next week, I’ll be here, star­ing out my rec­tan­gle window.

  

  –for­rest–

  Published July 31st, 2010 by Forrest Perrine

• A Lighthearted War, Pre-Production Teaser

  One of my sum­mer projects is a short series called A Light­hearted War.  The movies doc­u­ment two rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies in love who are fight­ing against their oppres­sive, bour­geois col­o­niz­ers.  The col­o­niz­ers have, inci­den­tally, banned whim­si­cal romance.  If you like non-sequiturs, con­tra­dicted on-the-spot real­ism, and two kids just try­ing their best, then stay tuned!

  This prep list also might give you a decent feel for the movie’s look and aes­thetic.  Sort of, anyway:

  

  

  

  

  

  Published July 1st, 2010 by Jimmy Marble