We’ll see.

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!

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

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!

Today was easily one of the best days of 2011.

Even cops were smiling at us!

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–

]]> http://siroccoresearchlabs.com/2010/07/life-lessons-of-an-intern/feed/ 0 http://siroccoresearchlabs.com/2010/07/a-lighthearted-war-pre-production-teaser/ http://siroccoresearchlabs.com/2010/07/a-lighthearted-war-pre-production-teaser/#comments Thu, 01 Jul 2010 22:58:04 +0000 Jimmy Marble http://siroccoresearchlabs.com/?p=108 Continue reading →]]> 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: