Ian MacKinnon’s Witchy Gothtober DAY 14

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Visit www.gothtober.com and click on Day 14 for the most helpful advice you’ll get this year!

Ian MacKinnan’s coven of witchy sisters are going to guide you toward greatness, if only you’ll listen to their common sense wisdom! Each of them is over 500 years old, so if you think better… Witch Please, think again!

Studies have shown that regular humans like us can gain infinite knowledge from the centuries of experience our dear majikal wimmin sisters have gleaned. If you don’t like what they are saying, don’t be too vocal about it, they can say incantations that make you grow hair on your eyeballs, it’s best that you not explore their wrath! We think you’ll find that if you apply these helpful bits of learning to your life lexicon, you will achieve a level of balance that was thought to be long lost, according to legendary lore.

 

The Stig Strikes Again for Gothtober DAY 12

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Visit www.gothtober.com and click on DAY 12 to see The Stig!

They say that things go better with basset hounds, so we invited The Stig to come on over and celebrate with us for another Gothtober. My goodness, this canine doesn’t disappoint! This year’s presentation by our furry long-eared fellow takes us down an eerie wooded path to tell a story we’ve all been addicted to over the summer. No spoilers! In the footsteps of Flash on Dukes of Hazzard, Sam on That’s So Raven, and Tex Avery’s cartoon creation, the beloved Droopy, The Stig is doing a fine job of becoming everyone’s modern day household Basset Hound!

Gothtober SURPRISE it’s DAY 9!!!!

Piñatas of bully billionaire politicians are quite popular right now...
Piñatas of bully billionaire politicians are quite popular right now…

Visit www.gothtober.com and click on DAY 9 and well… it might be the scariest thing on the entire calendar this year.

Los Gatitos and their basket of adorable deplorables have collaborated this year to make a short and sweet punk song asking you to please not vote for the Cheeto. I’m not gonna say his name because I’m tired of hearing it, and you know who I’m talking about.

Turn this one on, turn it up and sing along, we need it!

Gothtober 9
It’s always been mine*
But this one I bet
Will be the scariest yet
 
There’s a dangerous monster running for president 
Sick in the head, he’s really not hesitant
To foment violence among his followers
A schoolyard bully with a billion dollars
 
Did you know that
Hitler was elected?
Giving hope to the lost and dejected
But soon he started rounding up Jews
Homosexuals, Gyspies too
Don’t kid yourself it could happen here!
 
With angry talk of rounding up Mexicans
Persecuting Muslims they’re not good Americans
Denigrating women, dredging up hate
Now open your eyes before it’s too late!
 
Please don’t vote for Donald Trump
Please don’t vote for Donald Trump
Please don’t vote for Donald Trump
 
He’s a very bad man, he’s a very bad man!
*not quite true

 

A Glorious Stop Motion Explosion with Gothtober Day 7’s Harold!

screen-shot-2016-10-10-at-6-29-29-pm Visit www.gothtober.com and visit DAY 7 for a remarkably tremendous stop motion love letter to the 1995 film “Sense and Sensibility” from Sony Studios.

Harold has admittedly seen this movie more than 100 times, and decided that it was high time a bit of art should be dedicated to a certain celebrated cinematic moment. If you have seen this movie, you know exactly what we’re talking about, and if you don’t… well, perhaps it’s time you rented it on Netflix!

Upon watching this elegantly gorgeous and grotesque build-up of paper parts animation, enjoy the satisfaction and release accompanied by some finely drawn gore that just makes me give an unfiltered, unfettered hat’s OFF to our animator! Undoubtedly, the young and capable and entirely talented Harold spent way beyond any acceptable amount of hours to build this work, and it’s just breathtaking. As you may or may not know, the theme of this year’s Gothtober Calendar is “Metamorphosis” and I dare say, this theme is quite gallantly on display for day 7, we kid you not.

The spirit of this short film is a perfect visual response to both the literary and filmic concept of repression, the classic real kind from 1795 and perhaps the modern, current repression we’re watching while an orange-faced candidate for the presidency makes brains explode merely by saying things out of his face hole. screen-shot-2016-10-10-at-6-35-07-pm

The age of original, soul-crushing good-old-fasbioned Jane Austen-era repression was so strong, mind you, that Ms. Austen remained the anonymous author of Sense and Sensibility until after her death! This woman wrote in a room that had a squeaking board outside the door so that if anyone approached while she wrote, she could quickly hide her manuscript and disguise what she was doing by twiddling her thumbs or knitting lace or whatever people were doing to get themselves through the Napoleonic war. This was not a time to be getting your social vision on, it would be decades before the ethics, passion and exploratory notions in Sense and Sensibility would be truly appreciated.

In Lettres Philosophiques, Voltaire writes

What we find in books is like the fire in our hearts. We fetch it from our neighbor’s, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

And so we’re seeing some of that deep appreciation here in a multi-level artistic accolade from a dedicated fan to a moment, a moment that encapsulates the synthesis of sense and sensibility, in an outrageous transformation followed by a quiet and faithful heartbeat, a bloody, happy heartbeat.

Thank you, Harold Harold, for the blood, sweat, and tears!

Bobbugs for Gothtober Day 3

Visit www.gothtober.com and visit DAY 3 to see the Amazing BOBBUGS!!!

Bobbugs is none other than Michael Gump, the Master of Disguise! He and talented colleague, Brandon Minton, collaborated to make a stop-motion disguise especially for Gothtober. Watch how he transforms from mild-mannered mortal man to the shadow of his former self!

Bobbugs conceals  himself with a different every single day. EVERY SINGLE DAY! And he’s on his second year of doing it! years ago he tried on lots of different disguises to make a Gothtober piece, but he decided to try the 365 day challenge, which was so satisfying, that he hasn’t stopped yet! Check out this great story about him that tells you more about the daily challenges Michael faces in creating a new look every 24 hours!

Find his daily disguises on Instagram@Bobbugs! 

Don’t Mess With the CAT! Day 29

From two young film maker brothers arrives a cautionary tale about how NOT to treat your feline friend!

When Max and Jay decide to mess with the cat, Children of the Corn, they learn the hard way that cats do NOT take kindly to human shenanigans! KP Pepe produced and directed this collaborative film, it’s got some sweet stop motion and some expert animal wrangling! I asked KP the inspiration for the work, and here’s the scoop:

We pretty much let Jay come up with the story with some assistance from Max and me and Candi. The boys/Candi made the bulk of the sets and we took turns animating it. They had a big role in the story and dialogue.

This is a fine family project, big props to everyone who worked so hard on it, especially Mama Candi, who was production designer! And very big thanks to Children of the Corn, who is a BIG Gothtober Star, we hope you get all of the fish you like!

Kimberly Kim DAY 21

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Today’s beautiful short film DAY 21 on Gothtober haunts and hypnotizes your senses and reels you in to have a moment with the elusive gravity of existence. Kimberly Kim is a Los Angeles-based ornamental sound etcher who searches for sounds to sketch on trees. You may be more familiar knowing her as the silent  smiling bar maiden pouring delicious devil horn poisons and mixing tasty double vision snake oil elixirs at Akbar.

This is her Gothtober debut. Shifting footage, colors, animation, movement comes together to form a visual incantation accompanied by a temporal, resonant melody.

Do you hear a ballad? Do you see water? Whose face is that anyway? My eyeballs are fascinated! 

Peer into this piece, investigate, watch, and investigate further. Decipher what you will, the limitless availability of it gives you all you need and then some. There are a million and one ways to make a film, here is another, we are thrilled to present it.

DAY 9: TAKE OUT

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Click on DAY 9 on www.gothtober.com

From the depths of pipe cleaner nihilism arrives a one minute film called Take Out.

Though a brief foray into the avant-garde, it is everything, and it is nothing.

You might say it’s viscerally alive. You could say it was designed by the inventor of Tetris.

One might say it’s jalapeños in your pancakes.

It can be experienced as a smörgåsbord of sight and sound.

Refreshingly free of narrative, the joy of this film exists in it’s complete abandonment of constraints and a whole-hearted embracing of raw, spontaneous energy.

Take this journey, go on a one minute musing of whatever you will, whatever you have. What’s going on? Only the disco ball knows for sure.

 

DAY 8 – Fall Ideals: Los Angeles River

Today is a short film by Julianna Parr (me) about water, pumpkins, and one of LA’s secret havens: The Los Angeles River.

What you can see is pumpkins and the LA River. What you can’t see is the perilous task that is pumpkin wrangling IN the LA River.

It’s slippery, even if you have tread-laden shoes. But it’s beautiful, and it’s our river, and it was great fun slogging about, setting up shots with orange orbs in the middle of the day. One woman asked us if we were scared.

I’m not sure what she meant. Did she mean being in the LA water? Did she mean being scared of the urban environment? Was she inherently uneasy at the site of pumpkins not analogous to the surrounding landscape? I assured her that we were not scared. Maybe she meant flash floods? Flash floods are scary, and I made sure to check the forecast for any rain that would be happening up in Valencia or other places that could send a deluge of water our way, but the coast was clear.

It was sunny, breezy, clear and serene at the river. Pigeons were very curious about the project.

All of DAY 5 All the Way from an Island in the Mediterranean

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www.gothtober.com click on DAY 5

Mallorca [maˈʎorka])[2] is the largest island in the Balearic Islands archipelago, which are part of Spain and located in the Mediterranean Sea.

And from the middle of all that arrives a film with creatures, temptation, water, concrete, sand, searching, and singing! The director sent some comments and some behind the scenes photos. The director said that she’s:

… interested in the power of metaphor in the visual arts, thus the mouthless meets the eyeless. How do they communicate?

How does the ignorant and the powerless become the conscious and the active participant. blabla if you want to get into the mind wanking aspect.

Locations for this film include the beaches of Es Trenc, and a mixture of old and new structures in the city of Palma. The big round wheel-like sculptures they filmed in were by Catalan artist Josep Guinovart, dated 1986 and are supposed to represent windmills! Each piece can be seen here.

It took a lot of convincing the french teenagers to get weird…

When asked how the eyes and mouths disappeared in the film, Sisyphus’s twin sister said “I wanted to do silicone but we were rushed and it took too damn long so we just used adhesive stretchy bandages and coverup.”

People in Spain are so used to weird foreigners that not a single person stopped to watch the shoot.

We hope you enjoy today’s film experience, and may your communication impossibilities make a wonderful family.