Box Men and Winter Sports are publicly available again

In light of how the film festival scene has been affected by COVID-19, I’ve decided to make Box Men and Winter Sports available for public viewing again for an indefinite amount of time. Box Men: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vekSLuZOVYM - https://vimeo.com/372162379 - https://letterboxd.com/film/box-men/ Winter Sports: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmHAcjL5EiM - https://letterboxd.com/film/winter-sports-2020/ A playlist of nearly all my current films (short and featurette length) can be seen here: - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnlHE1xXwzCALW6QbofhMZTrF1QXCc598

The main reason I had these shorts private was so that they’d be eligible for festivals, but many festivals have delayed their deadlines and dates to 2021 and later due to the pandemic. I don’t want to keep the movies vaulted in that time, so it’s now possible to see them on YouTube and Vimeo again. I’ve realized that things had been somewhat frenetic on the availability of the films, being public and then private just to be made public again, etc. Apologies for any confusion. There’s been a lot of personal discussion lately on where things should go in regards to upcoming film productions and personal progression as a filmmaker, and the odds are shifting constantly with the pandemic. The version of Winter Sports I uploaded is like a director’s cut variant. The edit for film festivals has a public domain theater organ track while the linked edit has the original music the film was edited to, a song from Tom Waits’ The Black Rider. Music copyrights be damned, don’t tattle on me. The drone track following it was a really old ambient recording I made of an inactive online radio station, capturing the sound of raw data transmitting with nothing in it.

It’s been a moment since I last posted here. Been meaning to write on here, and on most other places too, but mental energy has kinda been in the tubes. A lot of stuff has been happening. Being in Georgia, we’re supposed to be going back to work now since Kemp is a moron. So we’re now full-time in the zone, watching out for deathtraps. Will save all that for later though, if I ever get to it. Main focus of this post is that Winter Sports is done, and on YouTube, right now. Just a little under 6 minutes of condensed black comedy. A teddy bear with an invisible rifle participates in the annual winter sports where he hunts bipedal suited animals for game. The set design alludes to incidents of slaughtering and the fates of several hikers who mysteriously went missing. Winter Sports was conceived in a night along with three other absurdist shorts (Voluntary Martyrs, Patriot Carnival and Day Of The Woodpecker). The films were all conceived in some way or another as absurdist homages to Soviet Necrorealism. Necrorealism has been a movement that’s fascinated me for a while now. It’s technically over at this point, it was the brainchild of a singular director named Yevgeny Yufit, and he kicked the bucket back in 2016. The movement died with him, but I feel aspects of it ring as being relevant to America’s current crisis with the capitalist shitshow going on right now in light of COVID-19. The best way to communicate our current landscape is absurdism in my opinion. It kinda surprises me that with the current popularity of quarantine filmmaking, it didn’t pick up any traction. Times like this warrant pitch black dark humor. The basic premise of Winter Sports really took action when I had a little realization about these shorts I was watching for the past couple of years. For some reason, early Necrorealist shorts were really fixated on werewolves. In Werewolf Orderlies there was the titular werewolf orderlies, a bunch of medical assistants who take the protagonist (a sailor carrying a hacksaw) and drop him off in a snowy forest where he’s beaten to a pulp by a gang of manic shovelers. And in Woodcutter, you have a werewolf who disguises himself as a tourist who jumps off the roof of a building before throwing himself in front of a speeding train. Not exactly the sorta stuff you’d expect a werewolf to do. Sometime later, I heard it might have come from how wild dogs and wolves were considered a predatory threat in Russia, like how bears are in America. You had stuff like the death of Grizzly Man where he was mauled by a bear. In Winter Sports, I originally had the idea of the sportsman being a suited werewolf. But after this tidbit, I shifted the protagonist to instead be a teddy bear named Bino. The image of a cutesy Sanrio looking bear shooting people and skinning them was also funnier than a plain werewolf anyway, so it’s a win win. This upload of Winter Sports may or may not be a limited viewing kind of thing. The plan was that I’ll have the film up for a week, starting today (writing this on the 12th) until it’s made private again on the 19th. Film festivals are kinda uptight when it comes to films being not available to the public when submitted for consideration. Still thinking through on if it should actually be private though. Forgot to mention it on here, but it's also the reason Box Men (a similarly absurdist dark comedy I filmed in 2019) is currently private. I do have the loophole though where I can send private upload links to the film to anyone interested in seeing it.

“You Get All The Great Sunsets” from Box Men. Recommended to watch with sound on. The full film is available on YouTube and Vimeo.

YouTube - Vimeo - Letterboxd Box Men was made as a part of the 2019 Buried Alive Film Festival Sinema Challenge, a 13-day filmmaking challenge where a makeshift crew is tasked with creating a short in 13 days. It was my first time ever leading a team for an event like this, my second time directing actors. I was made aware of the challenge previously with my involvement in other teams’ shorts for the Sinema Challenge. I had an interest in leading my own team for several years, ever since I conceived a campy comedic horror short titled “Boogeyman Meets The Spooky Teens Out By Blood Creek” from the prompts given for a team I was working for in 2017. I wanted to lead my own team to make something very campy, stylized, somewhat 60s B-movieesque in the randomness the film would embody from the prompts that were given. This year though, my intention in joining was from a more distinctly surrealist Bataille inspired standpoint in creating a sort of media hijacking, the context of seeing the film in the challenge’s lineup itself being a surreal experience for the audience.

The prompts we drew for our film were “Madness and Paranoia” and “Terrorists”. Being that the last film I made just before this was Kafka’s Supermarket, it was no doubt that we really lucked out on the draw.

In the span of just 12 days, our team conceived, wrote and filmed a nearly 20 minute short completely from the ground up. The only catch is that the maximum running time for a short in the challenge is actually 8 minutes. While the version of Box Men we ended up creating was the shortened version of a much longer concept, the film still maxed out with its length over the limit for what could be accepted. For this reason, I can now release the film early, showing its complete state the day it was to be submitted for consideration.

The team name we ended up selecting was titled after the Acéphale secret society that was partly curated by Georges Bataille. Special thanks go to everyone who generously participated in the making of the film. Thanks to Steven Cline, Casi Cline, Tommy Ward, Keaton Stewart, Tom Leary, Ben Holst, Juli Kearns, and Martin Kearns.

Aaron Kearns’ “The Counting Man” This film was my first effort of telling a lengthy work of fiction. This is the film equivalent to a one man band, there was no crew behind it aside from myself. The film took around 4 months to make, and that fact can in a way be told from how the main character's mask falls apart throughout the film.