You can watch “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre” – and many other films – on-line via the LAIFF by going to this link and using the festival access code:
ACCESSLA
You will find my musical Edgar Allan Poe adaptation in Official Selections Streaming Block #2. It will play in the end of the program (you may skip ahead…).
One particularly photogenic part of Naples, Italy – worthy of its own little blog post – is the Galleria Umberto 1. It is a public shopping gallery with apartments built 1887-1890 across from the opera house, and named after the then reigning king of Italy. From Wikipedia:
“The Galleria is a high and spacious cross-shaped structure, surmounted by a glass dome braced by 16 metal ribs. Of the four iron and glass-vaulted wings, one fronts on via Toledo (via Roma), still the main downtown thoroughfare, and another opens onto the San Carlo Theatre. It has returned to being an active center of Neapolitan civic life after years of decay. The building is part of the UNESCO listing of the Historic Centre of Naples as a World Heritage Site.”
The tallest building in the Hudson Yards – also the 6th tallest building in New York City or 8th tallest in the United States – boasts The Edge, a viewing platform on the 101st floor.
Above is a shot I took from 34th street – the particles in the air from Canadian wildfires – it was a “moderate air quality day” unsuitable for asthma sufferers – contribute to the hazy look both of the building from the street and the views of the city from the observation deck. Below the picture in the Wikipedia entry shows the building in clear blue skies not marred by the devastations wrought by Climate Change.
Our friend Mitch suggested we check out the views from the Edge. 3X $50 for timed tickets purchased the experience last Saturday.
After passing through ticket control, we joined the line in a large waiting area with a ceiling of thousands of lights representing Manhattan.
Mitch and Ed.
Then we were ushered through a passage past building support columns lit up like at a dance club.
This long, often stalling line before being let into the elevators up to the platform had us waiting for over thirty minutes – as if for a popular ride at an amusement park. We waited the longest time in this area pictured below that simulated the noise and traffic of a busy subway station – which may be a novelty attraction for tourists (?), but to us natives at least was a nerve grating area to be stuck in for so long. What was the point of timed tickets if it still takes so long to get in, or up? We were beginning to sour at the experience…
Finally we got up to the upper story of two that connect to the outdoor viewing platform of The Edge (as well as hosting an overpriced restaurant).
The Upper West Side in the Canadian Haze.
Looking East towards the Empire State Building.
First view from above out at The Edge observation deck.
On our first stroll out in Napoli, we noticed blue and white banners everywhere. Since it was the day before Easter, we initially assumed the decorations were in honor of that High Holy Day…
But we soon learned that white and blue are the colors of the Naples soccer team. And they were leading the national league this year, so the city was festooned in celebration.
So in this first blog post on Naples I will focus on how the colors of S.S.C. Napoli dominated much of the cityscape.
With images of dearly departed Maradona far outnumbering those of all other players combined.
Maradona has already been beatified as far as Neapolitans are concerned. Certainly there were more street shrines to him than anybody else. (Pope? What pope?)
“The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre” screens June 8
on-line via the Brooklyn International short Film Festival
The Brooklyn International short Film Festival will make select shorts – including yours truly’s musical Edgar Allan Poe adaptation – available for viewing on 24FramesHub this Thursday June 8:
The screening had been especially dramatic. The surround sound system in the movie theater was very immersive, making those sections of the film where voice and instruments can be heard in multiple iterations coming from all corners of the auditorium – left right, left behind, right behind etc. – extra unsettling. I was freaking out a little myself, and I had made the damn film and obviously have seen (and heard) it many many times… At the end of the “Pendulum” section a woman could be heard audibly moaning, and I wondered whether she then left the theater.
Spencer Hawken, director of the festival, said during the Q&A that when they screened my first short “The Tell-Tale Heart – a musicabre” two years earlier he saw another woman exit the theater in the middle of the screening claiming the “sounds were too unnerving”. Which prompted another patron waiting in the hallway to see the current Hollywood blockbuster to say “Oh I want to see that” and go into the festival screening instead. Oh, the unholy things I do with cellos…
Anyway, that is just one tidbit of the post-screening Q&A, which was great fun.
UPDATE: And here is the video of the Q&A. Things get really fun when the other two actors take over and start asking questions of me, and then one of them does a little “performance”:
Spencer Hawken, director of the Romford Film Festival
And here is a video clip of me accepting the audience award for performance the next day:
The festival was running since Wednesday, May 24. I arrived Saturday and watched many films and chatted with many filmmaker colleagues. The quality of the features and shorts was very high at this festival. My short screened Monday at the end of the day, almost like one of those midnight madness horror films. Tuesday evening was the awards ceremony where I received the Audience Award for Performance, a fine capstone to my Romford experience.
Some pics from the awards ceremony:
That’s me with Steven Sibley, the director of “Deadly Display”, who was so intrigued by the description of “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre” he rounded up a half dozen film crew pals to join him in the screening, and ended up being an enthusiastic booster of the film.
Even if you’ve only so far seen the poster(s) or trailer for “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre“, my musical short film adaptation of the classic Edgar Allan Poe story, you’ve encountered the above image of the protagonist hanging from the edge of the pit, with a monstrous eye waiting below for its quarry.
Day 8 of our shooting schedule is when we captured that shot – well, everything but the eye, photographed a previous day and added in post with VFX work. We would need an eight foot tube with the opening as wide (four feet) as the pit, in order to stretch out my body and arms within.
We wouldn’t be standing the pit tube upright for the shot. Usually in these “fake hanging from ledges” shots, the actor is lying on their stomach and the camera is placed level in the floor so that it looks like the shot is “looking down” at the character holding on for dear life.
In our case we decided we would tilt the pit tube about 45 degrees. In stead of a large fan, some gel and spray and styling would give my hair the right “downward” look. My acting would have to sell the rest. It felt a little like I was about to be shot out of a cannon.
For the whole film shoot we needed three separate versions of the pit. Most scenes required only the opening of the pit to be cut out of the floor of our set, raised just two inches above the studio floor. We placed a green screen or black cloth underneath (depending on the lighting). Both the inside of the pit shrouded in blackness and the reveal of the eye would be added in post with VFX.
Then we also needed to build a version of the pit that stood four feet off the ground, in order to allow shots from within the pit looking up, as well as shots of the protagonist as he is forced down into the pit by the encroaching, infernally hot walls.
For the shot of me actually hanging from the edge by my fingers we needed the big long tube. There was enough surface tension between me and the tilted tube that I wouldn’t slide down once lying down inside, but it was still very helpful that production designer Mariana Soares da Silva built a foot rest for me. Below the back entrance we at first placed green screen to aide Jimmy McCoy, our VFX guy, when he later adds the eye. But then we switched that out with black cloth to avoid the green light spill. The total darkness at the bottom of the tube caused by the black cloth was going to work better for Jimmy.
