Party members!
Investors!
Yesterday we finalized the glorious bureaucratic creation of a US-based company for monochrom.
US collaborators, actors and film festivals are easier to deal with if you can show that you are ‘one of them.’ Let’s call it financial mimicry, comrades.
Applause for
monochrom Propulsion Systems, LLC
Based in Washington, DC
(Left: our financial consultant Nick Farr and monochrom’s producer Guenther Friesinger)
Our marvelous casting agent Khris Brown has a message for the People of the World!
I’m very excited to have the opportunity to cast such a smart project. In the same way that early Monty Python skewered outdated social norms and Catch-22 satirized military absurdities, SZ sends up contemporary notions of commerce & social justice. The characters are all vibrant and essential to the lampoon, but, far from being cutouts to serve a point, they experience real arcs and anchor the story in strong human emotion. I expect the show to surpass its creators’ expectations and become a cult hit – it’s too insightful & funny to do anything less. We’re on the hunt for a diverse & international cast to add to our already-impressive roster. Interested parties can send their headshot, resume, union status & reel to me at SeniorEditor2011 AT gmail.com.
Comrade! Comradette! Get involved!
Today I visited SFX luminary Steve Tolin in his studio in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Steve is our creature effects specialist, an overall great chap, and I think he just offers what we need for Sierra Zulu.
(Above: Steve, working on a small action figure in his basement creature shop.)
What’s Steve’s background?
Steve is the award winning owner and operator of Tolin FX, an American special effects design and fabrication studio. Tolin FX focuses on the design and fabrication of Special Effects Make-up, Special FX Props, Radio Controlled, Cable Driven, and Hand Operated Puppets, and Computer Visual Effects. From conceptualization to execution, Steve and Tolin FX provide cost effective, creative solutions to complex and specialized problems. And that’s exactly what we need in Soviet Unterzoegersdorf: cost-effectiveness.
Steve has also made his film production debut as a member of Clear Conscience Pictures, creating a feature length science fiction adventure entitled, It Came from Yesterday.
To learn more about Steve Tolin and Tolin FX and to see some of their work, please visit http://www.tolinfx.com. To find out more about It Came from Yesterday and Clear Conscience Pictures, please see http://http://www.itcamefromyesterday.com/.
Creature effects? WTF?
Yes. But we are not telling you anything more. Period.
Our friend Andreas Rausch lives in Bamberg/Germany and works as an independent illustrator and storyboard artist.
We are highly delighted that we could convince him to join our team as the official storyboard maestro.
What’s Andreas story?
After finishing school, Andreas began work in the field of ceramics as a potter, painter and sculptor. While working with ceramics in 1994, he started his career as an illustrator and comic artist for various magazines, postcard manufacturers and comic books publishers, which lead to his independence as an artist in 1997.
In 2000 he began to work as a storyboard artist and set illustrator and painter, which included productions for cinema and TV.
In 2005 his graphic documentary Zappaesk was published by Ehapa, and was given a 2-page feature in Rolling Stone magazine.
(Above: Andreas is drawing some early storyboard images; August 2011 in Vienna)
What’s a storyboard anyways?
A film storyboard is essentially a series of sketches produced beforehand to help a film team visualize the scenes and find potential problems before they occur. In creating a motion picture with any degree of fidelity to a script, a storyboard provides a visual layout of events as they are to be seen through the camera lens.
When can we see the first sketches for Sierra Zulu?
Patience is a virtue, comrade… but here is a first glimpse.
(Above: a first glimpse)
Illustrator and designer Josh Ellingson on his role in the production of Sierra Zulu.
(Interview/editing by Eddie Codel.)
Exhibitions (Solo shows):
2010 All The Best, Mission: Comics & Art, San Francisco, CA;
2009 Bots, Bugs, and Beasts, The Art of Joshua Ellingson, The Museum of Robots, Second Life;
2009 South Carolina State University, Fine Arts Building, SC;
2006 Super7 Gallery, San Francisco, CA; 2003 KidRobot, San Francisco, CA
My name (and it is indeed a very Austrian one) is Johannes Grenzfurthner. I’m part of art-tech-philosophy group monochrom and I’m the director and co-screenwriter of “Sierra Zulu.” We are developing this feature-length film together with multi-award winning production company Golden Girls Filmproduktion — and I can’t tell you how excited we are about this project.
I was always interested in strange and obscure concepts, even as a kid. I loved science fact (Carl Sagan is still my only media idol) and science fiction, especially John Brunner and William Gibson. And I was always interested in the political dimension of near-future sci-fi. It’s hard to imagine, but I became a punk and antifascist because I devoured cyberpunk novels and watched shows like Max Headroom.
monochrom was officially founded in the early 1990s. The project started as a print fanzine about cyber-topics, politics, bizarre art and covert culture. There was some stuff going on in the US of A — like Mondo2000 — but it was all too hippieish, too liberalish, indulging in what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron later called the “Californian Ideology.” monochrom wanted to share and propagate a reflective leftist European perspective in relationship to socio-technological change. We published a couple of issues, low circulation, and — as the name suggests — we were barely able to finance the black and white xeroxes. But we kept working, created our first internet site in early 1994, and shortly afterwards we decided that we didn’t want to constrain ourselves to just one media format. We knew that we wanted to create statements, create viral information, spread thoughts, and do it in an entertaining way — in the form of sugar-coated info-bullets. Some messages definitely work better as a computer game or art installation or puppet theatre or robot or performance, some should better be presented as ASCII files… and some are the right stuff for a feature film. And that’s where we are right now.
Creating a film is an exciting, yet dangerous task. But we decided to take the risk. The story we want to tell is our approach to the political struggles of postwar, post-industrial Europe. We’re looking at the cracks in the foundation of knowledge society and transnational cognitive capitalism in a playful, grotesque and amusing way.
Get involved! Onward!