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Synthetik… Jesus what to say about Synthetik. It’s very personal to me and beyond the surreal element to it it is also a true story and a painful one for me to tell. Of all the artful ways i could thinkof the describe it I’ll use an anecdote to explain it… at the 2008 Beloit International Film Festival, where Synthetik was awarded the Emerging Artists Award, A woman in her 70′s gruffly pulled me aside after one of the screenings. I asssumed I was going to get the riot act from some self-righteous woman wound up like and eight-day clock. She dragged my to the sidelines of the entrance, hugged me close and said “Thank you, You don’t know what that film meant to me”. That is the truth, the whole truth and nothign but the truth and it was the best moment I’ve ever had in film making. Watch for yourself and see if you are astute enough to find the beauty and love under the mask of horror, The embrace in the rape, the tender kiss at the center of the storm of a terrrible beating. I have such little faith in the ability of the populace to grasp something beyond their realm of experience and yet I love being surprised… Enjoy, Synthetik.

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In reaction to Seattle’s prerogative to tear down any and all buildings more than 10 years old and erect “cracker-box” condos in their place we made The Neu-Transients. The metaphor of change is presented in a playful lost love story between two punks living on a rooftop one choosing the life of the modern urbanite while the other stays in his traditional urban garb. A bit of the biographical here is that so many buildings were being torn down at the time that many of our friends and co-conspiritors were finding themselves suddenly homeless and at the time we filmed this Dahlia Films Studios was being eyed by a condo company for it’s wrecking ball. We survived and they now have the slums of the future to look forward to thus, everybody wins. The Singer in the song to this film is the lovely and talented J. Marie Anderson and the Lyrics are by Jack Bennett.

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Also produced with Dave Hanagan and for the North West Film Forum this film explores the similarities of the inner workings of a toaster and a 1930′s era film projector. Produced as a welcome trailer to play before all shows at the Film Forum, it includes plenty of stop motion animation using Dave’s secret animation fluid and well as some lovely toast burned with subliminal messages by Jack and his trusty blow torch.

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Due to Jack’s Persistent hanging around at the offices of the North West Film Forum they finally asked him to do something. Here we have the results. Along with collaborator and filmmaker extraodinaire, Dave Hanagan we made a trailer for the 2007 Local Sightings Film Festival. We went all out and even got Morricone to do the soundtrack from beyond the grave. Of note in this film, Jack Built all of the “hand-crank” cameras you see in the film in one day from spare parts in his house, he is a nerd.

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This film was produced again in a day for a local Seattle Weekly news paper’s film challenge. The idea was to feature their paper in a film no longer than 28 seconds presumably for use as a commercial. The story goes that the Editor of this paper was enraged by our submission and didn’t even include it in the traveling exhibition of the finished products. Such is life. Don’t worry though, Astrid’s arm healed nicely.