Camera Reel

It's been almost two years since I've updated my blog! Okay. Well, here's my camera operating reel.

Camera reel: Keith Putnam from High Water Media on Vimeo.

Warning: NSFW content (lingerie, horror violence)

Keith Putnam's current camera operator showreel. If you're interested in hiring Keith, contact him via email at keith@highwatermedia.com.

RED Epic 5K test shoot: Feathers

Feathers from Mark L. Pederson on Vimeo.

This is the long-awaited test shoot we at OffHollywood did with the new RED Epic 5K digital cinema camera. Alonso Homs acted as DP and I was juggling DIT work and also operating the handheld shots of the pillow fighting from 0:52 to 1:49 and 1:52 to the end.

union busting is all the rage

"A unionized public worker, a member of the Tea Party, and a CEO are sitting at a table.
In the middle of the table, there is a plate with a dozen cookies on it.
The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies, looks at the Tea Partier and says, 'Watch out for that union guy; he wants a piece of your cookie.'"

write some

Oh look! This thing still exists.
I've made a snap decision to participate in this year's NaNoWriMo (or National Novel Writing Month, for the less acronym-savvy of you). The idea is to churn out a 50,000-word novel in thirty days. As they say, "December is for editing".
We'll see how it goes.

Old, Blackened Century now on CD

Flaming Tusk has incarnated their debut full length album Old, Blackened Century as a "compact disc" (remember those? they use LASERS!). It's housed in a handsome digipak, showing here:



It can be yours for the low price of $9 (plus the usual shipping, handling, and the imperilment of your soulllll). The CD digipak and the pay-what-you-will digital download are both available at music.flamingtusk.com.

magic on my block

Eggplants and flowers offered to the orisha Oya, deity in Santería and Yoruban pantheons, goddess of cemetery gates.
Left at the fence of Astoria's Our Lady of Mount Carmel cemetery, popularly known as the Irish Famine cemetery.

bonsai rose experiment no. 1

The rosebush in front of my house (which you may have heard about before) is especially vigorous this year. I, of course, credit my judicious regimen of trial-and-error deadheading and pruning which began last year. I'm forced to curate this plant semi-clandestinely, as my landlords' parents feel the rosebush is theirs. For my part, I feel I'm the one who's pushed it to produce so well this season and as such I have certain rights of my own.

Like taking cuttings, for example.

I've decided to see if it's possible to train a rosebush into something approximating a bonsai-like size. I picked a cutting which had an abundance of branches while still being small enough to start in a pot. Internet research led me to believe that the success rate of rooting new cuttings is fairly high, so I got myself a pot and bag of organic potting soil and went to work.

This cutting, my first experiment, has a dab of honey on the cut end to stimulate root production (apparently this is a thing?), and I'm hitting it with 700 lumens of artificial daylight from a compact fluorescent bulb at least until it shows some evidence of new growth. Let the experiment begin.

Flaming Tusk media barrage

It's been quite a week, mediawise, down here in our spectre-haunted practice space.

First, on Monday we received an alert about a new review of Old, Blackened Century on the Penny Arcade affiliate metal blog From The Dust Returned. Writer/editor Autothrall writes, in part:

They've here written a pretty tight debut showcasing their potential, which rests heavily on the killer riffing of Don Blood and 'Zosimus'. Seriously, these gentlemen can groove, and though many of their riffs recall the primal, morbid ascensions and declensions of an old Slayer, or the more creative sludge of The Ocean, Cult of Luna or the later Isis records, I'd say on the whole what they evoke is quite an original trip, worth taking even if the vocals require a little adjusting (unless you're already into extreme sludge like Soilent Green or Eyehategod).

The entire review is available at From The Dust Returned.

On Tuesday the May/June 2010 "Golden Gods" issue of Revolver magazine was released into the wild, and on page 48 they include Flaming Tusk as a "Quick Fix", showing here (click to enlarge):



Revolver describes us as sounding like "...High on Fire and Immortal mud-wrestling in a blackened sludge pit full of blood, bile, lava and more blood." Evocative, no? Go out and buy every copy you can find, though Revolver tells us that last year's Golden Gods issue was their biggest-selling of the year, so tracking it down may not be easy.

And finally, Veteran free weekly paper NY Press devoted a half page in their music section in their May 12-18 issue to Flaming Tusk, describing us in the headline as "gentlemen metalheads".



The full text of the article is available on the NY Press website in the Music Features section.

To those who can make it, we'll see you at Lit Lounge on Monday, 5/17.