![]() In post-production, it cemented to Jacobs that everything was working in concert creatively. ![]() The artist’s unorthodox approach sounds partly diegetic and partly like it’s emanating from beyond the veil. “She was amazingly patient with me.” Martin even took charge in changing Jacobs’ words with a pen in real time during a take-one that he ended up retaining in the finished version of the short.Īfter applying soft bursts of static in the sound edit, New York-based electronic artist Borpis undertook the remainder of the music from Jacobs’ template. But Jacobs reassured her that “it’s nothing political,” he jests. When she asked what her character was going to be saying on camera, Jacobs couldn’t produce a definitive copy right away. “That’s a personality who can a whole movie.” Martin ended up agreeing via text message even before Jacobs had fully written out the monologue. “She’s a charismatic person,” he says outright. In finding the right person for the thematic monologue running through his head, Jacobs knew his neighborhood friend Bianca Martin would be perfect. In Hdyk, that’s simply seen in his framing and use of a staticky CRT television, which he bought for $20 from a hotel in the Wisconsin Dells that was updating to all HD flat-screens. Coupled with that, Jacobs embraces outmoded technology that amplifies a certain mystique that the digital era can’t replicate. You see what you’re getting, and lean into what seems like is going well,” Jacobs notes on how he broadly tackles his art form, and how he adapts in tinkering with circuit-bending gear. “If you get into something like analogue glitching, that in itself is such an experimental process, that you kind of learn to treat things in a very experimental way. ![]() How do we know? What came first, the images or the words? Jacobs actually can assuredly answer that: the visuals, as he configured lighting setups to shoot with varying lenses on his trusty Canon EOS Rebel T4i DSLR. He launches right into the process of visualizing the film and scripting Martin’s metaphysically comic monologue in Hdyk, which attempts to undermine our shared concept of objective reality through hypothetical scenarios. “First of all, it should probably have a person in it,” Jacobs says, lightly laughing. ![]() “I very consciously was like, ‘Well, how do I make something a little more engaging?'” he asked himself, already in possession of the answer. Humbly reflecting upon his winter submission of Snow Light to the previous Project Projection, Jacobs realized that some viewers, especially online, weren’t “locking into it”-as an eight-minute hypnotic, ambiently psychedelic shot of a streetlamp-and so he wanted to create something more immediately entertaining. Jacobs cradles a five-foot Spirit Halloween Pose ‘N’ Stay skeleton he recently picked up, specially for “Hdyk.” His lone human actor, City Cast Madison host and radio producer Bianca Martin, stands in for that game’s fortune teller Eliza Vorez (motion-captured and voiced by the legendary Grace Zabriskie), but Hdyk also stars one non-human participant, Jacobs’ fetching feline, Frito.Īlex T. In Hdyk, Jacobs pushes beyond this familiar template in a wholly original live-action project, which takes subconscious inspiration from Supermassive Games’ interactive-drama horror game The Quarry (2022). The four-minute short hones Jacobs’ recognizably warped style, which has typically drawn on found footage elements or subtly time-lapsed static shots-glitchy pop art for the terminally online era. (Full disclosure: I serve on the Mills Folly Microcinema programming committee, but had no role in fielding or selecting this local work.) It sees its world premiere at Mills Folly Microcinema’s recurring showcase of local filmmaking, Project Projection, at Arts + Literature Laboratory on Wednesday, September 20, at 7 p.m. Jacobs’ new short film, Hdyk ( How do you know), arrives in the lead up to spooky season. This playfully eerie Rod Serling-esque setup to Alex T. An omniscient narrator emerges from behind a table and calls out to the viewer, “Hello. A disembodied arm moves the skeleton head towards the camera and gently pets the cat’s head. Amongst a prismatic wave of distortion and destabilized analogue transmission, a black cat materializes. The profile view of a human skeleton model peeks through the display of a CRT television. Catch the premiere of his new short “Hdyk,” starring Bianca Martin, at Project Projection at Arts + Literature Laboratory on September 20. Bianca Martin asks, “How do you know?” amid the film of the same name’s glitchy editing and psychedelic color distortions.
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