Fargo Paintings

Postcard from the Bottom Bunk

Greetings from the bottom bunk
where I lay quiet enough to ponder
an older brother gone quiet

where I lay quiet enough to think,
are you still up there?

Sometimes I envied your perspective
but now I think, to be first
must be quite the weight.

What a climb

And here in the bottom bunk
at least the bathroom is closer

The Sun and I

I'm going to post things here again. This is an AE project I was messing around with last summer.

3D editing space like whoa

Today I made use of AE's 3D capabilities for the first time ever, and I must say:  wow.  The potential for this is unreal.  Combine a 3D workspace with stuff like the puppet tool, and wow.  Wow wow wow.  I should teach myself more, this didn't take long at all to figure out.

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When I made the umbrella one, I realized that AE's puppet tool must have unlimited potential! Isn't that how they make HISHE? That would be fun to explore.

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Diner Scene

My final project for my lighting class, Fall 2013. Early that semester I was discussing ideas of an isolated film sequence with Isaiah. He wrote a brief dialogue, which I remembered when this project was assigned. Because I had little previous experience with lighting, having to do everything myself built a lot of confidence in my ability to use what I learned over the semester. I just wish I wouldn't have screwed up the sound.

Diner Scene from Travis Blake on Vimeo.

Noise

Shift

We are gutting a building after sunset.  The yellow floodlights we work by reveal an atmosphere of drywall dust.  I take a sledgehammer to the wall on the earth around the sun through the infinite.  

Planetary orbit is second grade, but kids can’t feel that knowledge.  I recall that as a twelve-year-old on the cusp of abstract thought, the existential jolts into the present moment, crises of reality and perception, flooded my knowledge with a new weight I couldn’t handle.  

One traumatic night riding in the van on our way home, the friend talking to me suddenly felt eerily far away, as if my spirit were retracting deeper into my body.  At the same time, my brain seemed to be exploding with unnecessary sensory detail that brought everything oppressively close.  I could not comprehend a word my friend was saying.  I tried to act natural.  When I got home, I starting sobbing while my parents  frantically asked what was wrong.  I was speechless.  I thought I was dying.

My forearms resist as I struggle to raise the hammer back for another blow.  In spite of a lackluster swing, the drywall crumbles before the blunt steel and debris particles sting my eyes.  When I open them, I see the lights beaming through the hole I just created.  A hole in the wall on the earth around the sun through the infinite.

Today, I relish both the sensory closeness and the spiritual distance, the discrepancies between my organs and soul, the gaps in my thoughts, the sensitivities of unedited conscious purity.  I’ve found such shifts can rarely be forced.  I do not mind, because it is their spontaneity and brevity that make them precious.  The simultaneous sensations of stepping back and stepping forward reassure me with the absurdities of existence on large and small scales:  the construct of consciousness, really real stars, my ability to reproduce, man-made measurements of time.