One of our favorite current bands, Broken Social Scene, is doing a show at Terminal 5 in NYC tonight and you can watch it live on youtube.
The band’s video for the track Forced To Love off their most recent album, Forgiveness Rock Record, was co-directed by none other than our good friend and soon-to-be Skylark Director of Photography, Alan Poon. The video employs cutting edge 3D rendering and looks like nothing you’ve seen before.
From Arts & Crafts’s video description:
“It’s an experimental 3D scanning technology that detects the displacement of a grid pattern of any object in front of it,” Poon explains. “The data is then used to rebuild the object in three dimensions. Each band member’s performance was scanned using this technique and manipulated in the computer to create the effect you see in the final video.”
Check it out here:
And here’s a little behind the scenes clip starring Alan, his collaborator on the project, Adam Makarenko, and the band.
-blake
I want to take a moment to share a beautiful clip that Alan sent us of Stevie Ray Vaughan performing with his brother Jimmie. Jimmie was three years older than Stevie and was his first big musical influence.
As you know, our film is about a musician who loses his older brother/bandmate in a tragic accident. Of course The Skylark is fiction, but the story of Stevie Ray Vaughan sadly is not. Jimmie’s younger brother overcame a drug and alcohol abuse problem only to die tragically in a helicopter crash in 1990. He was 35 years old.
Thanks for the clip, Alan.
-blake
There are some fantastic bands out there who aren’t getting the stateside recognition they deserve. High up on my (and Blake’s) list is The Acorn from Ottawa, Ontario. We saw them a couple years ago at a tiny spot in Hoboken and there were about ten people there. A complete travesty if you ask me. This is the kind of music that inspires us everyday, and the plan is that our film and this blog will be vessels through which these amazing voices are recognized and shared.
Here are two clips from Laundromatinee:
And a music video for their track THE FLOOD PT. 1:
Just fantastic songwriting across the board. If you like what you hear, give this band your money and download their music. I highly recommend their last album, Glory Hope Mountain. Also check out their amazing song off Friends in Bellwoods 2 (a compilation album of Canadian bands), called SLIPPERY WHEN WET.
The Acorn’s new album, No Ghost, comes out in the US on June 1st. You can download their new single for free here.
Enjoy.
-keith
I have four tattoos. My first came in a series of dots, placed with precision, around my lungs and spleen when I was 18. I had just completed six months of chemotherapy and was about to begin two months of radiation treatment for Hodgkin’s Disease (Cancer of the lymph nodes). These dots would perfectly align my body on the table so that the sick areas were treated while minimizing the sacrifice of healthy cells.
After my treatments were over I was in remission. I had been poked and prodded so many times by nurses and doctors that I decided I wanted to put something on my body that had meaning and beauty, and I wanted it to be something I chose. I’d get a tattoo. I told my mother my plans and she replied, “If you still want it when you’re 21, I’ll pay for it”. 3 years later I was ready.
I have always loved martial arts, specifically Bruce and Brandon Lee. Their young and tragic deaths resonated with me and I specifically loved the film, THE CROW (A story about a man who cheats death and exacts revenge on the people who brutally murdered him and his young wife). I felt I had just cheated death. I knew I wanted a crow but none of the images from the film seemed cool enough. A couple of days before my appointment with the tattoo artist I went to see the sequel to THE CROW. A terrible movie, but the villian was played by IGGY POP. He had a huge tattoo on his chest depicting two demons fighting each other and their outlines formed a crow. I loved it. It became my first tattoo, well, second if you count the radiation dots.
While in the hospital for complications from one of my chemo treatments I met a boy named Kipp who had Leukemia. He was only a year younger than me (17). We were the only patients under 60 on the whole floor and we bonded immediately. There was something angelic about him, and although we only spent a few days together we kept in touch after I was released. A year later he passed away.
While in the hospital, Kipp created a series of drawings featuring a character called Pipeman. Pipeman was a sort of alter ego who traveled to far away lands; a way for Kipp to escape. When I attended a special memorial service for Kipp at his High School, his mom gave me copies of the drawings. My favorite was PIPEMAN ON THE MOON. It became my third tattoo and I would eventually write and produce a full length play by the same name, based on my experiences with Kipp.
In our script, THE SKYLARK, there’s a key scene in which Micah, our main character, follows his muse through Central Park and she leads him to STRAWBERRY FIELDS, John Lennon’s memorial. Blake and I also shot our interview for THE ULTIMATE FILMMAKER COMPETITION in and around there. We’ve worked on this script for about four years now and I feel it’s very much a part of me, hence my fourth tattoo: the Imagine symbol at Strawberry Fields, but instead of the word IMAGINE in the center, I added a skylark. I fucking love this tattoo and it’s healing as I write this. It is an indelible promise to myself to make our film.
-keith
Unfortunately, our project was not selected for the finals of the Ultimate Filmmaker Competition. We’re still very honored to have made it to the Top 25, and we want to congratulate the finalists. We also want to say, without any hesitation, that THE SKYLARK will be made and we are pursuing every possible path to bring it to the big screen.
Now that the UFC site is down, we decided to give our interview a second life and post it here in HD. I know we also promised to post some outtakes, but it seems a little self-indulgent at this point. Anyway, we want to put our time into pushing THE SKYLARK forward and blogging about things that inspire us.
Stay tuned.
-blake
Filed under: Canon 5d Mark ii, Combat Rock, Screenwriting, Skylark, Sweet Nothing, Uncategorized, Video
*UPDATE: Because distributing the video on vimeo can be considered broadcasting, we’ve been advised to pull it for music copyright reasons (we have acquired festival rights only). Therefore the film is still on the site, but has been password protected. If you would like to have access to the film for private use only, please email us @ info@thehamiltonbrothers.com.
Now that SWEET NOTHING (formerly titled COMBAT ROCK) has been made available at The Ultimate Filmmaker Competition website, we figured it’s time to present the film to you here in glorious HD! However, please continue to direct your traffic to the competition site to vote and support independent film.
While finishing the screenplay for our feature film, THE SKYLARK, Keith and I thought it would be fun to create a companion piece that tells a little bit of back story. THE SKYLARK is about a brilliant young musician struggling to survive after losing his older brother/band-mate in a tragic accident. This short film, SWEET NOTHING, which takes place 20 years earlier, is about that older brother discovering his love of music and buying his first record. The film is intended to feel like an extended flashback.
One of the most interesting facts about SWEET NOTHING is that we shot it entirely on my Canon 5d Mark ii Digital SLR. For those of you who don’t know what this means, the 5d is a small photo camera that has changed the world of independent film and certainly reinvigorated us. It looks like this…
…and shoots HD images like you wouldn’t believe. I will be writing a long post about the camera and our experience with it soon. In the meantime, I’d like to give a special thanks to our wonderful cast and crew, and to the parents of Evan, Dominic, and Tristan who play the three leads in the film.
Without further ado, may I present to you SWEET NOTHING! (Be sure to click the fullscreen button in the bottom right corner of the player.)
I hope you enjoyed it and are ready for more in the form of a feature film! :)
-blake
Here’s one election that doesn’t involve punditry, lobbying, or picking a party: The Ultimate Filmmaker Competition is ready for you to help choose their winner! They explain on their site, better than we can, the importance of this competition, so please go to www.ultimatefilmmakercompetition.com now and vote! Then tell all your friends to vote, and tell them to tell their friends.
Our film THE SKYLARK is listed under KEITH AND BLAKE HAMILTON. Click on our names and you’ll find an interview with us, our bio, and a sample of our work including SWEET NOTHING in its entirety! And as promised, keep checking back here for out-takes from our interview.
Thanks for sticking with us. The time has come!
-blake and keith
Filed under: Combat Rock, Music, Photos, Screenwriting, Skylark, Sweet Nothing, Video
We have loads of news, but first I’d like to thank you all for sticking with this blog the last two weeks. Keith and I were slacking on the posts, but for good reason; we spent the last month finishing our screenplay and other submission content for the Ultimate Filmmaker Competition. I’m very excited to report that WE ARE DONE! The receipt of the materials was confirmed by the Filmmaker’s Alliance, and now we just have to try to wait patiently.
Keith and I spent many long days rewriting THE SKYLARK line by line, as we reported in previous posts. Overall, we trimmed a lot of fat and worked to heighten conflict where the pace felt slow. Along the way we received vital feedback from our friend Alan Poon and our wonderful ladies Julie and Sarah. We are all extremely excited by the finished product. I think it reads great, and as a director I can now SEE the film, which is when I know it’s working.
After completing the screenplay, we still had to submit three essay questions, plus a 7 minute video interview and a sample of our work. In my opinion, The Ultimate Filmmaker Competition earns it’s name by pushing it’s entrants to think through every aspect of their project and document it. The experience has been invaluable.
We decided to shoot our video interview in Central Park and cut it as a mini-documentary. This meant a lot of editing in a very brief amount of time. Alan shot some beautiful footage and we lucked out with a picturesque rainy day.
I decided to hold off on editing the interview until after we finished our screenplay, which only gave me about three days. I put in more than 40 hours in one weekend, cutting in music, photographs, old home-videos, and other b-roll.
For the work sample, Keith and I decided to submit the trailer for our first collaboration, UNFURL, along with our newest short film in its entirety. Now, here’s the not so great news:
COMBAT ROCK is now SWEET NOTHING
We managed to acquire the rights to music from The Velvet Underground, Depeche Mode, and Nina Simone for our small project, but ran into some resistance from The Clash. Such is life. Therefore, we have changed the name of the movie to SWEET NOTHING after the Velvet Underground song Oh! Sweet Nuthin’ which starts and ends the film.
I’m very excited that you’ll all finally be able to see some of the fruits of our labor in the coming weeks as the Filmmaker’s Alliance posts our work on their site. Get ready to vote and keep on checking back here. We’ll be posting outtakes from our interview and a lot of other content.
And finally, to celebrate the delivery of our work, here’s something beautiful in Central Park:
And another weeping ukulele to brighten your day:
Thanks again for the support!
-blake
The amazing Alan Poon became a New Yorker in a puff of smoke last spring, and today he will hop on his winged moose and head back to Canada. His name is all over this blog, and for good reason. Not only is he an amazing filmmaker, but he is one of my dearest friends.
Alan and I were freshman roommates at York University in 1997. One year later, he transferred to Ryerson, but those nine months we shared in the same dry prison (dormitory) solidified our friendship. He went on to become a Cinematographer and Director who has collaborated with Keith and I on our last three films. Most recently, he was the Director of Photography on our short film COMBAT ROCK, and is now helping us finish our screenplay for THE SKYLARK, which he will also shoot.
Last year, Alan directed a music video for The Bowerbirds, which was honored by Spin Magazine as one of the top 20 videos of the year. I could go on and on about Alan’s work, but I’ll let it speak for itself.
I’m also excited to share that I have the inside scoop on Alan’s newest project. He’s in mid-production on a stop-motion music video for the song “Marching Through Your Head” by Zeus , which he is co-directing with photographer and miniature-set-builder, Adam Makarenko. Here are some never-before-seen photos from this amazing project.
More on this video to come, so stay tuned.
Alan Poon, coming to a city near you… if you live in Ontario. 
-blake
One of our favorite albums from 2006 is Midlake’s The Trials of Van Occupanther. I was thrilled to hear that they finally announced a release date for their follow-up album and tour. Here’s a snippet from an interview last year with Stereogum.
“We didn’t know exactly what we wanted, but we know we didn’t want to make the same album as last time. We could have made 10 albums with the amount of time we’ve spent, but that doesn’t mean they’d be saying anything great,” says McKenzie Smith.
So, what sort of music can you expect from a Midlake record? Perhaps the new album cover will give you a hint.
Midlake’s last album was, for lack of a better term, Classic Rock Revival at its best. Their lead singer Tim Smith, says he was listening to a lot of Neil Young, America, Joni Mitchell, and Fleetwood Mac while he wrote it. Here’s an interesting quote I found of Tim’s, this one from early in the band’s career.
“We don’t want to get called a Radiohead rip-off band. I think Radiohead is a lot closer to my natural tendencies as a songwriter than a band like, um, Jethro Tull. I listen to way more Jethro Tull than I do Radiohead these days, but I could write 10 Radiohead songs before I could write one Jethro Tull song. I want to sound more like Jethro Tull, but I just can’t. That’s a big struggle.”
I doubt anyone but Radiohead can write 10 Radiohead songs, but I’ll give Tim the benefit of the doubt. If any of Midlake’s influences peak your interest, check out this music video for one of my favorite songs off their last album.
While surfing the internet today, I also stumbled across this low-fi EPK (Electronic Press Kit). It was especially cool to find because Keith and I wrote an EPK into THE SKYLARK to establish our fictional band of the same name. We use it as a storytelling device similar to the newsreel in Citizen Kane or Pixar’s UP. (That’s right, I just compared our film to Citizen Kane and Up.)
There’s some inspiring reference material in here, but be patient; there’s a 30 second countdown at the top.
Midlake’s The Courage of Others will be released February 2, 2010. I’m ready.
-blake
Blake and I were feeling drained and beginning to doubt our work as we approached the tail end of another two-day, twenty-hour writing session yesterday when we received this message by an industry professional who was asked to critique our short film, COMBAT ROCK:
“This magnificent coming of age tale is an American original. Nostalgic, yes! Entertaining, yes! Pop Art, yes! But here’s a film where every element comes together and soars with a vibrant, new emotional basis. This film’s artistry is based in its uncanny ability to sustain itself just outside the knowable “drama” at the film’s heart (the passing of the mother character). So by not focusing on this “drama” or a knowable trajectory, the film not only stays well away from becoming an average coming of age tale and avoids what could transform itself into simplistic “melodrama”. What COMBAT ROCK eventually establishes itself as is a film with a whole world of original ideas about life, growing up and provides us with a glimpse of the way huge life changes mysteriously come into our lives when we are too pre-occupied with little obsessions to understand or even see their importance. This is a beautifully shot, edited, acted film with a strangely (and memorable) emotional dexterity about it. Bravo!”
Needless to say, we were overwhelmed and instantly re-energized. This came to us when we really needed it. I should add that the author of this review has been kept anonymous to Blake and I because he or she is part of a panel of judges at a competition. Well, whoever you are, thank you for your kind words. There’s much more to come!
-keith
The shoot went great, despite some terrible weather. In fact, although the rain forced us to change locations a few times, ultimately it (and Alan’s crazy skills) made the footage look spectacular. We started out in Strawberry Fields and then moved to a few other locations around the park. Along the way, we saw a couple who had just become engaged, two Russian men sparring in the rain, and a holy cross on John Lennon’s Memorial… And no religion too?
A few pics:
-blake
Tomorrow Keith and I will head into Manhattan to do a video interview for the semifinals of The Ultimate Filmmaker Competition. The interview, along with a sample of our work, will be available online next month. Our friend and collaborator Alan Poon agreed to shoot the interview, and so the three of us met last night in Williamsburg to discuss the style of the piece. We’re going to approach it as a mini-documentary and shoot in and around Central Park (an integral location to our film). This will be the most screen time I will have had since my dad bought his first video camera in the mid-80s, when my brothers and I had mullets, so I’m a little nervous.
-blake
John Lennon Memorial in Central Park
Well, we finished our two-day writing extravaganza and Blake and I think it went pretty well. We ended up working for about twenty hours in two days. Needless to say our brains are a little fried. We rewrote all of act one and started to break down act two. There’s still a lot to do before our deadline, but Blake and I are confident we’ll have something special by then.
I’d like to give a shout out again to the amazing Alan Poon for giving us a hand both days (day 1 in person, day 2 via speakerphone.) We’re slowly building a collective of young and talented artists, which is very exciting for us.
To celebrate, here are two videos by another collective, Broken Social Scene. They’ve been around for a little while, but they remain one of my favorite bands. Most of their members are in other bands and this group is like a revolving door for talent. I’ve seen them several times and it’s always exciting to see who’s going to show up. Oh, sweet collaboration!
If that female vocalist sounded familiar that’s because it’s Feist!
Enjoy.
-keith
Thank you all for your support yesterday. Keith and I put in around a ten hour day. Our friend Mr. Alan Poon showed up to help for a few hours. We moved slowly but surely through the script and made some exciting changes. Each of us drank a LARGE coffee and about a half bottle of wine. These are the tools of the trade.
Day 2… Gotta run.
-Blake
UPDATE: pics
-
- Hard at work
-
- “there or their?”
-
- Like brother like brother
-
- The Skeksis drain my essence
-
- Alan does his best Steve Jobs impersonation
Starting this afternoon, Keith and I will begin a final page-by-page rewrite of THE SKYLARK by locking ourselves in my office for two days. We’ve pumped out more drafts than we care to count, and we believe the script is ready for the final push. In one month, we’ll be submitting the finished work to The Ultimate Filmmaker Competition for the semifinal round.
We’ll keep you posted on our progress and coffee consumption. In the meantime, click here for an excellent video interview with Writer/Director Darren Aranofsky. He discusses the screenwriting process while sporting an awesome Brooklyn accent and a sweet mustache. He discusses something called “the muscle draft”, which I believe is the secret to prolific writing of any kind.
-blake
Our first post and it’s a big one! THE SKYLARK has been selected as a semifinalist in The Ultimate Filmmaker Competition. This is the first year of the contest organized by the Filmmakers Alliance in Los Angeles.
Winner of the competition receives:
- A FULLY PRODUCED FEATURE FILM with a cash production grant of at least $200,000 and resources totaling in excess of $500,000.
- A Major Festival Premiere.
- Simultaneous theatrical, cable, retail and online distribution.
- Development, production and distribution guidance, support and mentoring.
- Production software.
- A Canon HD Camera.
We were one of about a thousand original entrants and are now in the remaining twenty-five! For round one we submitted a one-page synopsis of THE SKYLARK along with an essay on why we’re filmmakers. The field was then narrowed down to two hundred for the quarterfinals. At that point we submitted a treatment, a sample of our previous work (our short film COMBAT ROCK, which we will post here in its entirety very soon), and the first ten pages of our feature script.
For the semi-finalist deadline (Dec. 7), Blake and I will submit our finished screenplay along with an on-camera interview. Our short film and interview will then be posted on the website (above) where the public will have the opportunity to vote for their favorite entry. One of five finalists is chosen via online voting while a panel of industry professionals picks four additional finalists.
Blake and I are thrilled to have made it this far, but now we want to WIN! So check out our entry and VOTE! We’ll alert you as soon as the site is up and open to public voting.
In the meantime, to start this blog off right, here is an amazing street performance by Patrick Watson, an artist whose music is one of our current inspirations.
If you are not familiar with La Blogotheque’s Take-Away Shows, boy are you missing out! Check them all out here:
Cheers,
- keith
My brother and I thought it would be interesting to generate a blog as we finish development of our first feature film. THE SKYLARK is about a brilliant young musician struggling to survive after losing his older brother/band-mate in a tragic accident. Because music is so integral to the story, it presented us with a great opportunity not only to discuss our process as filmmakers, but also to share the songs and artists that inspire us.
Keith and I were raised by two hippies, and while the music of their generation will live forever in our iPods, what we’re really passionate about is the constant flow of great new music. We’ll post our finds, if you’ll hit us back with yours.
Our hope for this blog is that it will engage young filmmakers, inspire us, and help spread the message and music of THE SKYLARK.
-blake
“Music fills the infinite between two souls.” – Rabindranath Tagore
