119. Filmers Almanac Contribution

"Filmers Almanac": Sometime around 1986, filmmaker, free form radio experimenter, & publisher Owen O'Toole initiated a large-scale collaborative super-8 film project in wch he requested that filmmakers in various parts of the world pick a day in 1988 to shoot a 50 ft roll of film (wch he generously provided).  Potential participants contacted him & he coordinated the dates so that there were no overlaps.  This was all organized by snail mail.  As explained in my soundtrack here, I picked September 4th but had to switch it to December 11th.  This is just my contribution taken from a fuller screening so that overlapping parts occur.  I don't remember how many people finally participated - certainly not one for every day of the yr but perhaps as many as 200.  At the end of 1988, Owen took 50 of the films & made a spontaneous transfer of them, sometimes as single projection, sometimes as side-by-side double projection, sometimes as superimposed double projection, & gave me the only copy of this transfer as a VHS tape.  For this YouTube version, I've picked a short excerpt from the cable tv PSA that he made advertising the project & a short excerpt from the above-mentioned transfer.  This excerpt contains my contribution & those of a few others.  My particular contribution is a film that's presumably in Owen's collection since I gave it to him for this project.  As such, I only have it in transfer form.  For some time after the completion of this "Filmers Almanac", Owen toured w/ it - usually projecting w/ 2 projectors - one stable & one on a Lazy Susan so that it cd be moved easily.  He sometimes did live soundtrack mixing using the film soundtracks (when they had them) + tapes - such as my collaboration w/ John Berndt called "BBC Transitions & Cues" (that used a BBC S/F/X record of the same name).  This was one of my favorite collaborative projects of all time.  Perhaps a decade later, Owen repeated this project - maybe in an attempt to get even more participants.  - September 22, 2010E.V. notes from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE