Necktie Films

Click on the photos to watch here (opens in a new window) or check them all out at

www.vimeo.com/necktiefilms

You can also watch competition music videos at http://genero.tv/profile/290184/

American Gothic

Wm. James Still, Drowned

Requiem

Standing Still

Flare

Tag

Mondays

The Size 7 Social

No Regrets

This film features my parents. American Gothic was shot in my living room in 1995 and then shelved due to lack of money for a 16mm film print. When my mother died in the spring of 2009, I thought about how she had always been supportive of my film career, remembered this footage, and re-edited it digitally. My father also did not live to see this film.Based on a short story by Linda K. Wright, this brief and telling study of violence and emotional dysfunction in American families follows an elderly pair of parents as they wait for their son, who has escaped from an unspecified institution, to return home.

In Wm. James Still, Drowned, Ernest Hilbert’s elegiac sonnet about a drowned relative provides a startling metaphor for this meditation on suicide. Initially, I considered a very literal interpretation of this sonnet, including putting an actor in a local river. When I decided that this was impractical, I started to consider what Hilbert does not tell us in his poem: how exactly William James drowned. Did he end up in the river as a result of horseplay, and could not swim? Was he drunk and fell off a pier? Did he drown himself? This line of questioning made me see the poem as providing an apt metaphor for suicide. Brian Orleman plays Wm. James Still, and Ernest reads his poem in voiceover.  

Requiem is my homage to gravestones and a meditation on the impermanence of even the final monuments to our lives. Shot in both black-and-white and color super 8mm, Mercury Radio Theater (check them out in the links section), provided the music, nailing a theme from Mozart's Don Giovanni.

Standing Still – Music video for Baltimore's Oval Window, some early 90s music and a video meant to have an early 80s look. Some friends and I shot this video with a 16mm wind-up camera that we weren’t even sure worked. We gambled on 8 rolls of B&W film—a huge expense at the time—and prayed that it would expose correctly. When we shot the film, the band had four members. One soon left, and we lost a quarter of our footage. What to do? As a tribute to the faith of the crew, I added in footage of crew members holding slates and gray scales. Lyrics and music © 1989 by Emmy.

Originally conceived for a music video competition, Flare quickly became something else, and I had a blast playing with NASA's footage of our sun. ACSound provided a great sountrack for our favorite star.

Take a look at Tag, the latest member of the montage family. Tag started out as test footage to verify that a super 8mm Beaulieu camera had been properly repaired. While shooting the test footage, I found myself seeing graffiti tags everywhere – where I had been blind to them before, the act of filming them brought them to my visual forefront. Tag grew out of that initial footage, with additional footage shot on digital video.

Called "a tiny gem" by the Philadelphia Inquirer, Mondays was filmed with a Fisher-Price toy video camera, giving it the distinctive high-grain, black-and-white footage look in a black frame. Shot on a cold afternoon in my back yard, it remains a favorite.

The Size 7 Social proved to me that stop-action animation can be a helluva lot of fun. Yes, all of those shoes are mine. My friends used to call me "Imelda Redding."

No Regrets: "No Regrets Laundry Detergent gets out what you get into." Including wine, marinara sauce, and blood.