It’s been almost a month since Empire Drive-In opened for four short days at the 01SJ BIennial. It was an incredibly magical space that exceeded all of our expectations. After preparing for months and working for weeks it was amazing to see the theater filled with people in the cars, on top of the cars (making out in the back seats of cars!) and lounging in lawn chairs taking in the films and performances. The Flood Tide: Remixed screenings were great with a packed house and fantastic live musical score by Dark Dark Dark Dark.

Tod Seelie took some amazing photos…

DE-INSTALLING
It took three weeks (and months of planning) to create Empire Drive-In. And after the 4-day long Biennial, we had only 24-hours to take the whole thing down. With the help of many hands we were able to do it. Special thanks to Cyclecide for taking a massive donation of salvaged wood and other materials. The screen presented the biggest problem. At 32 feet high we would have had to use a scissor lift and slowly dismantle it section by section, lowering each piece to the ground. Instead we took a little gamble and brought it down like this:

PRESS
There was some good press about Empire Drive-In and Flood Tide: Remixed. Check the articles via the links below:

San Francisco Bay Guardian

Metroactive (San Jose/Silicon Valley weekly)

ReadyMade

THANKS
Empire Drive-In was conceived of and created by Jeff Stark and Todd Chandler with the help of a staggeringly talented group of collaborators including Robin Frohardt, Brett James, Ian Page, George Graham, Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels, Tod Seelie, John Law, Mary Beth Burton and many others. The project was made with the support of the 01SJ curatorial and production staff including Steve Dietz, Jaime Austin, Bruce Labadie, G. Craig Hobbes and others.

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We’re in San Jose right now (we being Jeff Stark, Robin Frohardt, Ian Page, Brett James and Todd Chandler). We’re working on an installation for 01SJ Biennial. Empire Drive-In is an indoor drive-in movie theater built from salvaged materials and filled with junked cars. Empire Drive-In started as an idea for the perfect theater in which to screen Flood Tide. With the support of the folks at 01SJ it’s now grown to become the platform for the entire film and video program at the 01SJ Biennial from September 16th-19th.

We arrived in San Jose last week to get set up, find wood, tools, cars, etc. So far, so good. Yesterday three car-carrier loads of cars arrived from Vince’s Foreign Auto Wreckers. Danny, our teamster forklift driver for the day was amazing. He was able to fit a Suburban and a Ford F250 through a door that was far too narrow– it was like forklift ballet.

The cars are pretty wrecked and we’ve got a lot of work to do cleaning up glass, smoothing out sharp edges– not to mention building the screen, stage, concession stand, wiring for power and hooking up radios and the FM transmitter. Just under two weeks to go.

Flood Tide: Remixed will be opening and closing Empire Drive-In– with a live score by Dark Dark Dark. Thursday, Sept 16th at 9:30pm and Sunday, Sept 19th at 3:30pm. More information at http://01sj.org/2010/artworks/flood-tide/

Here’s a short video clip from the Flood Tide: Remixed screening at Socrates Sculpture Park on July 7th. Live score by Dark Dark Dark. Video by Tod Seelie, Martha Shane and Rooftop Films.

Watch in HD here.

Last night at 10:30pm the fundraising campaign for Flood Tide on kickstarter.com ended. We exceeded our goal of $10,000.

Fundraising can be tedious and boring. It would be much more exciting to write here about the collaborative process of DIY filmmaking, about living and shooting a film aboard junk rafts, about pretty much about anything. But, unfortunately, unless you’re very independently wealthy, you can’t make a movie without fundraising.

Flood Tide was funded primarily by grants, fellowships, credit cards and by the staggering generosity of friends and collaborators who contributed their skills, energy and vision to this project. But, at the end of the day, we still needed more money to finish it. Kickstarter was a way for us to do this, and it was a way that didn’t feel totally gross. Because, well, sometimes, having to “sell” your art feels gross.

Running this Kickstarter campaign for the last 90 days was actually fun. It was a lot of work too. But, it was nice corresponding with donors, reading their comments on the site and sharing with them pieces of the film’s process through blog updates that included outtakes from the film, live music tracks and raft-project related footage.

Every time we received an automated ‘donor-alert’ email from kickstarter it was like unwrapping a gift– and it really didn’t matter if it were $5 or $500. It was the thrill of reading an unfamiliar (or familiar!) name of a person who decided to take two minutes out of their day to kick in some money to a project they felt was worth supporting.

In the end, we were completely floored by the number of people who pledged to support Flood Tide. We feel so thankful to the communities that are connected to the film for getting behind this fundraising effort, for spreading the word and for donating themselves, often times when strapped for cash. And we’re also thankful to (and surprised by) the large number of complete strangers who gave to the campaign. In the next few weeks we’ll start sending out the donor rewards.

At times it’s felt strange to raise money for a weird art film in the midst of oil spills and endless wars and so much other local and global injustice. But our friends and collaborators have always reminded us that it’s important to make space for art and music, to make space for the imagination and the sense of possibility that art can inspire. We hope that in some small way Flood Tide will inspire a sense of possibility and energize people to build their own worlds in everyday, simple and practical ways as well as in ways that are ridiculous and impossibly grandiose.

Thanks.

Last Wednesday was the premier screening of Flood Tide: Remixed, the live performance version of Flood Tide accompanied by a live score by Dark Dark Dark. The screening was at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City and co-presented by Socrates, Rooftop Films and the Museum of the Moving Image.

It was a scorching hot day– we received at least three, “sorry, I’m not coming,” messages from people suffering from heat exhaustion. As the sun was setting, the air cooled and people began to trickle into the park, walking down to the water or laying out blankets on the grass. By the time we started playing music at 7:45 there were close to 1000 people there.

Being outdoors, on the river, just a mile from where we docked the Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea Rafts two summers ago felt so perfect– like we had somehow come full circle. The event was magical. It wasn’t only about the film or the band…it was so much about the summer night air, the dull pink light in the sky, the water, the city skyline, the sounds of traffic, the hundreds of bikes piled up in the back corner of the park, families having picnics, fireflies and so many friends.

If you were there, thank you. Let us know what you thought. And if not, we’re doing a few dates on the West Coast in September and will be back East in the spring of 2011 for more.

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About two and a half weeks ago we launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise finishing funds for Flood Tide. Our goal is  $10,000 and we have 70 days total in which to raise it (or we get nothing). We’ve been bowled over by the amount of support for the project– we’re almost halfway after just two and half weeks.

Please spread the word. There are a lot of great rewards for giving: copies of the film, soundtrack and film poster and passes to Rooftop Films (courtesy of the kind folks at Rooftop) and copies of the new Swoon monograph (generously donated by Abrams Books). Please give if you can.

View non-flash version here.

We’re really happy to have a newly created website with the help of the amazingly talented and patient Gregg Osofsky. While it looks fairly similar to the previous site (designed and built by Flood Tide cinematographer Ava Berkofsky one late night between shoots in 2008) the guts are totally different. There’s all kinds of new features and information. We’ve added pages for cast, crew and collaborators, as well as a music page where songs from the film’s original soundtrack will soon be streaming (and available for purchase). It also has this blog…which is useful because we’re so close to finished with the film and the live performance version that there will a lot to announce in the next few months.

More soon.