Paint - (disPLAY)
Toronto rock band Paint are putting their bread and butter on display, literally and figuratively, with a double live album and concert film featuring mostly unreleased songs, with select cuts from Paint’s critically-acclaimed LPs, Can You Hear Me? and Where We Are Today, and film soundtrack/EP, Based on Truth and Lies.
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R. Stephenson PriceDirectorUnbury The Biscuit, Gratuitous Behaviour, 11:11, Boomerang
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R. Stephenson PriceProducerUnbury The Biscuit, Gratuitous Behaviour, 11:11, Boomerang
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Robb JohannesProducer11:11, Boomerang
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Victoria WicksProducer
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Robb JohannesKey Cast11:11, Boomerang
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Jordan ShepherdsonKey Cast11:11, Boomerang
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Devin JannettaKey Cast11:11, Boomerang
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Keiko GutierrezKey Cast11:11
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Project Type:Documentary, Experimental, Feature, Music Video
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Genres:Music, Performance, Documentary
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Runtime:1 hour 20 minutes
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Completion Date:September 1, 2016
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Production Budget:5,000 USD
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Country of Origin:Canada
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Country of Filming:Canada
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Language:English
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Shooting Format:Digital
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Aspect Ratio:16:9
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Film Color:Color
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First-time Filmmaker:No
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Student Project:No
Ryan Stephenson Price was born and raised in Timmins Ontario before pursuing a degree in Journalism/Film at Ottawa’s Carleton University — where his childhood love and obsession with film transcended simply memorizing and quoting his favourites (with bad impersonations), and into writing lengthy essays about the evolution of CGI in cinema, Alfred Hitchcock, Batman as quintessential Hero Quest archetype, and why Blade Runner is a twisted (and brilliant!) perversion of the American Dream. In addition to his independently-run STRATASFEAR PRODUCTIONS, Price has been co-producer of Toronto-based multimedia music series THE INDIE MACHINE since 2010, and has held various positions across the production spectrum in print, radio, video, and web. Price’s four years of collaboration with Toronto rock band Paint culminate in 2016 with the 90-minute concert film (disPLAY) (2016), following the hourlong black-and-white experimental sci-fi film 11:11 (2015) and heist-gone-wrong short BOOMERANG (2013). His two current web series endeavours — Canadian Comedy Awards-nominated GRATUITOUS BEHAVIOUR, and hockey crime drama UNBURY THE BISCUIT — are both available now on YouTube. He is currently in production on a series of character-driven short genre films, including: crime drama MISINFORMED, sci-fi thriller TEMPOR TEMPOR, and the first installment of his bio-punk sci-fi saga: PROBLEM SOLVING 101.
When I first started working on short documentaries in university I would often “forget” to return the journalism department camera that I had signed out for a week at a time. Not for any malicious reason, but because I was also using it to shoot my own projects in the same time frame. My one major obsession became music videos: how do I make them, and how do I make them well? I loved the idea of telling a short story with a great soundtrack already in place: the more cohesively the two could fit together the better. My cumulative project for my documentary specialization was following an Ottawa band around over the course of a few months for a “glimpse into the life of an indie band” documentary, and working in this atmosphere excited me. I already loved going to shows, but here was an excuse to hang out with the band and pretend to be one of the most important people in the room... because I really wasn’t.
After moving to Toronto I joined The Indie Machine: a music series I would co-host for a number of years with David Marskell, while also filming the bands on our show, and gradually building up the gear required to film bands in venues. Needless to say, around 2009/2010 a great many people were starting to film bands and put performance videos on the internet. The Canon 5D had just come out and made things very accessible and affordable, but that didn’t mean there was always something distinct about the videos in question: I wanted to ensure my material was different. As I was only starting out with a Canon XL-1 and mini DV tapes, I came up with a single-cam one-take performance technique that would make most effective use of my limited tape and battery resources, as well as our artists’ available time. With these one-take single-cam videos I developed a sort of interpretive dance while I held the camera, nestling it against my shoulder like a rifle in a contorted manner and directing it towards moments of interest: I would push in and pull back, panning and zooming, and dropping into and out of focus, organically steering the camera across the performance from vocalist shouts and lunges, to lead guitar solos, to insane drum fills, to bassists stage-diving into a crowd of drunk fans and hoping for the best. One night I met a producer from The Discovery Channel at a show and showed him a few videos from The Indie Machine on my phone: “it looks incredible, but I wish there were more angles”. I tried to explain the concept: the camera is supposed to represent your gaze at the show, as though you are the one witnessing the band. He didn’t get it.
After a few years of collaboration with Paint led to the production of 11:11, Robb Johannes and I got to talking about the medium of concert films, eventually deciding that we ought to try our collective hands at it. We had done some one-take single cam material for band promo as well as the four multi-cam “pocket dimension” performances for 11:11, so we started talking true multi-cam performance: how do we make something that will stand out? Robb and I initial met at Toronto venue Rancho Relaxo (R.I.P.) — equally known for their large collection of VHS tapes as they were for being the unofficial hottest (read: volcano-like) venue in town. Paint had already amassed about an hour worth of visual projection material from archive footage and Hollywood films that had fallen into the public domain, so in integrating this with some of our strongest visuals from 11:11 we sought to create another layer to the music and lyrics where we could infer additional meaning to the songs through these projections. We then applied a stylized VHS aesthetic onto this projection footage as we sporadically pulled it to the forefront through the course of the 18-song concert film that we shot one night at The Cameron House. That’s essentially (disPLAY): the culmination of everything I’ve been attempting cinematically since my university days in 2007, wrapped up in a solid 80-minute multi-cam performance with a weird, neon, ADHD-inducing, retro-aesthetic.