Our production company had an opportunity to create a side-project under the radar recently and we’re pleased to unveil it for the world to see. The aforementioned work is a music video for Beaujolais, the alter-ego of Bleeding Skull creator Joseph A. Ziemba. Designed to recreate the look and feel of the shot-on-video horror movies that Ziemba reports on in his other life, the video was shot for next to nothing on a vintage VHS camcorder. It offers a glimpse of a zero-budget slasher movie that never existed. Follow the link below.

WHERE WE CAME FROM

Exciting news!!! Our production company has been invited to the first ever Fantasia Industry Rendez-Vous and International Co-Production Market in Montreal. It is an offshoot of the long-running and well respected Fantasia International Film Festival and will take place concurrently in the same way that Cannes hosts both a festival and marketplace every year.  We are participating in a conference panel called “Transmedia Promotion Before and During Production”, which will focus on the power of the Internet to get an audience strongly involved in the early stages of a project, through crowdfunding and various promotional initiatives. We’re extremely honored to be invited but moreover we are thrilled to be able to share our story as ours is a film that has been made possible entirely through the support of other individuals with a shared enthusiasm for this subject. Carolee and Josh will be there to represent the film while Topher remains in Austin to continue editing full-time. We will have lots of updates in the near future so keep checking back.

We were lucky to have Illinois DIY filmmaker Rocky Nelson in our fair city for 3 jam-packed days. He traveled by train, then bus, for a total of 37 straight hours to join us for a weekend of celebration. We introduced him to breakfast tacos and BBQ brisket among other central Texas culinary delights. Rock shot about 3 hours of footage in Austin for inclusion in his upcoming monsta movies, including the 1.5 million bats that fly out from underneath the Congress Avenue Bridge every evening this time of year. You can see Rock getting off of his bus in this clip here.

We interviewed him for the documentary and it is quite possibly the most inspiring footage we’ve shot thus far. Rock unleashed a non-stop series of monologues about the value of making art on your own terms without the assistance of pesky annoyances like a budget, a crew, or actors. We can’t wait to share his passion with filmgoers. On the evening of Sunday, July 1, the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz hosted Rock for a screening of his best work and allowed him to preach the gospel of shot-on-video creativity to a sold-out audience of new fans. He flexed his muscles, did 50+ push-ups, shadowboxed, and shouted inspiring messages out into the crowd from his much deserved place in the spotlight on the Ritz stage. The crowd gave the maestro a warm reception and the antics before and after the show will go down in Alamo Drafthouse history. It was a fitting conclusion to our production on the home video documentary as Rock is such a perfect example of an artist who could only exist in the post-video world. We are deep into editing now and have more exciting updates to share soon. Keep your eyes on this page!

We are getting over the brutal jet lag and adjusting to the increasingly harsh Texas heat but we can tell you that our trip to Tokyo was an overwhelming success.

Hiroshi Takahashi Interview

We completed 14 interviews with  adult video innovators, giants in the direct-to-video market, J-Horror creators and producers, as well as anime gods – all who have been directly impacted or inspired by video. We learned a lot about the current state of film production and distribution in Japan and how it differs from what we see in the US; A wealth of information that is invaluable for the project.

Team VHS at Nikkatsu Corporation

Many, many thanks to all of you who have contributed and been supportive of the project from the beginning! We keep saying this, but we could not have done this without you. Our Kickstarter campaign was launched primarily to fund this shoot. It was extremely important to us to secure interviews and locations that would make our backers feel that their contributions were being used in service of the creation of a comprehensive document of the global impact of home video. We need to acknowledge the help of Marc Walkow who was tireless in his efforts to provide us with contacts and supply advice on preparation for the trip. We also need to single out Midori Inoue from Tokyo Media International who did more for the production than any one person should ever have been able to. She coordinated all of our shooting plans in advance of our arrival, translated all of our proposals for corporations, acted as a guide during our stay, served as interpreter during our interviews, and provided helpful suggestions on a daily basis. She is a great person and  a valued collaborator. She is the person you should contact if you have any film-related business in Japan.

Team VHS and Mamoru Oshii

What’s Next?
Christopher is heads down on editing. We head to Los Angeles June 15-17 for one last pick up trip. We are working with a handful of extremely talented animators from around the globe for various segments throughout the film. Music is coming together nicely and helping us refine the tone.

We are being visited July 1st by a unique filmmaker, who should have quite a bit to say about the power of video (ATX folks, you should definitely plan to attend this!) Everything is moving very quickly.

We plan to have things wrapped this fall so that we can start submitting to festivals. More updates will be posted as we work through the process.

As always, thank you for your support. We love you all.
Team VHS

Team VHS

We leave for Tokyo tomorrow morning. We launched a Kickstarter campaign several months ago with the intention of financing this trip. The success of that campaign has now brought us to the moment where the dream has become a reality. We’ll be in Tokyo for two full weeks shooting interviews for the documentary; covering everything from the puzzlingly unique world of Japanese pornography to the straight-to-video market that revolutionized their film industry.

We want to express our gratitude once again to all the people who helped get the word out about the film and of course those who contributed to the fund-raising. Everyone who backed us on Kickstarter should have received their rewards by now. Please let us know if you have not. There are still more to come for many backers such as copies of the finished film and credits on the film itself.

We apologize for the lack of updates recently but we have been busy traveling. Thanks to the success of our Kickstarter campaign we have just completed our two additional trips for the project: Cleveland, Ohio and Toronto, Canada. We filmed a total of 20 interviews, none of which would be featured in the film without the generosity of those who supported our crowd-funding effort.

We stopped into the homes of several SOV filmmakers while we were in the Cleveland area. Many people don’t realize that Northeast Ohio was a hotbed of shot-on-video filmmaking throughout the 90′s. We also stopped into the Cinema Wasteland convention to interview various other characters in the home video story. A wrong turn even brought us briefly to the edge of Lake Erie.

Our time in Canada was extremely productive, yielding interviews with a variety of subjects from the worlds of rental, production, distribution, archiving, and even fine art video installation. It also included our very first Oscar nominated participant in the form of Atom Egoyan who shared insights into the development of home video technology as it applies to the world at large and to his own highly personal work.

We are gathering all of the Kickstarter rewards this week (printing, etc) and should have them in the mail early next week. All backers should be on the lookout for awesomeness in their mailboxes.

Our final production trip to Japan is shaping up nicely with a handful of interviews scheduled and another 15+ as possibilities. This will be a huge trip and will provide a lot of unique content for the doc. We have a research assistant and interpreter working on the ground in Tokyo to get everything in place for our arrival during the last two weeks of May. More updates soon!!!

The Kickstarter campaign has come to a close and we are now scheduling our final production trips and wrapping everything up to deliver a finished feature film. We’ll be in Cleveland, OH at the end of March and Toronto at the beginning of April. A month ago these trips weren’t on our agenda and now they are both more or less fully scheduled. This is a testament to the power of crowd-funding efforts and what can be accomplished by individuals with a shared passion. This of course is all leading up to our final production journey to Tokyo, Japan in May. We’ll be editing as we go with an eye towards building a monumental document of an important occurrence in global history. Check back here at this site in the coming months for production tidbits and a new site redesign with added content. Follow us on Twitter (@RewindThisMovie) for regular updates on where we are and what we’re doing.

All of this has been made possible by generous contributions from those who love the subject of this documentary. We COULD NOT have done it without you and we cannot thank you enough!

Victory!!!!!!