I've made an EP called Answer Me! It has six simple little love songs played on the ukulele, with lyrics about monsters and demons, intelligent machines and ignorant people. You can download it here in any format you want, and I'm releasing it as "name your price", so if you want you can throw some change my way! Or you could help me out by posting this on your facebook or blog or anywhere at all (just hit the "share" button below)! Anyway, I hope you like this thing I recorded in my bedroom.

By the way I'm releasing this under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA so feel free to make covers and remixes! You can find a lot of the lyrics and chords at awesomepedia.org/songs. Here are some things you didn't know about the songs:

Answer Me was written as a response to the challenge "write a song from the perspective of an inanimate object", and picking an answering machine was sort of a way of cheating myself out of that premise. The singer could be a futuristic answering machine with an actual AI, but I prefer to think of him as an anthropomorphized old-fashioned answering machine, like we did in the music video. And of course the whole thing is a not-so-subtle metaphor for someone on the sidelines or in the "friend zone".

I don't really know where Feet came from - it's the one song on the EP that doesn't tell a distinct story. It's a slightly ironic expression of enthusiasm for the unknown, and about understanding nothing yet seeing meanings in everything. In that sense it works as a counter-pole to my earlier Nihilist Birthday Song, which expresses the exact opposite. The feel of the recording we made for the EP is a bit sloppy but I always felt the song worked best with this unbridled enthusiasm, like it's almost breaking apart. The song features my friends Thea, Simon and Tobbe, who also appear in the music video.

Katherine is a song about how things die, and about sleeping dogs and why we should let them lie. (Psst! It's actually it's about demons and possession and Frankenstein-creatures!) The obvious metaphor THIS time is that of trying to rekindle an old flame and things not working out the way you hoped.

The Machine is a song I wrote about a machine that is able to calculate anyone's perfect soulmate (but sometimes we don't want perfection). The audio for this track on the EP is actually from this video - it's the only "live" video I've made that actually got good sound.

Worst Love Song is a brand new song - you haven't heard it anywhere else, folks! As the title suggests it is the worst love song ever written, as you'll probably be able to tell from the first line. It's also sort of about finding comfort in cynicism.

#79 is the the latest in a series of failed love songs written by the same person, for the same person. It's the last song on the EP and also the one I wrote last, which shows, since it's a bit more complex than the others (and about twice as long). Here's a fun fact: I threw in an out-of-place homophobic line because I never want to make a character too likeable. I don't like people without flaws. They bore me.

The plan for the future is to make another EP (of about the same length) and then combine the best songs from both into an album, which gets properly produced with a lot more instruments and better microphones and so on. If you want this to happen you should download and spread this EP. Because it cheers me up and keeps me going. And because it's my birthday today.

I was asked to put something together for Falun Walk of Art, a project where different types of video art is shown in windows spread throughout the town of Falun. This post is about what I made and how I made it. There's a longer video further down, but here's a peek at the finished product:

BACKGROUND

For a long time I've been wanting to make something where two screens interact. Originally that was how 2 Eyes 2 Ears was going to work, but since that's an audiovisual mashup I couldn't risk it going out of sync, even just a frame or two, so we ended up using a projector. But there's a certain something about actually having two separate televisions interact, and since audio wasn't really a possibility this time around, I decided to go for it.

When it comes to video art, projectors are great because they remove all boundaries, but since the screen is more confining it can also be very interesting to keep those boundaries, and then break them! And the television screen is a symbol in and of itself, with meanings and connotations worth exploring. For a start, the television screen is something we'll sit and watch for hours and hours, and some would say it's a tool to keep people subdued. Like cattle.

George Orwell's 1984, the tagline "Big Brother Is Watching You", and the accompanying iconography is deeply integrated into our shared social framework. The connection to the television show Big Brother says a lot about how strange the form of that integration has become in this society where everything is about being seen, being noticed, and being approved of. In summary the TV is something we watch, but it's also, in some corner of our mind, watching us.

CONCEPT

So these were the thoughts running through my mind when I decided to make something with a type of Big Brother character staring grimly out at people walking past and displaying very 1984-ish messages along the lines of "YOU ARE NOT WORTH ANYTHING".

My Big Brother was originally supposed to be a military man, and I spent hours searching online and in real life for a military uniform and, more importantly, an impressive officer's hat. In the end I decided to slap on a suit instead, which worked just as well, although it changed the feel of the character a bit and I had to tone down the acting (which would have been more over the top if I'd had military clothes).

On the other screen I wanted a character who was the absolute opposite of the neat Big Brother. Someone scruffy and unkempt, who does his best to distract and irritate the Big Brother, mainly by writing anti-propaganda messages and trying to get passer-bys to read those instead. Ultimately that would result in a direct confrontation along these lines:

I resolved quite early to play both characters myself. It seemed like an appropriate mirror-effect, although I'm not going to expand on what these dual forms of the same person says about our society or whatever (since analysing your own work is often seen as unbecoming). I decided to use the age-old trick of cutting my hair between characters, which felt almost childish and gimmicky, but as you can see I was becoming a bit of a scruffy bastard and seriously needed a haircut anyway:

PRODUCTION

Planning is everything for this sort of project. Production-wise it was a lot like my music video Feet, where different video tracks are interacting in a similar way. Like with Feet I prepared a detailed previz (animated storyboard) and played around with it until it contained all the elements I wanted. I then recorded audio-commands along the lines of "Turn left in 3... 2... 1... now!" and synced them up with the things happening in the previz. That gave me an audio-file that I could play while filming, telling me what to do. This, like every part of the process, was to preserve synchronization between the two screens.

After all that planning the performance itself was deceptively easy. It felt as if I must have forgotten something, and I was slightly reluctant to get that haircut... But I find that's the case with most filmmaking - If you know exactly what you need you'll often be surprised by how quickly you can get it. So I got a haircut, changed the background, and recorded screen two.

It turns out balloons don't actually float in the slow meandering fashion I had imagined, so most of the balloons you see in the final version had to be animated, but I thought it would all look exceedinly fake without a few real ones floating around, so after eliciting some help I shot the ending like this:

POST-PRODUCTION

Making video art is, in terms of editing, completely different from making regular films because art is usually displayed in a very different context, and doesn't establish any type of traditional "contract" with the viewer. For instance Watching Me Watching You is shown in a store-window on a street in the centre of town, and as such it is unlikely to hold the attention of a passer-by for the full 10 minutes it takes to loop. It's also winter so people don't want to hang around outside anyway.

Working under that assumption I divided the piece into three parts where quite different things are happening. The goal was not to make people stop and watch for ten minutes (though that'd be cool), but rather to make it so that every time you pass something different is being shown!

In the first part the Big Brother is staring out menacingly and displaying his angry messages while the "Slacker" sleeps. In the second part the Big Brother is doing the same while the Slacker wakes up and and starts writing anti-propaganda, and the third part is where the characters actually start interacting, where the Big Brother pulls a gun and things start passing between the screens.

Most of the loop is made so that it will still work even if it goes a second or two out of sync, but there are points where things pass between the screens and could thus appear on both at the same time. We did everything imaginable to preserve synchronization, including getting two identical DVD-players in case different models took longer to loop. Also instead of making the two DVDs loop after one play I filled the discs up with 12 repetitions, since the loop point itself is where things could get messed up.

If you're local you can find Watching Me Watching You playing in the window of BK Data on Slaggatan 17 in central Falun (Dalarna, Sweden) until the end of January. Magasinet, who arranges Falun Walk of Art together with Falu kommun and Centrala stadsrum, did a great job of finding two perfect screens and actually building the stylish pedestals that put the screens at eye-level. All in all it turned out looking much better than I could have imagined!

THE FINISHED PRODUCT

So this work of art is about being seen and judged, possibly by our government (implied by the suit), but also by the public (ourselves). I think it's a relevant topic in today's world where people can lose their jobs over something they've said on facebook - where people forget what is public and what is private. We all want attention - we're worried about The Surveillance Society, but we want everyone to subscribe to our youtube. We want to be seen and we want to be liked. Preferably on Facebook.

Even I (especially I) am doing this. Apart from whoring myself out online I literally put this thing, featuring me, in the public space, and this whole post is about how I tried to make it grab people's attention! I am also one of those smug people trying to Say Something About Society, for which I am doubly damned...

On the surface Watching Me Watching You might be a statement about the dangers of a Surveillance Society, and our first choice of store window actually rejected showing my piece because the description apparently made it sound too dangerous. Even though I explained about the balloons and everything! But in the end I see it as a playful subversion and parody of the very concept of a surveillance society.

(On the other hand... Are you sure your webcam is switched off?)

This post is about a little something I put together for the Jim and Them podcast!

One of these days I'm going to write a blog explaining exactly why Jim and Them is my favourite podcast on the whole wide internet (apart from my very own Hallå Där! of course, which you should listen to if you speak as much as a word or two of Swedish). As I've written elsewhere Jim and Them is some of the smartest comedy availible online masquerading as some of the dumbest. And to be fair sometimes it gets pretty dumb. And racist. So yeah, it's very "inside", and from the outside it looks retarded and racist, which is why I feel the need to help people come inside.

But I'll save all that for another day and simply explain that in episode 219 of Jim and Them the boys got drunk as shit and decided to freestyle rap for an entire episode. Now I'm not going to claim that this is "sick as fuck", and in terms of quality their un-freestyled works are much better, but the genius of four drunk improv-comedians rapping for an hour is undeniable.

Like a 5-minute track about running an airship company, renting zeppelins to people and then suing them when the zeppelins crash (because they always crash). Just the fact that they spend about 75% of the time trying to force one unwilling participant (Brian) to rap is hilarious to me. In short I had no choice other than to chop the episode up into tracks, name them accordingly, and compile it into a mixtape:

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE JIM AND THEM THANKSGIVING MIXTAPE [2011]

The music video for Answer Me is long since finished, and you can watch it here, but I found some making of material that I never posted, so here's a run-through of how we did it! All photos are by Jonathan Norberg.

My song Answer Me tells such a clear story in it's lyrics that we had no other choice for the music video than to simply visualize that story. The song is written out of the perspective of an answering machine that is trying to get the attention of it's owner, to convince her that the guy she's seeing is kind of a dick, and that there are other guys (or answering machines?) out there that are more worthy of her time.

Last autumn I asked my friend and classmate Dennis Kullberg to work on the music video with me, which eventually led to us co-directing a three day shoot over a weekend in March. We were originally doing a very minor production, but a few weeks before the shoot we were lucky enough to get the Daydreamers crew involved. Daydreamers is a group of students at our school that does productions outside of schoolwork; enormously creative filmmaking students who are more experienced with photography and lighting than either me or Dennis (mere screenwriting weaklings). In short, these are the sort of people you want on your side! And it meant that instead of my tiny old Canon HF100 we were shooting the music video on a Red ONE camera. If you know anything about cameras you know that this is a big deal.

The music video mostly takes place in an apartment, and we decided to get all the other shots out of the way before moving to the main location, Dennis' apartment. So on Friday morning we started our shoot at a café in central Falun. The first thing we did was the exterior establishing shot:

Narcissistically enough, this above photo was my desktop background image for several months. Anyway, after that we moved into the cramped little café. Dennis, my ever optimistic co-director, had told the owner that we would be "about an hour" and we'd be occupying "a table or two". Needless to say, we took up most of the café for most of the day.

This picture shows a recurring problem with filming in front of windows in the middle of town: people tend to walk past them. The bastards. Like maybe you're shooting a romantic moment and an incredibly fat woman walks by and stares right into the camera. Awesome.

Last year Lovisa and Elizabeth (right and left) were commonly referred to as Lovisabeth, since it was nearly impossible to see one without the other! They shot and edited this music video.

The video above is a sample of Lovisabeth's endless battle with the tripod! (Please note how instead of helping I whip out a camera.)

After finishing at the café we spent the rest of the first day shooting the outdoors-stuff outside Dennis' apartment. I don't know if it looks it, but it was actually incredibly cold...

In the music video my character is on the third floor balcony looking down. In actuality we shot that on the first floor balcony of one of Dennis' neighbours. That's the magic of cinema, people! The neighbour we borrowed it from didn't really seem to understand the concept of cinema magic though - she kept walking past inside the apartment, looking perplexed and staring right into the camera.

Did I mention that it was cold?

We spent the next two days in the apartment! I spent most of it lip syncing.

On the evening between those two apartment-days we went out and had a bit of a wrap party (who says you can't have a wrap party when you're 2/3 finished?) and we took the opportunity to get this above photograph, which we needed for the video. You should have heard me directing Dennis in the restaurant.

Jakob: "That's perfect! You look like a total douche!"
Dennis: "But I haven't started acting yet."
Jakob:

In conclusion it all turned out the way I imagined it, or often better than imagined! Here's a comparison between the storyboard (as drawn by me and Dennis) and the final product:

(That's it! Now go watch the video and then listen to my other songs!)

On October 29th I performed as PLAYLISP at Dalarnas Museum, doing live mashups for A LOT of confused old people and kids. It wasn't the sort of crowd I usually play for, but hey, a gig is a gig is a gig. You'll find videos of the entire thing below!

This year I've been getting a lot more involved with the fancy smancy side of local culture, showing Video Art at Galleries as often as I show short films at festivals. I keep waiting for someone to point at me and go "this is not arrrrtttt", but at this point I've done almost as many gigs at art galleries as I have at dingy parties, and I'm pretty sure I would respond with "FUCK YOU THIS IS ART NOW".

Except for there being a relatively small amount of dancing (I did most of it), I was very happy with how this gig turned out. I've been working on a live setup that allows for more improvisation, and you'll notice that there are a lot of glitchy effects that really enhance the live-feel of what I'm doing. Here is my gig in it's entirety (music starts at 01:10):

01:10 OPM VS Eminem
05:55 Owl City VS Ice Cube
08:20 Grease Lightning VS Nate Dogg
09:30 Bobby McFerrin VS 50 Cent
10:45 Nintendo VS Beastie Boys
11:45 Journey VS Beastie Boys
14:10 Jungle Book VS Eminem VS Gwen Stefani
16:15 MGMT VS Ludacris
17:30 Fever Ray VS Drake
18:40 Lynyrd Skynyrd VS Drake VS Teddybears STHLM
22:40 The Prodigy VS LMFAO VS Quad City DJs

After my gig I also played music for a fashion show! I had to take some old mashups out of the closet and dust them off (and invent some new ones) to have enough for both a gig and this, but I think it worked out well!

The fashion show has two parts - the first half, until about 12 minutes in, contains clothes from the lovely Falun café Did U give the world some Love today Babe? (yes that's the name of the café, it's sort of the best), and the second part is from people studying fashion in Falun who've been working on the theme "recycling" (just like my music does, appropriately). Check it out:

I'm not gonna list all the tracks, but here are some of the new ones:
04:00 drake VS mambo # 5
05:00 ice cube VS röyksopp
07:10 the knife VS jay-z
14:45 nyan cat VS daft punk
23:00 primal scream VS everybody

There is a fantastic moment at 20:40 when I drop the theme from Dexter just as a girl wearing a blood-spattered dress and carrying a severed head walks in! Considering the age of the crowd I might have been the only one to actually notice this, but it made my god damn day. It wasn't planned or anything, and I was soooo close to skipping that song too...

For one of the tracks (about 9:30 to 12:00) I'm using a remix made by someone else (Alex S.) as a base, which isn't something I would normally do, because it doens't feel like I put enough of myself into it. As a mashup artist I have to be careful about not relying too much on any one sampled song. If people are only digging a mashup because the originals are good, then I'm not really creating anything new, and I can't claim it as my own. So this mashup (9:30 - 12:00) isn't something I would put in my set for a gig, but I figured it was okay to use it as background music for a fashion show!

As always you can check out PLAYLISP.COM to see more of my music, and if you're holding a party and want some mashup flavour, don't hesitate to get in touch!

This was just screencapped by a friend on facebook:

I usually don't care about what happens to "celebrities", but with Steve Jobs I found myself genuinely upset. My 1st thought: WTF, my 2nd thought: Holy shit, my 3rd thought: God damn it, now we're gonna have to deal with a bunch of smartasses making really easy jokes online for the next month.

Anyone can make a hack joke about Apple, and I expect a lot of people will. How about watching this video instead?

This is how we made the short film Rånet (The Robbery), written and directed by Henrik Eriksson

At the end of my first term of studying screenwriting at Dalarna University the class presented the short film scripts we had spent half the term writing. Rånet was the screenplay written by my classmate Henrik Eriksson, and while I myself had tried to cram a two hour post-apocalyptic thriller under the ten minute limit, Henrik had written meandering argument about potato gratin. Granted the screenplay might have lacked certain ingredients like a "message" and "plot" but it was still somehow brilliant, and out of all the screenplays I heard that day it was the one that stuck with me weeks and months later.

For a time I considered turning it into an animated short. I even went so far as to draw some sketches and storyboards for a potential animated Rånet, but nothing ever came of it. I was learning to do this sort of thing, but never really finished any of the bigger animations I had in mind:

When we came back for our second year of screenwriting studies (fall of 2010) I found out that some people were actually going to shoot Rånet, and I thought "cool, I want to be a part of this". A group called Daydreamers, consisting of filmmaking students that make films on the side of their schoolwork, had made an open call for scripts, and obviously they saw the same potential in Henrik's screenplay as I had, because they selected Rånet.

Over the next few months we tried to find a convenience store that would let us shoot there, and as you might imagine it wasn't very easy. We weren't helped by the fact that the script called for the characters to walk through the entire store in one uninterrupted take, meaning we'd disturb any and all business for hours. The only real option was to film at night while the store was closed, and that meant paying an employee overtime-cash to hang around and keep an eye on us. We weren't even paying our actors, god damn it... But we found a perfect place! Nice! And they'd let us do it! Awesome! And they cancelled on us a week before shooting! Fantastic! So yeah the film was pretty much dead, until lightning struck twice and we found a second perfect place.

We shot Rånet after closing on a cold dark November night at ICA Slätta in Falun. The owner of the place thought the film sounded really cool, and he stuck around with his young son to watch us shoot. I can barely put into words how friendly and helpful they were, but if I had to try the words would be: "They gave us coffee and candy". If you're ever in Falun, Dalarna, Sweden, and you need to do some shopping - this is the place to go! Unless you're, like, in the centre of town, cause then it would be, like, stupid to drive all the way out there I guess…

My main job on this production was as the editor, but my role during filming was as a general production assistant and an extra, playing the cashier who's tied up on the floor throughout the entire film. Since I'm only in frame twice I had lots of time to shoot this behind the scenes video. It's in Swedish, but you might get some enjoyment out of seeing the moving behind the scenes pictures anyway. Minutes 1-2 are of the director meeting the actors and going through the script. Minutes 3-4 documents us filming various things in the store. Minutes 4 and on is us trying to get the "long shot" of the actors walking through the entire store in one uninterrupted take. It also features us getting more tired and silly as the night went on (and on and on and on).

filmed by Jakob Burrows & Nils-Henrik Länsberg, edited by Jakob Burrows

If you're an international viewer I suggest going to 07:30 to check out some internationally accessible behind the scenes fun-times. The finished film will appear on Awesomepedia within a few weeks, after its premiere at the Dalarna Filmfestival on September 16th.

Next week (20th - 26th of June) I will release my audiovisual mashup project 2 Eyes 2 Ears on the internet! It's about 40 minutes long, so I've split it into six parts and will release one part each day between Monday and Saturday. And on the Sunday I'll put up the soundtrack!

I won't put every new part on the Awesomepedia start page - they'll be on youtube and at playlisp.com - but if you want convenient updates you can attend the the Facebook event created for the release! It's a worldwide internet event, meaning that you just have to watch the videos to attend... So no excuses!

Oh, wait? You don't know what 2 Eyes 2 Ears is? Then let me explain by lazily copy-pasting the description from the aforementioned Facebook event:

2 Eyes 2 Ears is a 40 minute cultural crash put together by the audiovisual mashup artist PLAYLISP (Jakob Burrows). In 2 Eyes 2 Ears dozens of music videos are set against each other to do musical battle for our amusement! Originally composed as a video installation for the exhibition Recycle Art - 2 Eyes 2 Ears is now released for free on the internet! All you have to do to attend this event is to watch the six parts as they're uploaded to Youtube.

Don't know what a mashup is? Check out this introductory video! As it happens, all of the mashups shown in this video are a part of 2 Eyes 2 Ears, so full versions of them will be up soon!

Here's a look at some of the bands that will be set against each other:

Monday - OPM, Eminem, Ben Folds, Grease, Outcast, Ramones, Super Mario
Tuesday - Dexter, Lil' Wayne, Journey, Beastie Boys, Dead or Alive
Wednesday - David Hasselhoff, Black Eyed Peas, Familjen, Scroobius Pip
Thursday - Bobby McFerrin, 50 Cent, Passion Pit, Lady Gaga
Friday - Jungle Book, Gwen Stefani, MGMT, Ludacris, Antoine Dodson
Saturday - Lynyrd Skynyrd VS EVERYONE
Sunday - The soundtrack is uploaded, becoming PLAYLISP's first full length album release!

So, in summary: all you have to do to attend is to watch it, listen to it and enjoy it! No money changes hands, and you don't have to leave the comfy comfort of your computer! If you like it, the best thing you can do to help 2 Eyes 2 Ears is to comment on it, rate it, and send it to a friend or two! Like I've said, it won't be on the awesomepedia startpage, but you can keep up with 2 Eyes 2 Ears at any of these three places:

facebook event - playlisp.com - youtube account

If you've been keeping up with my hourly comics you'll have noticed that since last summer I've been working on mashups, which is basically putting different songs together to make new songs. I've spent a lot of time leveling up these skills, advancing to the stage where I'm actually having live performances, under the name PLAYLISP.

Never before have I released any of this music online, but today playlisp.com goes live, a website devoted entirely to my mashups!

Over there you can read more about the project and, more importantly, listen to and download three new tracks! These include the mix mentioned in the hourly comic above, between Ice Cube and Owl City, and a cacophonous collision called Bare Bananas, which includes everything from Gwen Stefani and Eminem to MGMT and Super Mario!

Apart from the songs playlisp.com also a short preview of my audiovisual project 2 Eyes 2 Ears, and an interview with me on the (Swedish) radio show Godmorgon Dalarna, where we talked about my music and played one of my tracks.

Usually I try to keep all my projects within the Awesomepedia url, because I like to have one website, with one unified design, for all my projects, so that people don't get lost... But I decided to make playlisp.com because it was getting really difficult to explain to drunk people after gigs that 1) No, my stage name is PLAYLISP, not DJ Burrows any such nonsense and 2) you can find more at awesomepedia.org. It was difficult enough to get one of those concepts across, let alone both.

So, in summary: GO CHECK OUT PLAYLISP.COM RIGHT NOW.

A full fourth of 2011 has gone by, and creatively it's been some of the busiest time of my life, even though you might not think so from just watching the website. I've become sick of being all mysterious and saying things like "cool stuff is coming to the site soon i promise", so I figured I might as well let you know about some of the things that are happening. So here's my answer to the question "what's up?" You can click any image to see a larger version.

Short Films

Rånet (The Robbery)
My role: Actor & editor
Genre: Comedy
Status: Post-production

Two friends walking through a grocery store get into a heated argument - they both have very strong opinions about potato-gratin! Then they run into the guy who's robbing the place. And he has opinions too.

Filmed on location at ICA Slätta in Falun on a loong dark November night. It's being edited by me, right now, along with a behind-the-scenes film that's likely to be longer than the actual film.

Klasskamrater (Classmates)
My role: Director
Genre: Drama
Status: Post-production

Thea is in the hospital. Thea has tried to kill herself.
Someone she hasn't seen for 20 years drops by with flowers. And spite.

Filmed at Dalarna University's imitation-hospital-room built for the nursing program, in February. This was a really fun experience - working with actors twice my age turned out to be no problem at all, since we were all on the same wave-length story-wise. This one's also being edited right now by Jonathan Norberg, who wrote the script.

Frekvens (Frequency)
My role: Writer
Genre: Drama / Post-Apocalypse
Status: Production

Two brothers drive a crummy old car though a world that's been destroyed, scavenging for food and shelter. Always in danger, always running - they're all that's left of humanity. Or so they think until their radio starts picking something up...

A bunch of film-students at Dalarna University, including folks I've worked with on Rånet and Klasskamrater, have chosen my screenplay to produce as part of their education, spending half a term on it. I have high hopes! These pictures are from a test shoot we did, where I played one of the characters. I won't act in the actual film because I'll be busy with the next thing on this list...

Rymdkarate (Space-Karate)

My role: Director, writer, actor, producer, editor
Genre: Comedy / Drama
Status: Pre-production

Daniel really really really wants to make a movie. About something awesome. Like, in space. But all he has to work with is a crappy camcorder, a bunch of cardboard & tinfoil, and an old childhood friend who absolutely does not want to play his Space Princess. Well... You work with what you've got.

This is a story that's been bubbling around in my brain for years, and which now has backing from Film i Dalarna. We're shooting it later this spring!

Den Objudna Gästen (The Uninvited Guest)
My role: Director
Genre: Comedy / Drama
Status: Pre-production

Man, that sure was a great party last night! Who's that on the couch? Is... is he breathing?

This one's in the casting/finishing-the-damn-script stage. Will be filmed in the fall.

Music Videos

Answer Me
My role: Director, musician, producer, actor
Genre: Ukulele & song
Status: Post-production

A personified answering machine serenades its owner, and explains why her on-again-off-again boyfriend is a jerk. The lyrics are built very much like a story, and this music video reflects that, becoming something like a number from a musical in the way it represents the story. Packs comedy and drama and a whole lot of ukuleles into 2 minutes, 50 seconds. Shot with a RED One camera at Centralcafét and and Herrhagen in Falun on the 25th, 26th and 27th of March.

Feet
My role: Director, musician, producer, actor, editor
Genre: Ukulele & song
Status: Finished

This video explores the storytelling-potential inherit in a very specific visual trick which lies halfway between special effect and optical illusion. Above all else this video is fun. It's had overwhelmingly positive response at a viewing arranged by Film i Dalarna and at Dalarna University.

2 Eyes 2 Ears
My role: I did everything yo
Genre: Mashup / Remix
Status: Finished

This might be more of an installation or video-experiment than a music video, but it fits the category. It's a cultural crash where no one's safe, a mashup, an extended audiovisual remix where different music videos are put together into something new. More specifically it's a 40-minute-loop where Baloo from the Jungle Book plays along with Lady Gaga and Gwen Stefani, where Super Mario meets Eminem, and where David Hasselhoff sings a duet with the Black Eyed Peas. Is currently being shown at Recycle Art, an exhibit at Magasinet in Falun (the pictures below are from there).

In summary

There are musical projects in the works too (as you might guess from the music-video-section), but I'll leave those for a later post. Hopefully this is enough to prove that I'm not slacking off!

I hate blogs that only have one or two entries, especially if the first one is along the lines of "I've finally gotten round to starting a blog" and the last one includes an apology for missed updates, and a promise of more to come soon (dated 2006 or so). But despite my hate THIS IS TOTALLY GOING TO BE ONE OF THOSE BLOGS PROBABLY. Just in case it doesn't turn out like that I thought I'd explain why I'm starting this:

I used to post things here on Awesomepedia fairly regularly, and mostly they were silly but entertaining little things that took a day or two to put together. Now though, my standards have changed, and the creative projects I'm involved in have gotten bigger. At the moment I'm in the post-production phase of two short films and a music video, and at the same time I'm in the pre-production of several more, filling roles like director, actor, editor, etc. These, and other projects, take up the time that might have gone into making silly little things for the website. All in all, this means that there are fewer posts on the site these days, but that some of them will have a remarkably higher production value.

That's where the blog comes in! I'd like to have a space where I can give you peeks at coming projects and (perhaps more importantly) discuss the creative processes behind those projects. So you might expect behind-the-scenes stuff from the films I'm making, random pages from my notes, storyboards, and so on! This is also where I'll post any small image or text based project that won't fit into the streamlined Awesomepedia website-structure (note that the gallery has disappeared from the main menu, although you can still find it if you try hard enough).

In short this blog is a way to convince anyone who might be concerned that no, despite the lack of updates, I am not actually dead yet, and nor has my creativity died.

The name of this blog is Lots of Keys, and I suppose that needs to be explained. I can hear you now: ”What are you, the keymaster? The fucking keeper of the keys? U a locksmith all up in this bitch?” So here's the thing: it's a line from one of my songs. You haven't heard it, because I haven't uploaded it anywhere yet. This is the line:

your heart's got lots of lock.
but my piano's got lots of keys

EDIT DECEMBER 2011: The song in question is called #79 and it's now availible here.

It seemed like an appropriate name, since I'll mostly be writing about the inner workings of creativity. Also I really like the line.

So long, until next time! (unless I turn out to be more of a dick than I thought I was and don't actually ever post here again ever never ever it could happen)