"WAX or the discovery of television among the bees" 

This is information on a new full length film created with new techniques
destined to make it a pilot for a new breed of cyber-cinema.  It was
contributed by the film's creator, David Blair.


CONTACT:
David Blair 
P.O. Box 174, Cooper Station, New York, NY 10276   
(212) 228 1514

     "WAX or the discovery of television among the bees" is set in Alamogordo,
New Mexico (1983), where the main character, Jacob Maker, designs gunsight
displays at a flight simulation factory.  Jacob also keeps bees.  His hives are
filled with "Mesopotamian" bees that he has inherited from his grandfather.
Through these bees, the dead of the future begin to appear, introducing Jacob
to a type of destiny that pushes him away from the normal world, enveloping him
in a grotesque miasma of past and synthetic realities.  The bees show Jacob the
story of his grandfather's acquisition and fatal association with the
"Mesopotamian" bees, in the years following the First World War.  The bees also
lead Jacob away from his home, out to the Alamogordo desert, slowly revealing
to him their synthetic/mechanical world, which exists in a darkness beyond the
haze of his own thoughts.  Passing through Trinity Site, birthplace of the
Plutonium bomb, Jacob arrives at a gigantic cave beneath the desert.  There, he
enters the odd world of the bees, and fulfills his destiny.  Traveling both to
the past and the future, Jacob ends at Basra, Iraq, in the year 1991, where he
meets a victim that he must kill.

     Independently executed over six years, "WAX or the discovery of television
among the bees" combines compelling narrative, in the realistic/fantastic vein
of Thomas Pynchon or Salman Rushdie, with the graphic fluidity of video
technique.  The result is an odd, new type of story experience, where smooth
and sudden transpositions of picture and sound can nimbly follow and fuse with
fantastical, suddenly changing, and often accelerated narrative.  The result
resembles story-telling in animated film.  Yet location photography and archive
research form the backbone of the piece.

     "WAX or the discovery of television among the bees" (85:00, mono) provides
an example of a new type of independent "electronic cinema" that will become
more common as the 1990's progress.

Review for 
"WAX or the discovery of television among the bees" 

from the magazine "MONDO 2000"
(to be printed in Volume 7 in August 1992)
article by Richard Kadrey

        Throughout the history of the film biz there have been occasional
attempts to shoot whole novels.  The silent era gave us Greed, a 12-hour
misery-fest that was ultimately chopped up and sold as guitar picks by the
studio heads.  Fassbinder was more successful with his 15-hour Berlin
Alexanderplatz, but that was shown in installments on TV, so the accumulation
of action and information was greatly diminished.

        In the literary world, J.G.  Ballard experimented with "condensed
novels" in his book The Atrocity Exhibition.  The idea was to boil away all
character and plot and leave just the steaming residue of motive, action and
response, to create the cumulative effect of novel-like density in just a few
pages.

        David Blair's video, WAX or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees,
is sort of a combination of these earlier experiments, and yet is something
wholly new.  Through a combination of archival film footage, new video and
computer animation WAX achieves the effect of a novel (density, the passage of
time, dramatic changes in character), and it does so in the 85 minute
running-time of a regular feature film.

        It's almost impossible to describe the plot of WAX; it's a Zen koan
told as a Burroughs cut-up.  We open with experimental cinematographer James
Maker, a member of the Supernormal Film Society who accompanies a British Royal
expedition to Antarctica in hopes of filming the spirits of the dead.
Flashfoward to James Maker's grandson, Jacob Maker, a computer programmer
working on targeting systems for the Air Force at their Alamagordo test range.
Jacob keeps bees, the bees that once belonged to his father and grandfather, a
semi-famous keeper of bees himself, friend of the man who first imported
Mesopotamian bees to England.  Jacob grows unsure of the work he is doing for
the Air Force, telling us that "To hit a simulated target was to prepare murder
against a real target." As his uncertainty grows, he spends more and more time
with the bees.  He has blackouts; time turns liquid, and he loses hours at a
time.  The hives are endlessly fascinating to him.  And then one day, he thinks
he can hear voices speaking to him from inside the hives.  .  .  .

        After that, Jacob quickly leaves behind almost everything we would
consider normal life and embarks on a Ballardian quest that takes him from his
home in Alamagordo, to Trinity site (location of the first nuclear bomb was
detonation, coincidentally on the day of Jacob's birth), to the underground
lair that is the real home of the bees (where the bees commune with the dead,
and prepare new bodies for them), to the Land of the Dead itself and to Iraq
during the Gulf War where Jacob is reborn briefly as a bomb, guiding himself
with the same targeting system he worked on back when he was a programmer.

        Blair labored for six years to finish WAX, working when he could from
grant to grant, scrounging and convincing people to contribute to the project
through the force of his vision, the strength of which is evident in the
extraordinary production quality of WAX.  The scenes set in Alamagordo and
Trinity Site were really filmed at those locations.  Blair convinced the Air
Force to let him take his video crew deep inside the highly restricted WSMR
bomb range.  On the day Blair and company were shooting, a celebration was on
nearby, an annual party marking the anniversary of the first nuclear bomb test.
Technicians set off a small chemical explosive, sending up a tall, white
mushroom cloud, a moment captured by chance by cinematographer Mark Kaplan, and
incorporated by Blair into the finished film.  Stealth bombers practiced bomb
runs over the shooting site, using the Trinity marker as ground zero on their
targeting grids-- Blair and his crew were being virtually bombed the whole time
they were filming.

        Another striking sequence in WAX is the underground cavern where the
bees make wax bodies for the dead to inhabit.  Blair shot these scenes in
off-limit locations inside Carlsbad Caverns, conning and cajoling his way into
sectors of cave that even the park rangers generally avoid.  It's during this
act that Jacob enters the Land of the Dead, and the audience gets a tour of the
afterlife via Florence Ormezzano's lovely computer graphics.  WAX neatly avoids
the problems of mainstream films like Lawnmower Man where films and effects
live and die by their flash quotient.  WAX refuses to compete with Hollywood's
ideas of special effects.  The computer images we get are startling, from the
bat-winged and multi-skulled spirit guide to the biomorphic squiggles that are
the alphabet of the dead.  These are dream images from a lost digital tribe,
pixelated runes and hieroglyphs.  Imagine what the Maya might have left behind
if they had vanished into a virtual world instead of the Mexican jungle.

        WAX is the first generation of a new video-based artform that Blair
calls is "independent electronic cinema." Like home-recording studios and the
zine world (like the zine you hold in your hands) recent advances in technology
have put powerful editing tools into the hands of anyone with the need and
desire to use them.  WAX was assembled using the Montage Picture Processor, a
relatively new "non-linear" video editing system, which allowed Blair to work
quickly and intuitively, digitally cutting and pasting the work together from
as many as six video segments at once.

        Both Blair and WAX, however, are having to pay a price for their
ambition.  Nobody wants to show or distribute WAX.  The art video crowd has
rejected it because it's too long and too expensive, a PC no-no.  The film
community is strictly hands-off because WAX is video-based.  This is almost
always the fate of the new.  Tuxedoed and tiaraed royals rioted at the premier
of the Rite of Spring.  Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg and Burroughs were all
banned at one time for obscenity.  And the Elvis was shot from the waist up
because white boys weren't supposed to move like that.

        And who can really blame the critics?  The New is always frightening.
It makes you look at everything, your own work included, in a different way.
It makes you question your methods, your ideas, all your assumptions.  Worse,
the New can make you feel old, and when you're in art, where coolness and
affect are half the game, old is not where the beautiful people are hanging
out.

        Blair is optimistic, though.  With praise from the likes of William
Gibson, he knows that he accomplished want he set out to do.  He's already at
work on a new feature, an alternate history piece linking the fate of the
modern Japanese and Jews in an alternate Israel located in Manchuria.  Not
exactly the kind of material destined to give Terminator 9 a run for its money,
but Blair is playing in a different league, where film has the density of a
novel, where new thoughts are always welcome and where memories, dreams and
desires are as close as your skin, and as dangerous as a smart bomb.

TECHNICAL PROFILE:

        "WAX or the discovery of television among the bees" demonstrates the
narrative and visual forms that are emerging as the wide availability of new
technologies make possible an independent "electronic cinema".  Though the
specific combination of story, production work, post-production work, and sound
design that make up "Wax..." are unique, there is no doubt that the increased
availability of the technologies used in this project will lead to the creation
of new ways of making feature- length narrative, at which time "Wax..." will
become an example of a type, rather than an idiosyncratic phenomena.

ELECTRONIC PRODUCTION:
High quality video production is already an established fact.  As has often
been noted, the ability to shoot cheaply allows a director the ability to
sketch out story ideas, even under the pressures of location production.

Over fifty hours of location material were recorded for "Wax...".  There were
three production periods, totalling twenty days, spread over three years.  The
location work included travel to the a sculpture garden in central Kansas, and
to a wide variety of locations in Southwestern New Mexico, including such
restricted areas as the White Sands Missile Range, and the Carlsbad Caverns.

The ease of video duplication aided in stock footage collection.
In addition, small format video allowed the collection of archive
footage during travel.

ELECTRONIC POST-PRODUCTION: NON-LINEAR EDITING
The mass of material collected during video production and created during video
and computer effects work (see below) is difficult to organize and edit.  This
bottle-neck was overcome by the extensive use of non-linear editing during
off-line.  "WAX or the discovery of television among the bees" is the first
long- form independent production to fully exploit the capacities of this new
technology.

Organization of production material began early on at Film/Video Arts, a
non-profit media access center in NYC, where simple 3/4" editing equipment was
used.  This work was shifted home when, in the course of the production,
inexpensive home editing equipment became available.  A thermal video printer
allowed simple sorting and cataloguing of shots.

After the final shoot, all organized material was input to a Montage non-linear
editing system, where the real work of off- line editing began.  More than 1800
hours were spent on this system.

Non-linear editing allows an editor to instantly rearrange, trim or lengthen
all shots within a sequence, while previewing simple opticals.  On such a
system, a director can work at the levels of shot, sequence, and scene
simultaneously, allowing both the complete exploitation of large amounts of
production material, and the opportunity for associative patterning at all
levels.  Off-line editing acquires both the speed and creative flexibility of
writing.  "WAX or the discovery of television among the bees" is a clear
example of this new functionality.

ELECTRONIC POST-PRODUCTION:  VIDEO GRAPHICS/COMPUTER GRAPHICS
As is already obvious in short-form work such as the television commercial and
music video, the combination of electronic post- production with computer
graphics allows a director both complete control over production material, and
the ability to integrate this footage with completely synthetic material, in an
artificial graphic space.  "WAX or the discovery of television among the bees"
is the first independent production to harness these technologies for
fiction-feature storytelling.

Effects production began simultaneous with the initial production and editing
work.  More than forty hours of processed material were recorded, using a wide
variety of image processing and image synthesis techniques.  These ranged from
frame-based PC work, both 2-D and 3-D, to the real-time work, initially
executed on analog voltage-control systems at the Experimental Television
Center in Owego, N.Y.

Of special interest is the fact that a simple Amiga-based system was used to
create over 90 minutes of 3-D animated elements.  In the final tape, there are
several long sequences of narrative 3-D animation, totalling almost ten
minutes.

Both the PC work, analog work, and the majority of the production material were
fed through a real-time 2-D/3-D joy- stick controlled, key-frame based device
called Impact, from Microtime.  The machine was loaned to the production by the
manufacturer for 24 days, and installed at Film/Video Arts, NY.  The
extraordinary plastic qualities of this easily programmed device provided,
within the shot, the same compositional flexibility that the non-linear editing
system provided across shots.

ELECTRONIC POST-PRODUCTION: MUSIC
At the completion of editing, the finished picture was given to the composers,
devoid of any production or stock sound.  All eighty-five minutes of sound were
created from scratch by the pair, using samplers and other computer-based
instruments at their PC-automated audio-for-video studio.  The inexpensive, yet
powerful, technologies of contemporary music allow the independent
composer/sound designer to create long-form works with a speed and
sophistication previously not possible.

INDEPENDENT "ELECTRONIC CINEMA"
At the current time, "WAX or the discovery of television among the bees" is an
unusual, perhaps idiosyncratic project, in the style, content, and length of
its' narrative, and in its' visual composition.  However, these elements have
proceeded in unity with, and in many cases have been born from, the technical
aspects of its construction.  It should be noted that, as the 1990's progress,
real-time 2-D and 3-D image processing and synthesis will become available in
affordable desktop computers.  Inexpensive non-linear, PC-based editing systems
will replace cassette-based, mechanical systems.  These new technologies,
combined with the already established practices of video production and
PC-based electronic music, will be the material basis for a new "electronic
cinema".  As a wide range of producers gain the ability to investigate this
possibility, what is unusual here may become common.

Distribution for "WAX or the discovery of television among the bees" is planned
both on tape and on film.