Lo and behold! It's the 2014 film reel of me, Charles Pieper! Whatta surprise, huh!

This year my reel focuses more on my newer live action works as I want to continue on in this form a bit more. In years past I was known most for my stop motion works but as of late I've felt more and more interested in pursuing more collaborative live action works. Don't get me wrong, puppets are great, but people, oh people, they can be great too.

(Though this isn't to say I won't do more stop motion as well. In fact the end section of this reel is new stop motion I did for the Norwegian Artist Bjarne Melgaard and in fact the little snippet you see in here is probably the only bit you will ever see of it outside of a high end art context gallery. No joke!)

But I'll get back to that. I think I'll start at the beginning though and, for the uninitiated, give a little description/background to all the film pieces sampled in this reel.

So....Here we go...

The reel opens with my biggest live action short to date, 'Last Remnants:'

(I am going to go into detail in depth about Last Remnants in an upcoming blog post, so for now...I shall say nothing!)

The reel then goes to footage from 'Pulsifer the Noctivigant:'

This short film is a satire of film noir narrative, and pokes fun at anyone in general who acts like they are cooler or more mysterious than they really are. That was the idea anyway, that this main character, Adam Pulsifer, walks around at night trying to seem cool and edgy, but he gets continually faced with freaky real world denizens of the night, until he ends up meeting something straight up evil and supernatural and then well, there goes his night!

The reel then cuts to footage from 'A Serious Stare Produces Results:'

This was a completely improvised short done to experiment with a lensbaby lens and was shot at the same time I used this actor for his phone scenes in 'Are You Marmaduke Dot Com?' I really enjoy the strange look and tone of this piece and certainly want to do more visual experiments like this in the future.

Up next is a little footage from 'Are You Marmaduke Dot Com?'

All I can say about the Marmaduke film is that I stand behind it 100 percent and it makes sense, 100 percent. Yes? Yes.

The reel then goes to 'Jazavac Attack' which I just realized is NOT on Film Annex yet and I will certainly correct that soon as I am sure you all want to watch what is essentially a long monologue about a man talking about seeing badgers set on fire at a zoo. Of course.

Up next is my nonsensical short 'The Apple Sauce Diaries.'

This film grew out of an intense desire to write something rapidly without thinking about what it meant at all and then shoot it before I could realize if it did indeed make any sense. And of course, it does make no sense. Or does it? Give it a watch and see!

Next up is a quick shot from an earlier work of mine, 'Apartment.' This too is not on Film Annex yet either! But stay tuned. This was the first film I worked on with Marie Bollinger, who went on to play the waitress in 'Last Remnants.'

Then comes footage from my newest short 'Morning Cloth.' 

This short has been discussed at length elsewhere in my blogs so I won't go into it again here.

Then the reel returns to the crazy stop motion footage for Bjarne Melgaard. This is the second stop motion I made for art shows of his. Both animations played on loop within the New York City art galleries that were displaying his art.

This year the animation looped on a screen inside of a giant knocked over pepto bismol bottle with a 6 foot tall Pink Panther made out of fabric scraps sitting on top of it. Viewers had to kneel down on blankets at the foot of the bottle and lean down into the open cap to see the horrifically vulgar animation going on inside of it.

If all this sounds very weird and ridiculous it is because, yes, it was. 

And that, my friends, just about wraps up this tour of my new reel. I hope you enjoyed it. Or were, at least, confused a bit. Because confusion is as good as enjoyment these days I do suppose...