930 Club Redesign, originally uploaded by BlackLabel251.

Alright so I finally uploaded a bunch of new stuff to the design section so go check it out. Also I finished my website redesign for the 930 Club (no its not actually going to be their new site…its for a class.) You can check out the site design at www.chrismarotta.com/930club There is also some stuff I put up from my time at Curious Pictures.

The production happened over several weekends, although most of my parts were shot in the course of one weekend. We had some frustrating moments and we all wanted to kill each-other at times but we still had fun. Steve and Jon are really trying to unite the relatively small film community at American and I give them a lot of respect for that. Everyone involved worked really hard on this and its awesome to finally see it come together.

It’s tentatively titled “Freak Scene”…you can check out some of their other shorts/photography over at www.killfilmstudents.wordpress.com

Gauntanamo Airlines, originally uploaded by BlackLabel251.

So this past semester I took a class called “Visual Explanations and Information Graphics”….yes its wordy…I know. We covered everything from the bane of powerpoint presentations (I will never be able to look at one seriously again) to the perplexity of making gender neutral bathroom signs that are understood by a broad audience. The classed proved to much more interesting than I thought. I came out of it with a different outlook on the way that information is presented to us and I began to realize that there is something beyond bar graphs and pie charts.

For the final project we had to focus on Guantanamo Bay and the questionable/controversial practices and politics involved. I could talk for hours about Guantanamo but I am going to focus on something called “Extraordinary Rendition.” Which is something few people have probably heard about but happens much more often than one would expect.

Extraordinary Rendition allows for the abduction and indefinite detention for persons with suspected ties to terrorism, no matter how unconfirmed or dubious. While in detention, detainees are subject to harsh treatment and interrogation, without the rights of representation, habeas corpus, or those afforded to Prisoner’s of War in the Geneva Conventions.

Prisoners are arrested, forced on to “private” charter planes, and then flown to several different countries and eventually to Guantanamo. Flight plans and routes are obviously kept secret. The only way that we know certain flight paths is through eye witness accounts of tail numbers that were seen at several different airports.

For our project we created a poster that detailed several recorded flight paths in 2003. Countries that have known flight paths are filled in with orange and countries that are involved in rendition but with flight paths that are unknown are filled in with blue. The map illustrates that rendition has many more players than just the United States and Iraq. Countries include The United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Italy, Libya, and Azerbaijan to name a few. Its hard to say how much the leaders of these countries are involved, if even at all. The actual scope of rendition is much larger than what we have shown here, there are many more countries involved that we dont know about.

The final result was 5 feet long and 20 inches high. I will post pictures of it in context in the gallery soon. For more information on rendition check out the wikipedia article at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition_by_the_United_States

Here you can find links to several investigations.

For a bigger version of the map click here:

Capsule 4.13.08, originally uploaded by BlackLabel251.

So a few weeks ago I got a chance to take some pictures at a local show right here in the District. The whole “hardcore show” idea was really a last resort for my final critique for basic photo. I had originally planned to shoot infrared at an abandoned hospital out in maryland…but apparently the cops dont really like kids wandering around old tuberculosis treatment centers. Surprising.

Infrared proved to be much harder than I expected. The process warrants its own post later. So my friend Adam suggested doing something that I know…something that is “close to my heart” so to speak. I already knew that there was a hardcore show going down that weekend so I decided to take a chance. For those of you who dont know I played in 2 metalcore/deathcore bands in high school and early college, so its something I have been connected to for as long as I can remember.

When I got to the show everyone was cramped in the tiny basement, which made positioning for shots really difficult but it brought me back to the old days. Considering I was shooting on standard black and white film there was alot of guess work…you really do take that lcd screen on digitals for granted hah. I ended up using an external flash with a plastic milk jug on top to help diffuse the flash (courtesy of Adam Dexter).

By using a relatively slow shutter speed with the flash I was able to freeze whatever the flash exposed in the frame. Since the shutter was still open after the flash fired it caught the ambient light and the movement of the people/my hand. The result a character that is frozen in time yet still has a sense of movement.

Overall I was pretty happy with the results, I feel like they really do capture something about “the scene.” That there is something beyond the big venues and mass produced garbage. There is a vibrant, living-breathing, movement that will never go away.

For some more of the pictures check out my photo section. You can check out the bands at their myspace’s at

http://www.myspace.com/capsulefl

http://www.myspace.com/furnacesucks

I am going to try to focus on design,photo, film, etc. but Im sure I will go off on tangents from time to time. Either way…keep checking it out.