There have been some mighty fine music videos in Homegrown Music Video Festivals past. Remember when Brian Barber turned the mayor into a cartoon character, the Aerial Lift Bridge into a transformer and Enger Tower into a weapon? Or how about the time that Erin McConnell and Jason Page joined forces to bring an amazing kite to life?
But this year, film freaks, this year was the most across-the-board solid showing I’ve seen. Not a dud in the bunch. More videos featured the actual bands, and when they didn’t — heck, that was cool, too. There were narratives. There were abstracts and there were sitcom-esque visions. The theater space at Zinema 2 was packed, standing room only.
The videos will be replayed around 10 p.m. Wednesday at Zinema 2, after the Trampled by Turtles show at Clyde Iron Works. Meanwhile, keep your eyes to the internet as these vids tend to crop up on Perfect Duluth Day.
Some highlights:
Trent Waterman, the eye behind North Shore Sessions, did a relationship-gone-wrong narrative and footage of musician Sarah Krueger playing guitar and singing her song “Running.”
Josh Carlon, who went the animation route last year with “The Old Clyde Road” by Bitter Spills, pitted a man in a stark waiting room holding a tag with the No. 53 against a taunting electronic Take-A-Number system.
Rich Narum had Little Black Books playing in the basement — and a pensive Mark Lindquist doing a shot at RT Quinlan’s, Norton had Excuse Me Princess (and friends) over for a dance party in the living room.
Erin McConnell’s video for Loup-Garou’s song “Gone from Minnesota” was a relationship narrative starring Abe Curran and Tonya Porter that was really touching with its snippets of a life together and funny with its scenes of Curran in an elevator.
Tim Massett went strobe-y to capture a song by Tim Kaiser, a scene that included religious imagery — within the non-stop blinking — that seemed like hallucinations. I think it might be the film David Foster Wallace wrote about in his novel “Infinite Jest.” He used found film footage.
Meanwhile, a poetry reading was going on upstairs at Teatro Zuccone, and a photo show was hung in the atrium, including images from Homegrowns past. This gem, by Laramie Carlson, was taken after Bratwurst’s set last year. It is a pretty good advertisement to get thee to RT Quinlan’s for the last band on Friday night.
