IOW: Setting “Fire” to leafy fun

Given yesterday’s post about do-it-yourself film projects and events, it made perfect sense to follow up with an “Image of the Week” featuring a hands-on local musician who has appeared on C-U Blogfidential more than once, Urbana’s Morgan Orion. The following video to his tune, “Fire in Blood,” was submitted too late for us to include in last month’s New Art Film Festival but we said, “What the hey, we like it so we’ll share it!” Our favorite antifolk crooner dons sweet cowboy threads for the clip in which he strums guitar by the proverbial tracks while, on a different day, he and friends race through a neighborhood in burlap sacks only to crash through lovely piles of fallen leaves every chance they get. Matt HarsH and Sam Ambler produced as with the prior clips, while Joe Frieburg, Tad Boehmer, Dave Tcheng, Sara Sasaki, and engineer Paul Kotheimer performed on the track with Orion. Additional songs and albums can be accessed through Bandcamp, of course.

On a side note, Ambler more recently contributed to one of the Pens to Lens shorts we mentioned yesterday, SUPER DUPER LOW, directed by his former co-worker Mike Trippiedi and featuring voice work by his father, well-regarded Station Theater veteran Gary Ambler. SUPER DUPER LOW stars young script writer Quinn F. as “Super Quinn,” a flying heroine in battle with an evil robot. She suddenly pauses to inject insulin since she is diabetic; the break gives Super Quinn a chance to tell her nemesis – and the film’s audience – about the disease and how it is controlled. In an artist’s statement, Trippiedi recalls they designed SUPER DUPER LOW to feel as if it was actually produced by children for children, making the subject matter palatable to Quinn-aged peers. It’s slam-bang execution, we say!

~ Jason Pankoke


Fire in Blood by Morgan Orion from Sam Ambler on Vimeo.

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