Category Archives: media

Deep Listening – Frog

The following video resulted from a workshop and deep listening exercise held on 3.10.23 on South Puget Sound Community College’s campus as part of the Digital Humanities Lab. The workshop was led by Jessie Lenderman, an instructor at the college who is a filmmaker and documentarian who uses inter-disciplinarian practices to inform her work.

In the first part of the exercise, participants were given an object and asked to write a short piece only describing it. Next, participants developed a second short written piece detailing personal associations with their chosen item. In the last part of the exercise, participants filmed the object, using the two former pieces of writing to help guide the audio-visualization of it.

Videos were shot on our phones. To edit the video, we used an open-source software program called OpenShot. Open-source software is distributed with its source code, making it available for use, modification, and distribution by anyone who uses it. Unlike software developed by many corporate entities for profit, open-source software is guided by an ethical component that fosters community, exchange, and learning.

In my video, I incorporated a recording of frogs I’d made on campus the evening before, around 8 PM. I was leaving the building when I heard them in a chorus.

Frog from Mike Gray on Vimeo.

Loss of Mt. Rainier

This summer I am making a short film I wrote called Loss of Mt. Rainier. In the film, a social media star falls into a catatonic state and has his body abused on the way to the top of Mt. Rainier. It’s a dark comedy that is a loose adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Loss of Breath”. We have a super cast-n-crew working on the film, many of whom are associated with the Olympia Film Collective. I couldn’t speak more highly of all the talents involved. Today we launched a Kickstarter for the film, which you can check out below.

Click on the following link to visit the Kickstarter for Loss of Mt. Rainier; you can watch our video to learn more about the movie.

Sunday Dogs

“Sunday Dogs” is a short instrumental. I should have probably added barking dogs to it, but I decided not to make it an intense affair and more of a moment before the barking begins affair.