Portland State film students are bringing back the music video with a vengeance.
The first-ever PDXMV: A Night of Music Videos showcase, which takes place at the Hollywood Theatre Monday, April 9, will feature the music videos of local bands and filmmakers. There will also be a live performance by Portland-based indie pop band Josh and Mer.
Portland State film students are bringing back the music video with a vengeance.
The first-ever PDXMV: A Night of Music Videos showcase, which takes place at the Hollywood Theatre Monday, April 9, will feature the music videos of local bands and filmmakers. There will also be a live performance by Portland-based indie pop band Josh and Mer.
“All in all, we’ve had a swell time reviewing the massive amount of content we received,” said event manager and Vanguard staff writer Kat Audick. “Some of the videos were extremely avant-garde and others more tame, but almost all of them were entertaining in some way. It’s been a great look at all of the local talent Portland has to offer.”
Developed by students of the Portland State Department of Theatre and Film, the showcase was open to local talent, student and non-student alike. The showcase itself will focus on music videos shot by and for Portland-based artists and will include such bands as The Thermals, Broken Bells and Shaky Hands.
Josh and Mer will open the event with a live performance at 6:30 p.m. In addition, they will screen the video for “Mind Control,” a song from their debut album, Planet Music. The video, created by Ben Parslow and Zen Freese of ZF Creative, features a mix of surrealistic imagery and narrative with classic live shots. Broken mirror shards reflect the lighting to create webs of brightness and ambiance.
“‘Mind Control’ was an experiment of sorts,” said guitarist and vocalist Josh Schroeder. “We got clever with cutting up audio tracks and layering electronic and organic percussive elements, and the song seemed to lend itself to a hypnotic theme.”
The band produced initial concepts for their video, which they sent to Freese and Parslow for development.
“Josh and I had no idea what it would look like. We would get a screenshot every now and then, but compared to what the video actually is in its entirety, we couldn’t have guessed it,” keyboardist Meredith Adelaide said. “I think we started screaming after the first time we watched it.”
Portland State film professor Dustin Morrow initially conceived the idea of an event to showcase developing student talent, an idea that, with the help of his students, evolved into a broader event encompassing all of Portland’s talent pool.
“He wanted to make an event where student filmmakers would be able to display their growing talents,” Audick said. “Once the idea started taking off, several of us from the music video class transformed into the board members for PDXMV and began working away at gathering submissions.”
The Hollywood Theatre, which will host the showcase, is responsible for a number of educational and outreach programs on top of its usual film screenings. Justen Harn, Hollywood Theatre’s director of programs and community engagement, explained that the theater has “an ultimate goal of expanding the traditional film-going ritual, giving way to a modern movie theater and cultural hub.”
“Recently, with the advent of Video on Demand technology, we have been thinking hard about what it means to be a movie theater. We’ve been reaching out to talented people to help us re-imagine the theatre as a home for creative experimentation,” Harn said. “As a space for transcendent community events and celebrations to take root and thrive, inviting various disciplines into the space to inform and evolve how we consume film and video.”
Hollywood and Harn’s recent collaboration with PSU’s film department is one of the results of that outreach effort.
“Dustin and I had been meeting to discuss developing a formal partnership between PSU’s film department and the Hollywood Theatre, and hosting this event seemed like a logical first step in working towards that aim,” Harn said. “If successful, with necessary student support, this could likely become an annual event at the Hollywood.”
The showcase itself will start at 7:30 p.m. and will present 16 videos chosen from a pool of more than 70 submissions. Various members of the creative community will be in attendance, but the doors are open to anyone, especially those interested in music and film.
“It should act as a fun networking event for those interested in film and music, but it will also serve as some incredible entertainment for the general public,” Audick said. “Admission is completely free, so students, filmmakers and musicians should flock in the masses to this marvelous event!”
