Melanie Anne Phillips

1976 - Futuristic Space City set. Another special effect from the same movie I made as a kid. Again, in the film the "city" is much brighter and due to the lower resolution of Super-8, it degraded the image enough to look like it was distant. Made this one with items from around the house (can't you tell?) - some of my mom's perfume bottles, some green plastic dishes from our camping set, even the flash reflector from my still camera looking like a satellite dish.

1976 - A Black Hole. Special effect from one of my early movies. Made by placing an upside down bowl on a piece of black velvet, then sprinkling around the bowl with flour and hitting the velvet with a strong light. This is actually a poor image - the one in the movie looks like brilliant white-hot stars against a pitch black background as the camera slowly zooms into the center. Keep in mind, this was before computers and CG - everything had to be mechanically created.

So, this is going pretty well.  I can shovel whatever the heck I'm thinking about at the moment up here on this blog where hardly anybody (IF anybody) ever sees it, but I've satisfied my need to shout in the town square. Then, I can take all the little gems and best-of-the-best and post it to Facebook or Google+ or Twitter.  The VERY best goes on my web site and the whole pile of it gets shovelled into my archive (on hard drive and back-up on my web site in a folder). Pretty satisfying.  Short of having a personal librarian, I do believe this is the best I can do.  And whenever I get the urge to organize that ol' archive on the internet, I no longer feel an obligation to make it complete, but see it more as a playground where each trip into the sand box spiffs things up a little bit more in the warehouse. Cool.

Okay, so I've been working about six hours now on this archive project, trying to get all my creative works and personal history (family photos and such) up on one place on the internet in a form where it can be accessed by both date and topic. And I've accomplilshed nothing. Oh, I've tried myriad of ways, but it keeps coming down to this: it's a hell of a lot of work! Now, it's one thing to spontaneously create something and toss it up on a blog or Facebook or Google+ or YouTube or Twitter.  But, it is about ten times as much work (and no creativity involved) in archiving it and organizing it. So, rather than make the archive organized and accessible, I've made a radical decision: I'm going to put things on my internet archive, but leave them disorderly and inaccessible.  The point of the archive is not really to show all my crap along with the jems, but just to ensure that nothing is ever lost due to one of the aforementioned social network sites c...

Here's another thought...  I'm finding it absolutely frustrating to take every single posting or journal entry that I make originally on the internet (such as this one) in the very convenient form of this blog system and then try to reproduce it in my home page archive in some form such as in a Word document.  What a pain in the ass! On the one hand, I want a permanent record of this stuff that can't be deleted at the whim of a company, on the other hand, who wants to spend five times as long documenting each thought as it took to originally think of it and post it? What's more, I still haven't figured out a good way to present this stuff.  I started with a page called "Chronology" and though I have tried dozens of ways to organize it, they all suck.  For example, if I create two columns - one for a creative timeline of what I invent and the second for a personal history of what's going on day to day, though it clearly shows the side by side relati...

On the day before the New Year, I continue to give a lot of thought about my key focus for the year to come.  Last year I determined that 2011 was to be my year of organization for all my creative endeavors, family history, personal interests, etc.  And that effort was largely successful as I have now gathered all of those materials into boxes, into foldes on my computer, and online on my web site, blog, and various social networks.  But just having the material organized, I'm finding, is not sufficient.  Rather, it means nothing unless it is contextualized and presented in some consistent accessible fashion.  Through all of these decades I've been a little fount of creativity and documentation, snapping photos, shooting videos, inventing quoatable aphorisms on Twitter.  And I've saved all of and, as of the end of the Year of Organization, has gathered it all together.  But it is hardly accessible, not grouped in any useful form, and much of it exsit...

1975 - A dead Great White Shark at Sea World. An early attempt of my photographic Muse to make a social statement. I set up the reflection and waitied for the moment when this poor, natural creature was posed in a permanent unnatural position, in a glass case, surround by gawkers and reflected palm trees as it "swims" through the sky. I like the dynamics and balance of this composition - the two faces in the back, flanking or boxing in the shark as they stare, the companion composition of the two folks in front, seen over their shoulders, the unnatural bar across the top which also serves to frame the shot, the counterpoint of the foreign element of the sky above and the plastic of the faux water below. I've often felt the best definition of art is "That which you put a frame around." In other words, anything that you elevate from its surroundings - anything you paste an exclamation point on, is a way of saying to other people, "Look here" or ...

1975 - A rare, rare day in Burbank - so much hail that it looked almost like snow. Previously, it had snowed last in Burbank in the 1940s, and it snowed again in early 2011. Wasn't there for either of them. This particular shot is in the front yard of my childhood home on California Street. The car is my beloved 1953 MG TD. My dad (my natural father, John) gave me $1000 in 1971 so I could buy a car to drive to college. I bought this wonderful vehicle and he never complained - in fact, he thought it was cool. I used to drive this to USC while wearing a white leather jacket with gold buttons. Once, my steering column sliced through the whole wiring harness just before arriving home. The momentum carried me right up into the drive way. I ordered and installed a whole new wiring harness (all the wires in the whole car in a bundle) all by hand myself. At the end of the long day I turned it on and realized I'd reversed left and right and had to do it all over. The gas ...

Video of my latest experimental 3D still photos. (You'll need your 3D glasses for this one.)

Rummaging through my archives: "Lilith and Eve" - photo manipulated artwork I created back in the late 1990s...

From my archives - a sketch I drew in 1996, first attempt at drawing on a computer using a mouse....

An old acquaintance of mine wrote this song about my home town...