Lorenzo Fonda, director.

20 - 07 - 2010before deciding for some obscure reason that what i wanted to focus on in my life was directing, i tried different mediums and ways of working with the arts. one field i was incredibly interested in (well, i still am) were interactive installations. the amazing amount of human ingenuity and creativity that is poured in the creation of this kind of artworks never ceases to amaze me. for instance, watch this video of Listening Post, by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin. witnessing that installation was pure ecstatic bliss.
so, since i myself gave this wonderful new art field a shot, here i present you with one of the installations i created when part of the collective Thankyourupert, together with Enrico Mazzi and Rudy Melli.
the white liquid is milk, and the phrases that come out of the toys are those silly made up stories that your parents used to tell you as an excuse to not have you do something they didn't want to cope with. when grown, you look back at those memories and smile about them, being old enough to digest them with the help of some of the milk they forced down your throat when you were gullible enough to believe in everything. aah, youth.
the installation was based on Processing language. a camera was placed on the ceiling shooting at the pool, so to track the different toys floating. when a toy was moved, the program would recognize movement and a new phrase would be crapped by the toy, it would float for a minute and then sink forever into milk oblivion.

14 - 07 - 2010during the course of a director's career, especially in the beginning, he will find himself having to ask favors to friends and people whose work he respect. i mean, I did, and still do (just to be precise, "asking a favor" means asking someone to work for you for free). I have multiple people I keep going back to work with, but one vfx collaborator that stands out and deserves his own little space is Markus Wagner. Hailing from Austria, he basically worked on almost every project I've done since my documentary Megunica (check this little teaser he did for the film). He's like the dream collaborator, basically. Incredibly versatile, always willing to do his best, always bringing something of his own to the project and always willing to tell you gofuckyourself if you're asking too much of him.
The latest projects he worked on for me were the For a Minor Reflection music video (about to come out) and some really fun vfx for the N.A.S.A. film.
So, since the only reason he worked on my projects was for passion, the very least thing I can do is share with you his new live visuals reel and suggest you use him for your next project. He does also vfx of course, which you can go check on his website.

28 - 06 - 2010Blade Runner private screening on a friend's rooftop in downtown. looks like everything is going according to plans.

23 - 06 - 2010As visual artists, we might rephrase the question as something like: How has the Internet changed the way we see?
For the visual artist, seeing is essential to thought. It organizes information and how we develop thoughts and feelings. It's how we connect.
So how has the Internet changed us visually? The changes are subtle yet profound. They did not start with the computer. The changes began with the camera and other film-based media, and the Internet has had an exponential effect on that change.
The result is a leveling of visual information, whereby it all assumes the same characteristics. One loss is a sense of scale. Another is a loss of differentiation between materials, and the process of making. All visual information "looks" the same, with film/photography being the common denominator.
Art objects contain a dynamism based on scale and physicality that produces a somatic response in the viewer. The powerful visual experience of art locates the viewer very precisely as an integrated self within the artist's vision. With the flattening of visual information and the randomness of size inherent in reproduction, the significance of scale is eroded. Visual information becomes based on image alone. Experience is replaced with facsimile.
As admittedly useful as the Internet is, easy access to images of everything and anything creates a false illusion of knowledge and experience. The world pictured as pictures does not deliver the experience of art seen and experienced physically. It is possible for an art-experienced person to "translate" what is seen online, but the experience is necessarily remote.
As John Berger pointed out, the nature of photography is a memory device that allows us to forget. Perhaps something similar can be said about the Internet. In terms of art, the Internet expands the network of reproduction that replaces the way we "know" something. It replaces experience with facsimile.
Eric Fischl & April Gornik - Visual artists

Taken from the massively interesting World Question Center's "How Has The Internet Changed The Way You Think?" website

08 - 06 - 2010i am back in LA, and last night had my craziest, absurdest, surrealest, untellablest, not-grandchildren-story-material experience here to date.
on an unrelated note, this is a picture of an elder man playing Wii bowling in a senior recreation center.

24 - 05 - 2010yesterday i went to visit the town where i used to spend summers during my childhood. this is my uncle having some problems with his Apecar.

16 - 05 - 2010I don't know how you handle it because it is a constant thing. I think what I always try to do is say to myself, "How did I feel about this last one when I was around this point, was I feeling good?" The answer to that is usually, "No, you were feeling terrible. You didn't even know that you wanted to make the movie."
There are always times when you don't know if it's a movie.
Wes Anderson on self-doubt and screenwriting

10 - 05 - 2010back in my hometown for a while.. when I got home, my mom had prepared a surprise for me: some of my old stop motion characters reunited, in one stylish wooden box. you'll be able to recognize the Sweaty Boxeur, me, my father, Becruno (beheaded), the Mad Jackall, Mafia Dude, Clockwork Orange Dude, and others. all these guys were brought to life by me and my brother (with questionable results) during my teenager years in silly stop motion experiments.



this is one of my favourite experiments. i think i was 16 when i did this. synopsis: a glimpse into the life of a bored drug dealer.

22 - 04 - 2010Mighty8, the music video division of my lovely production company, has a shiny new website, full of beautiful clickable moving images.

21 - 04 - 2010as i try to finish all my other projects, i also try to keep this website alive, so you people don't think all i do is to sit home and draw penguins buying groceries. here is a video i shot a couple years ago in Prato, Italy, in which Blu and Ericailcane paint a wall. without asking permission. but i guess it's clear enough from the video.

21 - 04 - 2010shooting weird pale walking characters (created by Splunny) walking on a random chosen instrument at Squeakeclean studio for NASA film project! i love my job! wait! i'm not getting paid for this! but who cares! i wish all jobs were like this one! wof! look behind you, there's a three headed monkey!

13 - 04 - 2010hotel's morning shower in Taiwan.

06 - 04 - 2010a few years ago my good friend Romulo Alejandro made this short film while he was in college. when it was time to make a film, a friend of his told him "As a student, there are just some movies you can't make. For instance you can't make a movie set in outer space." (supposedly no gravity is something you can't represent well without big $). right after, Rom thought it might be interesting to set this moving story about two humans in space, probably because he knows that the "can't dos" are such a lure for us filmmakers. now, if that's not the right attitude towards making films, i don't know what else is.
so, at the cost of him stealing my job, i wanted to share this great little film, because the world needs more great little things like this.

ROSKOSMOS from Romulo Alejandro on Vimeo.

04 - 04 - 2010here's the story.
i was walking in lower east side, not really expecting any random/kgjioyoi situation. but, as my eyes move from the sidewalk platforms to whatever is in front of me, i see an indian man coming out of his restaurant with a cage in his hand. walking closer plus closer inspection reveals that inside the cage roams a happy hamster. further inspection reveals that indian man starts pouring water over the cage, over the hamster.
i'm in awe. this indian man is giving his hamster his morning hot bath. this is so beautiful, a man loving his pet so much he takes the time to wash it.
the hamster starts enjoying it, moving back and forth. the indian man keeps pouring hot water, smoke grows out of it.
the hamster starts jumping up and down. kind of excited. indian man keeps pouring. hamster jumps awkwardly fast up and down. smoke keeps coming out of water. smoke. water. hot. very hot. VERY hot. hamster stops moving. wait. he's not giving his hamster a bath. wait. he just KILLED the thing. ok, that wasn't a hamster. duh. rat. mouse trap. hot boiling water.
goodbye Jumpy, sorry to say, but you will not be missed.

29 - 03 - 2010quite a few years ago i was about to leave for my first lone adventure to New York to try my luck here in the wonderfool united states of america. before leaving i sent this to the companies i was about to meet and to some other people (i wanted to send it to the customs at JFK as well but couldn't find their email). it's been sitting in a folder for a while all by itself, so i said, why not share it.
post scriptum: it actually rained for the whole two weeks i was there non stop, every single fucking day, and i felt miserable. i remember myself spending the nights at the hostel trying to dry my shoes with a borrowed hairdryer in time for the next day. but when one night i sat and browsed through the pics i snapped that day, i found this little gem. now i wasn't the only one sharing some misery on 4th St.

26 - 03 - 2010it happened before that some people told me that my work touched or influenced them in one way or the other, but this never happened to me yet.. a band from Philadelphia named themselves "Portland Senator", inspired by the video i shot from the decks of the ship bearing the same name. visit their website and download their music for free, it's pretty good too.

25 - 03 - 2010news frenzy! I've been on this for a while, but it seems we're getting close to and end.. I have been helping Sam Spiegel (whose studio Squeakeclean scored my Police short) and Syd Garon (great animator/director guy whose son is called Enzo) with their documentary about the NASA project, by directing the visual transitions between live action footage and the great animated videos they produced for each song of the record. more news soon. meanwhile, go check the project if you don't know about it already.

23 - 03 - 2010shot! we photographed my still-to-be-titled short film last sunday, and it was a battle for who was faster, us or the sun. but despite that, i think we got some pretty nice shots. now onto editing and scoring.

19 - 03 - 2010been location scouting in a very strange place for a short i will be shooting this sunday.

11 - 03 - 2010yesterday it's been a year since I moved to LA. i can't remember the day when i decided i wanted to make films, but i remember being very small and watching movies and being mesmerized. when I was 6, i thought that when you saw people falling down those huge cliffs in 007 movies, they were terminally ill people that would have died anyway. when i was 12, i used to watch music videos and think that each shot was photographed for the necessary amount of time to be on screen (usually 1 second) and then the crew would move to the other part of the world, shot half a second, come back to the previous set, rebuild it, shoot two seconds, go back to the other side of the world, shoot another second, and so on. i wonder now what other kind of massive misconception about filmmaking i still have to demystify.
this picture i took when i was landing in LA that day. it makes me dizzy. i mean, the picture. the city too, actually. a good dizzy.

10 - 03 - 2010yes, I live in Los Angeles. and yes, that's my parking lot.

04 - 02 - 2010Ok, I feel it's time to start posting some making of pictures of the Boys and Girls Clubs campaign I've been working on for a while now. The images relate to the Denzel Washington piece, we have another one almost done with general Wesley Clark, but I can't show you pictures of that, otherwise I'll be killed. With a spoon.



this is me trying to avoid a bum and desperately trying to catch my worst kickflip ever on 35mm camera during the Denzel downtown LA shoot.

04 - 02 - 2010when i go around i take pictures with my phone, and some of them are worth sharing. so if you see a weird picture in here with no description, don't panic, it's allright.

26 - 01 - 2010My good friends back in Italy at Bastard have sent me a couple snapshots of the murals I did at their offices last year. Straight to database.

10 - 12 - 2009last week i turned 30, and I thought the event deserved some attention.

08 - 12 - 2009Just to let you know, I uploaded the "Origins of Bacchanals" promo in the personal works sections. It has english subtitles so you should definitely check it out.

16 - 11 - 2009just got back from Cutout Festival in Queretaro, Mexico. I had a great great time and people from Mexico are lovely. this was my favourite sight there: an old woman lived close to my hotel, and sat all day in her house with someone who could have been her husband, I don't really know, but I found it extremely touching and beautiful that she had a small table with some plastic glasses on top with some drink in them, in case you wanted to stop and make her day by exchanging a couple words with her.



apart from screening Megunica, at the festival I gave a lecture about my work. as I felt just showing my work might have been boring, in the morning before my presentation I hastefully sketched down a list of "attitudes" that helped me along the road in my creative process. here is one of the points, the rest is here:

10 - 11 - 2009I was asked by Warp Films to cover the event they did for 20 years of Warp in NYC, last september. Watch it here.

09 - 11 - 2009didn't you feel the world needed another website? so I rushed and filled the void by redoing mine.
new life, new city, new companies, new apartment, same old grumpy bad-breathed hairy clueless director.
towards the end of last year i had a dream where a 126 years old brazilian anteater dressed like an early century amusement park ride owner was telling me to pack up my bag and relocate to Los Angeles. then he tried to kill me by throwing me down a 126 stories building, but i woke up, and decided i didn't want to have dreams like that anymore, so to be sure of that i did what the anteater said and relocated to California.
turns out i almost stopped dreaming also about all the other things as well.
anyway: welcome to my new website, as you can see it's quite different from my old one, less stuff and more just about what i'm focusing on right now.
as usual I indulge myself in way too long writings no one will ever read, so I'd better let pictures do the talking. this is how I feel right now: