Film | Ragged Band · Dispatches from the Creative Life

Matt Wignall

By: Ben Bishop

04·30·2013

“I started a band in high school with a few friends, and we played some backyard keggers, and by that time it was clear I was not suited for any kind of structured job.”

The word jack is evocative of roguish qualities. Three-day stubble and cool competence. JFK, Jack Nicholson, and Jack Daniels. Jack the Ripper. Blackjack. Sgt. Whiskeyjack and Captain Jack Sparrow.

Fitting, then, that Matt Wignall is a true jack-of-all-trades.

As a photographer he’s shot bands including Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes, My Brightest Diamond, J. Roddy Walston & The Business and Thrice, and worked on fashion projects for companies like Volcom and NSF.

He has his hand in the world of moving pictures, having filled the roles of cinematographer, director and/or producer on a range of projects, from numerous music videos to commercial pieces with a documentary flair.

He is a producer and audio engineer who has cut records with Delta Spirit, Mando Diao, Cold War Kids, The Fling, and Deep Sea Diver. His analog recording studio, Tackyland, sits in back of his Long Beach home.

He is the former lead singer of Havalina Rail Co., whose music is too rich and varied to even begin to attempt describing here.

He is a graphic designer.

He’s involved in some capacity with these guys.

His wife, Judita Wignall, is a raw and organic foods cookbook author.

When I contacted Matt about an interview, I opened my e-mail with the following three anecdotes:

1 – In the fall of 1999 my insufferable thrash band, 4 Pete’s Sake, opened for Havalina Rail Co. in the fellowship hall of a small church on the west side of Santa Cruz, CA. Seventeen people attended. One was my mom. Midway through our set our bass player fell down and simultaneously unplugged all of our amps. You and Orlando were kind afterwards.

2 – In the spring of 2007 some friends and I were picking up a trailer that our buddies in Cold War Kids had gifted us. It happened to be parked in your driveway. While lifting the trailer to back it onto our truck’s hitch, we inadvertently struck, knocked over, and utterly destroyed a ceramic chiminea that belonged to you and your wife.

3 – Last year while having coffee with a friend who will remain nameless I was told an apocryphal-sounding story involving you, XXXXXX, a Mexican wedding, a speedo and a toothbrush. I’m not sure I believed it.

Andy Barron

By: Ben Bishop

02·01·2013

Design, Film, Interviews, Music, Photography

I have a clear memory of the first time I saw Andy Barron. It was a warm evening in late August, 2001, and I was lying in bed. It was my first night away at college. Just as I was about to fall asleep, the door of my dorm room cracked open and someone slunk inside, attempting to be quiet.

I knew that one of my two roommates was named Andy. We’d even spoken briefly on the phone ahead of move-in day. But I had no idea what he looked like. Being the shrewd fellow that I am, I feigned sleep. I figured if I was about to be robbed by a malingering undergraduate taking advantage of unattended belongings during the chaos of move-in week, I would wait until he got closer and then brain him with my alarm clock.

Instead, the shadowy figure clambered up the edge of the bunk bed, shaking it crazily in the process, such that if I had been asleep I would have woken in a panic thinking an earthquake had struck, and proceeded to fling a guitar bearing a Jimmy Eat World sticker onto the mattress along with a backpack and various other sundry items before climbing back down and immediately leaving again. Two days later I found out it was Andy.

The phrase “one thing led to another” seems to have been invented for Andy, who by now has been making his living as a graphic designer, photographer, tour manager, press wrangler and videographer for over a decade. He has toured extensively with Switchfoot and Foster The People, and has taken captivating photographs, perusable on his website, of everyone from The Jonas Brothers to Paper Route.

Of all the artists I’ve had occasion to know, he is one of the least pretentious, least neurotic, and least anxious. He comes across as being singularly unconcerned with whether or not people find him, or what he “is into,” to be sufficiently cool. Which makes him a very easy person to be around in an industry generally rife with insecure men and women desperately trying to manage others’ impressions of them.

We corresponded via email.

Shake The Dust

By: Ben Bishop

09·06·2012

Film

Over the last four years, Adam Sjöberg has traveled thousands of miles and labored countless hours readying “Shake The Dust”, his feature-length documentary focused on the impact of breakdancing in the developing world. Having nearly reached the finish line, he’s reaching out for help on the home stretch.

If you’ve ever contemplated putting your money where your mouth is when it comes to being a lover and consumer of the arts, Kickstarter’s micro-patronage model provides a great place to start. And if you’re looking for a young artist with integrity, incredible talent, and matchless energy, your search is over. The story Adam is telling—of how art can empower and inspire the lives of the poor in a world tilted toward wealth and power—is one which must be retold in every generation.

Watch the trailer below and visit the Kickstarter page to chip in.

Mickey Smith, Surf Photographer

By: Ben Bishop

01·24·2012

Film, Photography

If I only scrape a living, at least it’s a living worth scraping. If there’s no future in it, at least it’s a present worth remembering. – Mickey Smith, Dark Side of the Lens

At the southeastern tip of England, in the county of Cornwall, lies the town of Penzance. Head south out of town for three miles and you’ll come to the tiny hamlet of Paul. Host to wet, cold winters, and best known to the larger world for its various associations with piratical figures, it doesn’t seem like the kind of place that would have fostered a dedicated surfer, much less one who would one day become a highly respected, well-traveled photographer of the sport.

Mickey Smith is a mild-mannered fellow with a thick Cornish accent and a weakness for bad weather. In 2010, in the wake of his sister’s death, Smith released a short film that upended the hoary clichés of a genre fixated on the pursuit of endless summer. “Dark Side of the Lens” was filmed on the frozen western coast of Ireland in the middle of winter, and features towering cliffs, iron skies, and swirling black waters. As the images stream past Smith delivers a sort of mystical, stream-of-consciousness monologue on his life in the water. The film somehow manages to convey a sacred feeling without coming off as overwrought, an achievement largely attributable to the honesty of Smith’s narration, and the pure unbridled beauty and power of the land- and waterscapes he documents. Filled with wheeling gulls and thundering currents, they are places at once ominous and exuberant.

Filmmaker Eliot Rausch

By: Ben Bishop

11·23·2011

Film

“I’m always grieving over my responsibility to the subject matter. I’m in there with cameras and then it blows up on the web and people want to know what it was for. Was it to just build my portfolio?”

The film that ended up winning the $25,000 grand prize for best video at the first annual Vimeo Awards was a gritty six-minute short that had also taken top honors in the documentary category. Last Minutes With Oden details the final hours of a three-legged dog and the transcendent mixture of anguish and gratitude experienced by his owner.

The first time I saw the film I was sitting in a friend’s office, surrounded by his coworkers. Within seconds, hemmed in by the desks of strangers, I began to weep openly. Something about the film’s raw beauty, the way it captures how the numinous and the mundane intermingle in our daily lives, made me want to share it with everyone I knew.

Vern Moen, Documentary Filmmaker

By: Ben Bishop

07·28·2011

Film, Interviews, Profile

In April, the Foo Fighters embarked on an abbreviated tour that would see them playing just eight shows. These were no run of the mill gigs, though. Instead of the large rooms the hard rock unit usually sells out, these concerts took place in more intimate venues. Much more; the shows were held in the garages of eight of the band’s most hardcore fans.

Filmmaker Vern Moen was on hand to document things, including the host of the New York show giving one of the all time great rock and roll introductions.

Interview with Adam Sjöberg, Photographer

By: Ben Bishop

07·12·2011

Film, Interviews, Photography

Trying to keep up with Adam Sjöberg’s travel itinerary is a Sisyphean task. Whether on a mission to capture images for corporate clients, bear vibrant witness to various humanitarian causes, or document exquisite weddings as part of his standing gig with one of New York’s most prestigious boutique wedding photography outfits, Ira Lippke Studios, Mr Sjöberg seems to exist in the act of being perpetually slungshot between continents. It’s hard to imagine the guy sleeping.

Matt Wignall

Andy Barron

Shake The Dust

Mickey Smith, Surf Photographer

Filmmaker Eliot Rausch

Vern Moen, Documentary Filmmaker

Interview with Adam Sjöberg, Photographer

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