Nice little mention of the Time of the Robots story in today's Columbus Dispatch, getting ready for the Sci-Fi Marathon this weekend!!
Here's the text:
Sci-fi fans to stay up all night at Drexel for their annual fix....
....
• Time of the Robots (2012) is a mash-up of public domain silent- and sci-fi flicks by Seattle filmmaker Eric Hammen.
“I have a huge soft spot for old sci-fi,” said Hammen, 45. “When DVD started to explode onto the scene, there were so many of these old space movies and silent movies that became available. I tried to explain to buddies how great they were. .?.?. They don’t get the respect they should.”
Hammen came by his love for sci-fi as a child, staying up on school nights to watch late screenings of The Twilight Zone and Flash Gordon.
“By the time that was done,” he said, “my brain would be totally fried.”
Peep Show, an unauthorized 1965 film about Frank Sinatra that producer J.X. Williams assembled from clips and snippets of film, piqued Hammen’s interest.
“It seemed like such an interesting story, putting together this freaky film out of other films,” Hammen said. “I just love the audacity this guy had, and I see Robots as being an audacious movie as well.”
Married with two children, Hammen, a content producer and video editor, thought Robots would take about six months to complete, working on it in his spare time.
Instead, it took six years of writing, sorting through mountains of public-domain footage and creating title cards to finish the film.
Hammen, who played in a high-school punk-rock band, also wrote the soundtrack.
Other movies on the schedule include:
• Dr. Cyclops (1940): Albert Dekker stars as a mad scientist who miniaturizes those who threaten his work.....
a film by Erik Hammen
Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Monday, November 12, 2012
Fun at the historic Mission Theater
We had a great time in Portland last night! At the truly gorgeous old Mission Theater, sitting up in the balcony... And our time slot was very Portlandesque, sandwiched between the daytime craft-mart and Wes Anderson's latest film going on afterwards.
We scored a funny and spot-on write up in the Oregonain, exerpted below. (There was a bigass photo in the physical print version, I'll try and scan that later.)
"... the idiosyncratic, market-be-damned attitude is clearest in oddities like Erik Hammen's "Time of the Robots," which edits together public domain footage of old Flash Gordon serials, horror films and more into a bizarre original narrative..."
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Portland: Sunday Nov 11 at 7pm
SUNDAY Nov 11 -- 7pm
Time of the Robots
Northwest Filmmakers Festival
Mission Theater
1624 Northwest Glisan Street Portland, OR 97209
Watch Time of the Robots on the big screen at the stately Mission Theater in Portland, Oregon!
Food and drink are served, and sadly it's a "no minors" environment.
But that means it's a "yes drinking" environment, and we will have the opportunity to test a certain theory that "robots are funnier and devils are freakier when you've had a few".
Friday, September 28, 2012
Review is in! TOTR is a "a rip-roaring narrative"
Here's a fantastic review of TOTR in the City Arts online magazine, just in time for Saturday!!
(original article is here: http://www.cityartsmagazine.com/time-robots)
There’s much enchantment in the flickering images of early 20th-century fantastic cinema.
Decades before cinematic illusions could be wrought with a few mouse clicks and keyboard taps, pioneering filmmakers crafted strange worlds, space ships and robots with a few venerable optical tricks and a lot of imagination. Viewing those early efforts through jaded 21st-century eyes, it’s easy to dismiss them as pure hokum. But seeing a parade of those antiquated images—boxy robots portrayed by men in suits, gorgeously-rendered art deco spacecraft zipping across back-projected skylines, exotic women with features obviously sculpted in decades past—can’t help but captivate in the right context.
Seattle-based director Erik Hammen knows this, and he’s created a film, Time of the Robots, steeped deeply in that mystique. Hammen sifted through several hundred hours of public domain footage, weaving images from old cliffhanger serials and silent films into a rip-roaring narrative involving the appearance of a mysterious phantom planet and the attempts of its tyrannical emperor to overtake the Earth with rebellious automatons.
What stoked Hammen to create an original feature film from pieces of old ones? Part of the motivation, he explains, came from sheer love. “I was always trying to explain to my friends why Flash Gordon, King of the Rocket Men and Zombies of the Stratosphere were so great,” he says.
Ironically, he also took inspiration from a film he’d never seen. A New York Times article six years ago profiled a one-off screening of Peepshow, a 1960s film by underground filmmaker J.X. Williams.
“It purports to be a documentary on Frank Sinatra’s connection to the Mafia," Hammen says. "The movie uses clips of Frank Sinatra’s films to pretend it was this documentary. I couldn’t go to New York to watch it, but it was such an exciting idea. Then I took a look at the serials, and thought, I’m gonna make myself a little Peepshow of my own. It’s gonna be a science-fiction, silent Peepshow.”
Hammen worked on Time of the Robots over a five-year period while juggling full-time employment in the dotcom world and full-time duties as the father of two children. The film is essentially a one-man effort, with Hammen writing the script and taking on the mammoth task of editing the footage into a cohesive, unique whole. “It was so hard,” he says. “The footage would not do what I wanted it to do sometimes, and it was really important to me to make it work.”
Much of the film’s score is comprised of public domain music from the Edison Library, but Hammen ended up using sound effects and self-composed music to fill in the gaps. “The public domain music was too limiting at times,” he says. “I was so excited to do my own soundtrack. It was a ton of work, but so much fun.” He enthuses about punctuating one of the movie’s big action scenes (lifted from the old King of the Rocket Men serial) with his own music: “When the Rocket Man’s gonna take off, I thought, man, this guy needs a kettle drum!”
For all its pulp-cinema spirit, Time of the Robots also sports some cogent socio-political commentary. George W. Bush was still in office when Hammen began the project, and he admits that some of that awareness seeped into the finished product. “[Bush] was trying to privatize health care,” he says, “and I thought, we’re gonna give away civil society to a little group of people, and that’s the plan? It just felt so good to make a film that addressed that.” But Hammen feels strongly that he never lost sight of the film’s core of old-fashioned entertainment. “Within the structure, it’s total pulp,” he adds.
Hammen’s film career covers a wide swath: His first feature, the 2000 indie comedy Love My Guts, received kudos from experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, and his 2011 short The Last City in the East features poet Paul Dickinson on a semi-fictionalized visit to Minnesota. Next summer, the director begins filming “a beach movie. “I’m shooting it here in Seattle," he says with a laugh, "so it’s a beach movie of the mind!”
Time of the Robots screens Saturday Sept. 29 at the Grand Illusion theater.
(original article is here: http://www.cityartsmagazine.com/time-robots)
There’s much enchantment in the flickering images of early 20th-century fantastic cinema.
Decades before cinematic illusions could be wrought with a few mouse clicks and keyboard taps, pioneering filmmakers crafted strange worlds, space ships and robots with a few venerable optical tricks and a lot of imagination. Viewing those early efforts through jaded 21st-century eyes, it’s easy to dismiss them as pure hokum. But seeing a parade of those antiquated images—boxy robots portrayed by men in suits, gorgeously-rendered art deco spacecraft zipping across back-projected skylines, exotic women with features obviously sculpted in decades past—can’t help but captivate in the right context.
Seattle-based director Erik Hammen knows this, and he’s created a film, Time of the Robots, steeped deeply in that mystique. Hammen sifted through several hundred hours of public domain footage, weaving images from old cliffhanger serials and silent films into a rip-roaring narrative involving the appearance of a mysterious phantom planet and the attempts of its tyrannical emperor to overtake the Earth with rebellious automatons.
What stoked Hammen to create an original feature film from pieces of old ones? Part of the motivation, he explains, came from sheer love. “I was always trying to explain to my friends why Flash Gordon, King of the Rocket Men and Zombies of the Stratosphere were so great,” he says.
Ironically, he also took inspiration from a film he’d never seen. A New York Times article six years ago profiled a one-off screening of Peepshow, a 1960s film by underground filmmaker J.X. Williams.
“It purports to be a documentary on Frank Sinatra’s connection to the Mafia," Hammen says. "The movie uses clips of Frank Sinatra’s films to pretend it was this documentary. I couldn’t go to New York to watch it, but it was such an exciting idea. Then I took a look at the serials, and thought, I’m gonna make myself a little Peepshow of my own. It’s gonna be a science-fiction, silent Peepshow.”
Hammen worked on Time of the Robots over a five-year period while juggling full-time employment in the dotcom world and full-time duties as the father of two children. The film is essentially a one-man effort, with Hammen writing the script and taking on the mammoth task of editing the footage into a cohesive, unique whole. “It was so hard,” he says. “The footage would not do what I wanted it to do sometimes, and it was really important to me to make it work.”
Much of the film’s score is comprised of public domain music from the Edison Library, but Hammen ended up using sound effects and self-composed music to fill in the gaps. “The public domain music was too limiting at times,” he says. “I was so excited to do my own soundtrack. It was a ton of work, but so much fun.” He enthuses about punctuating one of the movie’s big action scenes (lifted from the old King of the Rocket Men serial) with his own music: “When the Rocket Man’s gonna take off, I thought, man, this guy needs a kettle drum!”
For all its pulp-cinema spirit, Time of the Robots also sports some cogent socio-political commentary. George W. Bush was still in office when Hammen began the project, and he admits that some of that awareness seeped into the finished product. “[Bush] was trying to privatize health care,” he says, “and I thought, we’re gonna give away civil society to a little group of people, and that’s the plan? It just felt so good to make a film that addressed that.” But Hammen feels strongly that he never lost sight of the film’s core of old-fashioned entertainment. “Within the structure, it’s total pulp,” he adds.
Hammen’s film career covers a wide swath: His first feature, the 2000 indie comedy Love My Guts, received kudos from experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, and his 2011 short The Last City in the East features poet Paul Dickinson on a semi-fictionalized visit to Minnesota. Next summer, the director begins filming “a beach movie. “I’m shooting it here in Seattle," he says with a laugh, "so it’s a beach movie of the mind!”
Time of the Robots screens Saturday Sept. 29 at the Grand Illusion theater.
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