by Grace McEvoy

TEAM SMARTYPANTS! INC.

Take the elevator all the way up at 1705 Guadalupe Street and enter the foyer of the only ArtPlex tenant on the third floor. There is seating, a living potted plant and a dead one with a hand made sign among the leaves that says "I'm dead." However, as you go through the door it is clear that you have not only entered the best space in the building, but that the foursome that make up TEAM SMARTYPANTS! INC. are anything but dead. TEAM SMARTYPANTS! INC.(TSP!) is creative director/CEO Mario Champion; co-founder/designer Derek Rosenstrauch; designer and programmer Frank Champion; and designer Scott Talkington. Yes, Frank and Mario are brothers. What TSP! does is creative media design and development for print, web, CD-ROM, Enhanced CDs and DVDs.

Mario Champion founded the company in 1995 after being disillusioned with what he could do with his architecture degree from UT. He knew he was a good designer and the field was new enough that he figured he could do as well if not better than the next guy getting into it in its infancy -- and he was right. An early project he worked on was the Lets Talk About Me CD with the Austin interactive company, Girl Games. Recent projects have included a collaboration with another Austin interactive company, Human Code and an educational CD project.

TSP! have been at there present location about two years and they like it a lot. Improvements were made early on. Windows were put in, a dividing wall with a window, the ugly carpet was removed and the lighting and ceiling changed. Now it is a typical new media workspace. The workstations, equipped with Macintosh computers are decorated with plastic toys, pictures, Teletubbies and the like. Although Mario works a sixty hour week, fun seems to be the encouraged attitude as the team has been spending their lunch time playing the boat racing video game Hydrothunder for the past several weeks and have considered giving themselves a stipend just for video games.

Limited only by what they feel like doing, TSP! are involved in a couple of other projects. They are part owners of Luck records and responsible for the cool idea of putting a set of dice in the plastic margin on the left side of the CD covers. The plastic is translucent yellow and has a quote from the artist as well. I don't know what to call that part of a CD, but they call it the aquarium. They are also in the midst of another as yet undisclosed joint venture with a company called Blue Arrow.

Want to know more? Check out their web site at TEAMSMARTY.COM so you can see how they "proudly trounce the line between original art and corporate communication," or so says their postcard. When I asked Mario to describe their artistic style he said, "I don't know, I guess it is layered and made up of components." A lot like interactive media, no?

Austin Cinemaker Co-Op

If you live in Austin and are interested in film and want to be involved in it, there is just no excuse not to be. On the very accessible and affordable end of the film making scale is Austin Cinemaker Co-Op whose mission it is to provide what is needed for the Super 8 art form. The total novice can start from scratch with an inexpensive workshop and then rent a camera for a reasonable fee from the Co-Op and go shoot a film.

I spoke to Gonzalo "Gonzo" Gonzalez on the fifteenth day of his position as the managing director. The position is the only paid staff position and only recently did they receive the funding for that. The job description is for 30 hours a month, yet Gonzo estimates he puts in about 35 hours a week. The Co-Op has survived the last three years on all-volunteer staff and, well, other volunteers. I think you get the idea -- it is a labor of love. With three hundred members, the Co-Op is growing and the Super 8 workshops have grown from once to twice monthly.

The list of Austin Cinemaker Co-Op activities is long. Currently, on Tuesday evenings viewers can see something called Windowfilm, a work in progress projected on to the second floor Co-Op office window to be viewed from outside. Aaron Valdez will be simultaneously projecting and editing this film to be shown in its final version on September 22 at the amphitheater at Austin Museum of Art at Laguna Gloria for Cinemaker Co-Op's kick off screening for the Cinematexas Short Film Festival. Coming up on August 8 and 9 is "Score Wars: The Phantom Flicker." This is a Co-Op presentation at the Ritz Lounge of Super 8 films that were made in a two part project: filmmakers made a soundtrack first, and those were chosen at random by other filmmakers who then made a film based on the soundtrack. There will be over twenty-five Super 8 short films screened. This is an example of the parlor game like film making that you can get involved in with the Co-Op. There are members-only projects like "Twelve Houses," making a film based on a Zodiac sign. "Exquisite Corpse" is an idea based on a drawing game where someone draws a head and the next person draws the torso without seeing the head, only the two lines of the neck. The drawing is finished by a third person who does not see the torso or the head and draws the legs. Translated into film, the second and third film makers base their portion on the last thirty seconds of the previously shot film without seeing any other part of the film. Then there is the Make a Film in a Weekend challenge. I imagine people running around with cameras like they are in an egg on a spoon relay race. Sometimes there is nothing more inspiring than a deadline.

And there is more. There are screening salons, monthly screenings and special screenings and opportunities to get feedback on your work and to meet people to work with. There are sponsored projects, discounts for members and the in-progress film score register. This on-line world wide register will be a place where you can put your music or select a sample with an email connection.

Austin Cinemaker Co-Op is also a great resource for film information. Get on the email list and receive information about job postings, casting calls, calls for festivals and screening opportunities and more. With the advent of home video, Super 8 film making could well have vanished yet some artists have kept it alive and some film schools still take advantage of it as an inexpensive teaching tool. Others take it seriously as a democratic art form. It is important to know that film has a longer life expectancy than video. It looks as though Austin Cinemaker Co-Op also has a long life ahead.

Austin Filmworks

Director Steve Mims has been teaching his production classes for seven years but has been an ArtPlex tenant for only a year. Austin Filmworks gives people who want to learn about film making an alternative to a university degree program. Each class is fourteen weeks long, and Production I is appropriate if you have no experience at all. Students learn cameras, film and lighting and end up with a finished project. Films are screened at the Dobie Theater in December.

The course demands a lot of work in fourteen weeks, so students collaborate on films with a partner. Projects are shot on 16mm film and edited on mini digital video. Mims tries to get the students to avoid having to buy any gear, so cameras are provided as well as editing equipment; however, a conservative budget for a ten minute 16mm film is high. Nevertheless, this kind of learning experience is just what many people are looking for. They can avoid the much higher cost of a university degree and get only what they want.

Instructor Steve Mims is a 1981 film production graduate of Southern Mississippi University, and got his MA in film at the University of Texas in 1987. He has taught at both universities. He teaches the classes with an assistant and spends the rest of his time working on his own projects or collaborating with others. Like other tenants of the ArtPlex, the students take advantage of the Dog and Duck pub across the street where a lot of these projects get worked out. Mims loves the location and thinks "the vibe is great in the building." He also likes his students and is impressed with the quality of the work they turn out.

The Alan Smithee Project

It sounds like the name of a noise band, but those in the know know that Alan Smithee is not a tenant at ArtPlex. The Alan Smithee Project gets its name from a non-existent director whose name gets put on projects that the filmmaker is embarrassed to have made. Each of the people who share this space have worked on a project or two that they would rather not have their name on so they decided to call themselves The Alan Smithee Project. Basically, it is four independent people working in film who share the same space.

Filmmaker Mat Hames is the anchor of the group and he hooked up with filmmaker Robbie Robertson through production classes at Austin Filmworks. Sharing the space are filmmaker/editor Christine Isenberg and filmmaker/editor Kevin Smith, a full time Apple employee who manages to make film as well. The facilities they share in their second floor space are non-linear editing equipment. Hames does video graphics and animation on a commercial basis and the others are basically aspiring filmmakers. Right now Hames is doing post-production on some commercials for a hospital in Belton. The kind of work he does involves layering different video images or compositing images, motion graphics, and animated titles and graphics. Most of his money goes back into working on his own creative projects.

Hames background includes studying film at the University of North Texas in Denton and working for three years at a production company in Dallas. Like most ArtPlex tenants, the group is very happy with the location and the fact that they can afford it.