A feature-length film written/directed by Kenny Riches

Not a trailer from kenny riches on Vimeo.

Cut Offs is a collaborative video project by Kenny Riches and Tj Nelson.

Featuring music by:
Lord Mandrake,  Birthquake!,  Mushman,  David Fetzer,  JT Brown,  Some Beasts,  The Platte,  Desert Noises,  Bluebird Radio,  Tj Nelson, 

Cut Offs began from a series of low-rent videos Tj and I were capturing on little point-and-shoot cameras. While living in Berlin, I would send them to friends back home. Strange home movies that felt exciting for no other reason than having shot them in a foreign country. When I got back to the states Tj showed me a few videos from his journeys to New York and California. A shared aesthetic, taste in music, and the desire to travel bonded not only our videos, but also us as friends and now art collaborators. The content of the early videos was mostly day-to-day events and road trips. We made it a goal to try and portray the feeling of being somewhere someone else had been before. There was a desire to inject memories into the viewer that were gathered third party.

As the project began to roll forward, our discussions of memories and nostalgia met with more discussions of change. The desire to make videos with a feeling of timelessness was fueled by the realization that we are the last generation of analog, in a broad sense of the word. Future generations will only know digital technology, and while we continue to take advantage of many of its tools, we placed an importance on utilizing old technology like super 8mm film-- a medium kept alive only by hobbyists. We wondered if the opening credits of "The Wonder Years" would mean anything to future generations, while we have been trained to relate nostalgia to that old grainy super 8 film, just as our parents have with the entirety of their home 8mm movies.

Moving from this old media to the Internet, digital cameras, and a world completely saturated with media made us contemplate quality of content as well, especially because we utilize that media to produce these videos. Even for the viewer to have the ease of inserting a DVD into a player holds its own implications. So, the idea of making art films was not just to make abstract experimental videos, it was about making a connection and giving a cinematic experience. We hope that this little collection of videos does connect the viewer in some individualistic way and push them to find the conceptual relationships between the vignettes.

I often think about how photographs build certain memories and erase others, so that the memory is the image of the photo and not the experience itself. Maybe that's the way I'll feel when I look back on these videos many years from now; nostalgic, yet hazy on the ideas and purpose, or the fiction and realities of this project.

This collection of short videos is accompanied by a forty-page booklet of photos and descriptions. The running time is about twenty-minutes. The project is a limited run of 200.

The Cut Offs DVD is an art project to be sold to raise funds for a feature-length film written/directed by Kenny Riches to go into production summer of 2010.

If you are interested in purchasing the DVD [ $30 ], please contact Kenny Riches at kennyriches@gmail.com.