After creating Into The Basement, a short documentary about the Philly underground music scene in digital video class (with Leo Cohen, Nick Werner, Ellis Measley, and El Newburger), Nick and I were inspired to continue the project. The original plan was to basically make a longer documentary, interview more artists, and go more in depth about the scene and everything surrounding it; the good, the bad, and the ugly. That plan did not work out. So, now working alone, I resolved to take the documentary idea, and instead turn it into a magazine. With the help of a lot of people, including Nick, I was able to interview many more individuals involved in the underground music scene, not limited to artists/musicians, archivists, and sound engineers. After the hair-pulling process of fundraising, transcribing interview after interview, coming up with article topics, writing the articles, pulling quotes, doing more research, gathering photos, designing a layout, and making graphics, the magazine was finally here. Covering what the underground and the concept of ‘DIY’ actually means, the analysis of punk rock as a genre, the differences between the past and the current state of the scene, and more, as well as full interviews with artists who are able to give two different perspectives, I sincerely hope I’ve represented everything accurately and fairly(and also remained just the right amount of self-insertive). This is the digital version, and I’m in the process of getting the final product printed professionally. If you are curious, and would like to know more, I invite you all into the basement.

Here is a small excerpt from my interview with Cheshire Agusta of Stinking Lizaveta:

And here are some pages of my final magazine:

Here is the link to the full magazine

Here is the link to my annotated bibliography

In class, we were talking about how the main character, Jeff, was painted as being a hero throughout the entire movie. At the end, he was right all along, leaving the characters feeling thankful he was watching the entire time, and that they should have listened to him. The conversation moved to examining the fact that in reality, Jeff was actually doing this pretty invasive thing under the guise that it was okay because their windows were already open. I was thinking about how the movie would be different if the audience didn’t necessarily see Jeff as the hero, but rather just a man actively invading people’s privacy. I know the assignment wasn’t to change the plot of the movie, but I think it would have been interesting to see a version where Jeff was portrayed in a way that even the audience didn’t believe him, and at the end he was still right all along (and it would still feel like a Hitchcock movie). Since we can’t change the plot, I was still thinking of ways that the audience could go into the movie without seeing Jeff as a hero. I chose to do this through a movie poster, especially since people normally see the poster before seeing the movie, which gives them their first impression of it. I tried to tie in the colors of the original poster, with the brick building and yellow windows, blue text, etc. Every single movie poster I saw Included Jeff’s eyes in it, and because of this you get to see Jeff’s concerned expression, giving him some humanity to the viewer, showing that he’s watching people for the right reasons (the eyes are the windows to the soul…). I drew the poster, not with Jeff’s binoculars below his eyes and him looking over them to the side, but with him looking through them at the viewer. This was in an attempt to make the viewer feel uncomfortable, like they’re the ones being watched without their permission. I don’t know if there’s ever a shot in the movie that is a closeup of Jeff looking through the binoculars, straight into the camera, and perhaps that is done intentionally, or maybe it was just an issue of reflections in the glass. Additionally, In the reference photo of binoculars I used, the lenses were actually red, and I was inspired by this. I thought making the lenses red in the poster would add a value of sinisterness to the action, as well as somewhat foreshadow the events to come, which is a presumed murder). There are also two figures in the binoculars, representing the people he’s watching.