H.P. Mendoza: Difference between revisions
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*2011 - Now and at The Hour - director, editor, cinematographer, soundtrack |
*2011 - Now and at The Hour - director, editor, cinematographer, soundtrack |
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*2011 - Storm Still - director, editor, cinematographer |
*2011 - Storm Still - director, editor, cinematographer |
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*2012 - [[I Am a Ghost]] - director, editor, cinematographer |
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===Television=== |
===Television=== |
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Revision as of 11:19, 7 November 2012
H.P. Mendoza | |
|---|---|
| File:Hp mendoza.jpg | |
| Born | March 13, 1977 |
| Partner | Mark Del Lima |
| Website | hpmendoza |
H. P. Mendoza (born March 13, 1977, San Francisco, California) is a Filipino American film director, screenwriter, actor, and producer of features and short films. His most recent work, I Am a Ghost, premiered on March 13, 2012 at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival.
Career
Colma: The Musical
After writing a concept album called Colma: The Musical as a birthday present for his childhood friend, he reunited with film school classmate Richard Wong, who had just finished working on the television show, Arrested Development and was looking for a script to direct. When Wong listened to a track from Mendoza's concept album, he asked Mendoza how long it would take to turn it into a script. After seven days, a first draft was born, Mendoza flew from Philadelphia to San Francisco and the plans were set in motion. After 18 days of shooting and several months of editing, a feature film was made for a budget of roughly $15,000. The film, called "an itty-bitty movie with a great big heart"[1] by The New York Times went on to win three Special Jury Prizes on the film festival circuit and was acquired by Roadside Attractions and Lionsgate Entertainment.
Option 3
After experiencing a horrible breakup, Richard Wong wanted to create an experimental genre-skipping film based on the turmoil he experienced subsequently. He hired Mendoza to write a preliminary screenplay and score. After Mendoza edited the film, it premiered at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. The film, heralded as "brave" by UCLA Asia Pacific Arts[2] stars Mousa Kraish and won a Technical Art Award[3] at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival for Richard Wong and H.P. Mendoza.
Fruit Fly
During the festival life of Colma: The Musical, Mendoza and actress L.A. Renigen would jump back and forth from gay film festival to Asian film festival for about a year. After experiencing the strange treatment Renigen would receive from gay men (automatically labeling her as a "fag hag"), he decided to create Bethesda, a character based on Renigen. Bethesda, like Renigen, is a performance artist who moves to San Francisco to workshop her latest performance piece dealing with finding her biological mother. Also like Renigen, Bethesda finds herself going to gay bars every night and getting labeled a "fag hag". The musical film, called "irresistible"[4] by the San Francisco Chronicle was funded by the Center for Asian American Media and was awarded the Best Narrative Feature Audience Award at the 2009 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival.
Elsewhere
Like the original Colma: The Musical concept album, Elsewhere was written as a gift for Mendoza's partner, Mark Del Lima, known for his odd mixtapes and offbeat playlists. Mendoza tried to mimic the patterns, themes, and sounds of his mixtapes and playlists and wrote fourteen songs that follow the general arc of a Mark Del Lima mix. The album marks a temporary departure for Mendoza's music, having virtually no lyrics and sounding as if it were recorded in various eras to evoke a sense of nostalgia. Elsewhere is due for release in late 2009.
Great Hymn of Thanksgiving/Conversation Storm
Great Hymn of Thanksgiving takes place at a dinner table, where the sounds of conversation have been replaced by fragments of news reports from Iraq, scraps from the Army prayer manual, invented Arab folk tales, and a recurring State of Emergency pointing everywhere and leading nowhere. The sounds of the table itself struggle to bring this “conversation” into a confrontation with material reality.
The piece is a trio between the functions of music, noise, and semantic meaning, wherein each function can mingle with the others, lose itself in reveries (under fields of motive force that assert themselves with varying degrees of insistence), or, when necessary, take a solo.
Conversation Storm sees three friends from three sides of the political spectrum unwillingly argue their way through a "ticking time bomb" scenario, dissecting, revising, and even brutalizing their own positions in the process — but time has either stopped or entered an ugly loop, and as the friends assign and reassign roles, the scenario begins to dissolve the boundaries between real and hypothetical, past and future, day and night. [5]
In 2007, Mendoza was working for the San Francisco Fringe Festival and was able to see a performance of The Nonsense Company's Great Hymn of Thanksgiving/Conversation Storm and was determined to meet the troupe. In 2008, Mendoza gave his voice to Great Hymn playwright Rick Burkhardt for his award-winning composition "Calf", performed by the ensemble Ascolta and decided to ask Burkhardt if he would be interested in making a film version of Great Hymn of Thanksgiving/Conversation Storm, called "a delicious two-course evening"[6] by Time Out New York.
The film is currently in post-production.
Other projects
Mendoza has also contributed music to theater troupes like Precarious Theatre for their musical adaptation of a chapter in Don Quixote, I'm Yours! (or Deranged by Love).[7] He also spent a lot of 2009 scoring the films Abuela and A Lower Power, directed by Paul Kolsanoff and Robert O'Geen, respectively.
As of 2010, he is producing the David Lewis comedy, Longhorns, as well as producing its soundtrack.
In 2011, Mendoza will go into production for three feature films, one of them a horror movie called I Am a Ghost.
Personal life
Mendoza is openly gay and lives with his partner, designer/animator Mark Del Lima, with whom he started ersatzfilm, a division of ersatzdesign.
Filmography
Films
- 2006 - Colma: The Musical - screenwriter, lyricist, composer, actor
- 2007 - Option 3 - screenwriter, lyricist, composer, editor
- 2008 - Abuela - co-director, composer
- 2009 - Fruit Fly - director, screenwriter, lyricist, composer, editor, actor
- 2009 - Great Hymn of Thanksgiving/Conversation Storm - co-director, cinematographer, editor
- 2009 - A Lower Power - composer
- 2010 - Longhorns - producer, editor, soundtrack
- 2011 - Now and at The Hour - director, editor, cinematographer, soundtrack
- 2011 - Storm Still - director, editor, cinematographer
- 2012 - I Am a Ghost - director, editor, cinematographer
Television
- 2010 - Obscura (TV) - director, composer, editor
- 2009 - LALA (TV) - director, composer, editor (8 episodes)
Theater
- 2004 - Magic At - co-writer
- 2008 - I'm Yours! (or Deranged by Love) - lyricist, composer, musical director
Discography
- 2004 - Everything is Pop
- 2006 - Nomad
- 2007 - Colma: The Musical (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
- 2008 - Fruit Fly (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
- 2009 - Elsewhere
- 2012 - I Am a Ghost (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
References
- ^ http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/07/06/movies/06colm.html
- ^ http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=90913
- ^ http://www.asianamericanfilm.com/2008/05/ocean-of-pearls-and-oh-saigon.shtml
- ^ http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?type=movies&f=/c/a/2009/03/07/PKG716527J.DTL
- ^ http://nonsensecompany.com/home.html
- ^ http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/theater/71406/great-hymn-of-thanksgiving-conversation-storm
- ^ http://www.precarioustheatre.com/