A hookah gurgles and gargles in Chris McKinlay’s basement. McKinlay passes the hookah to Justin Longoz, but it is largely ignored as the two excitedly launch into our conversation, often saying the same thing at the same time. Longoz and McKinlay are friends, and the film production duo 1998creative. Working for Global Mechanic, the filmmakers produced their Ten Commandments series, for which they were featured on the Huffington Post and in Juxtapoz magazine earlier this year. 1998creative and their unique films have remarkably captured the limited attention spans of web video audiences around the world.

Their internet fame—and their creative partnership—has been years in the making. Born and bred Vancouverites, McKinlay and Longoz met in grade one while attending Vancouver College, an all-boys, shirt-and-tie Catholic school. “The whole origin of [1998creative] came in high school when we would work on social studies video projects,” says McKinlay. “We got better marks than we ever had in school.”

“Period,” Longoz continues, “Whenever we did a video project, we got As.” Their long friendship would be apparent to anyone who meets them today. One instant, Longoz is complimenting McKinlay’s mad cow illustrations, the next, McKinlay is locking Longoz out of the house in the midst of brotherly warfare.

Following high school, the pair attended Langara College with the intention of studying psychology and transferring to UBC. “Wherever we go, we kind of puppet the other [one] and follow to the same place,” says McKinlay. The friends soon encountered boredom with the traditional academic route, and McKinlay enrolled in a film program at BCIT. Longoz quickly followed suit. “Even when we were at Langara taking psychology, we were still doing video projects,” says Longoz.

Never ones to settle anywhere for too long, Longoz and McKinlay quickly realized that they would learn more about film through experience than in the classroom, and spent most of their time at BCIT away from BCIT. “I failed out of film school because I didn’t want to go to all the law courses and we’d be out screwing around with a video camera,” says McKinlay. Longoz laughs, “I want it to be on record that I didn’t fail film school. I passed the law classes.”

The friends abhor wasted time. For them, the best route is the one that leads quickly to the joy of creation. This explains their choice to work as a collaborative team for Global Mechanic, a relatively small studio, rather than for large institutions, which Longoz describes as “dinosaurs.” McKinlay, nods, adding, “The workflow is just archaic.” The two go on to explain the standard flow of film production. A large studio will create a concept and delegate the work to various other large studios – each accomplishing just one part of the project. “They hand it off and hand it off,” Longoz continues. “It’s a game of telephone that’s passed on and the message is lost,” says McKinlay.

Under Global Mechanic, 1998creative aspires to be a full-service film production operation. “You come to us and we can do your creative, we can do your production we can do your post-production, we can do everything on top of the fact that you haven’t gone through eight different people and the message doesn’t get watered down through each step,” explains Longoz.

Longoz and McKinlay formalized their ventures as 1998creative two years ago. The name channels their love of nostalgia—it was the year they began social studies video projects, and a year bursting with movies and music that continue to influence them today. They have worked on a variety of projects from backing videos for musicians to award-winning animation shorts, to painting murals in McKinlay’s soon to be destroyed house. The Ten Commandments, one of their most popular projects, is reflective of their religious background.

Roughly two minutes long, each stop motion short enacts a Commandment with fruit. The shorts are funny, poignant and universally relatable, much like 1998creative themselves. “Without being hyper sacrilegious or hyper-religious, we just wanted to tell the story,” says Longoz. “It’s part of the nostalgia. To go to a religious Catholic all boys school for twelve years,” says McKinlay. “Kind of influences you a bit,” finishes Longoz. “We like to take the serious part away and show it for what it is,” McKinlay continues. “… like, ‘These are the Ten Commandments—with fruit!” Longoz exclaims.

Most of their projects are released with a post on the Global Mechanic blog detailing the creative process. This is in part because of Longoz and McKinlay’s shared sentimental values. They want to share the personal investment made in their art. For a mural project, the duo created a time-lapse video of the production process in McKinlay’s kitchen. “When we did our wall mural, it could’ve just been this photoset that doesn’t tell the whole story of all the love. I look at the mural and it’s beautiful, but when I actually watch the video I have the fond memories. I hope there are people watching the video who can have that same appreciation, and be there alongside us when we create it.”

Sharing the more technical aspects of their work, Longoz and McKinlay exude a confidence that comes from experience. “I think that’s something a lot of people are afraid of—the idea that you can’t be bad and then get better,” says McKinlay. “Rather than hiding from a past project that fails or not you can actually tangibly look your past work and improve upon it. We see what we love and what we don’t love and we extrapolate what we learned from that and move forward. There’s no fear from us.”

“Nope,” says Longoz. “I just hope that when we do stuff like that other people will see that and think, ‘well they’re not afraid, maybe we shouldn’t be afraid either!’ Because if there’s a collective sharing of how people do things everyone’s going to get better, right? You can make money off of it, but there’s no point if you’re just going to hoard it. Then, nobody learns anything.”

They just want to fill the world with great art—regardless of money. Not that they’re worried; they’re having a good time. McKinlay smiles, “successful or not, at the end of the day, you realize what makes you happy and I think for us, we’ve found it.”

Written by Rebecca Slaven.

Check out 1998creative at Global Mechanic’s Blog.

People clutch mugs of mulled apple cider, both with and without rum. Their breath faintly marks the air while they listen to tales from a diverse cross-section of Vancouverites. Rain City Chronicles is an evening of storytelling that could easily be a variation on standup comedy, but it is more than an audience passively watching performances. Elianna Lev, Lizzy Karp and Karen Pinchin have created an inclusive community-building event that blends humour with touching insight.

Each of the creators told a story at the premiere in December of last year, with the fitting theme of “first times.” In an effort to keep Rain City as heterogeneous as possible, the ladies have now assumed the role of backup storytellers. “This was never started as a vanity project,” Pinchin says. “We don’t want this to be a place where comedians and performers and type-A journalists get up onstage and tell self-indulgent stories.”

Born in Etobicoke, just west of Toronto, Pinchin has resided in Vancouver for just over two years, working as a freelance writer. She and Lev met as neighbours and Karp entered the scene when she wrote Lev a fan letter asking how she could become involved with her podcast, The People’s Program Project, before moving to Vancouver from Toronto. “It’s sort of like we were the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band of writers,” laughs Pinchin. “You know those really weird moments when everything in the universe aligns to bring you together? All of a sudden we were just sitting around one day and we said we should start a storytelling night.”

The diversity in Vancouver’s residents is both its strength and flaw. What keeps the city bustling also constructs a shield. “People are sort of sick of attaching themselves to people who eventually pick up their roots and move,” says Pinchin. Rain City’s creators feel a desire to facilitate sharing among Vancouver’s guarded population. “I think there’s a hunger for that. I think people are really tired of sitting on the bus full of people wearing iPods and not having any dialogue with their neighbours,” Pinchin continues. While she has struggled with these standards, she still regards the city of Vancouver as an exciting place. “There’s a lot in this city that hasn’t been discovered, that’s still sort of really burgeoning and really coming to life and it’s what it must have been like to be in Montreal in the ’70s.”

Pinchin describes her experiences in approaching people to participate in the event: “Most hesitate insisting that they have nothing worth saying in front of a crowd but then digress into a captivating story—for example, the time they French kissed Jimmy Carter, as with Linda Solomon, who dished her experience at Rain City’s premiere. It’s such an intuitive concept that it seems redundant to say it out loud: that people are interesting and that people have interesting stories and that the only way to really build community is to communicate with one another. I don’t know why it’s so difficult for people to sometimes just let themselves open up a little bit and to tell their stories.”

The flow of Rain City’s evening speaks to the creators’ intuition. They curate the storytellers to be as varied as possible but then allow each to take control and speak about what moves them. “The most important thing is to keep it open so people can see themselves reflected in the topic. The worst thing would be to micro-manage because that would be totally egomaniacal for us to do—to say, ‘this is what your story is.’ People just need a bump in the right direction.”

At Rain City’s first event, papers were left on each seat asking for attendees to write down their stories about the next evening’s theme, “luck.” A staggering number of people wrote anonymous stories in response. “If we accomplish anything, it’s that someone is a little bit interested, that they come, that they see it’s a safe space for them to tell a story…and eventually it’ll just catch on and it’ll spread and all these apathetic, jaded, cynical people of our generation will just let a little light in.”

The creators never aspired to monetary goals. Eventually, they would like to donate the profits to local literacy charities and to host monthly installments at their dream venue, The Cultch. For now, they are happy to patiently coax Vancouver out of its shell. “We’re not doing anything remarkable—it’s the oldest form of communication in the world. All we’re doing is making a little bit of space for it. Making people stop and take a break. Just take a few hours to listen to stories, and tell stories, and share stories.”

-Rebecca Slaven for Sad Mag

The next installment of Rain City Chronicles takes place at 7:00 pm on Monday, March 29th at The Western Front. RSVP on Facebook.

http://twitter.com/raincityvan

Update [26 October 2009]: Drippytown was cancelled last week. In place of the exhibit, the AMS Art Gallery has expertly put together VANIMAUX, which opens today:

VANIMAUX explores the Vancouver animal in its native environment drawing other stories from six perspectives. The contemporary landscape is unpacked by six [local emerging] artists.

The show features Sad Mag contributors and family members Daniel Elstone, Kristina Fiedrich, Brandon Gaukel, Tina Krueger, Judit Navratil, and Katie Stewart. VANIMAUX further unpacks the idea of urban Vancouver, wiping the Olympics sanctioned hype away and showing the beast for what it is.

VANIMAUX. AMS Art Gallery. 6000 Student Union Boulevard. Exhibit opening October 26, 2009, from 5-8 pm.

RVSP

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Jeremy Jaud is nearly choking on his words. His excited phrases are gunning through the empty gallery and splatterings upon impact. Jaud is the art commissioner of the Student Union Building (SUB) Art Gallery at UBC.

Until recently, most UBC students knew the the SUB Art Gallery as the site of the annual poster sale. Today, the gallery is a fixture for art aficionados in Vancouver’s scene, in major part because of Jaud. After meeting the gallery’s previous art commissioner in an Art History seminar last spring, Jaud took over the position and oversaw dramatic renovations over eight months. Jaud is all passion and smiles as he shares what led him to this position. “I saw it as an opportunity to bear all my skill sets on one direction, having a background in art history, visual arts, budgeting, management, and volunteer work.”

Last month, the new space was inaugurated with the show “Vancityscapes,” featuring Morgan Dunnet, a local artist whose impressionistic paintings reveal the city of Vancouver in its simplest moments of glory—images you might recall from late night stumbles through the rainy streets of Gastown. The opening night of “Vancityscapes” saw over two hundred visitors, many of them students, like myself, who had been on UBC’s campus for years, never set foot in the space, but gushed at its reinvention. This was just the start of the gallery’s continuing celebration of Vancouver. Jaud, originally from Yellowknife, is drawn to Vancouver’s new developments and the sense of community it provides. “Vancouver is constantly changing, it’s always in the moment, it’s infectious.”

Jaud envisions the the SUB Art Gallery as a window on the landscape of art to the Belkin Gallery, Museum of Anthropology, Koerner Library, and beyond campus to the rest of Vancouver. He discusses the uniqueness of the gallery in its daily access to thousands of students—the future powerhouses of Vancouver—and its opportunity to initiate or foster artistic interest within them.

At the end of this month, the gallery is hosting an extension of an exhibition called “Drippytown: Vancouver Life Through the Eyes of its Independent Artists” at the Rare Books and Special Collections Library (RBSC) at UBC. The exhibition showcases the RBSC’s collection of print comics created by Vancouver artists, including Colin Upton and James Lawrence, whose work together on a cover for the comic “Drippytown” gave the exhibition both its name and narrative. “Drippytown” presents Vancouver and its characteristic rain, gray skies, and silver linings, as seen through the eyes of six local artists using the comic medium. Like Vancouver, the collection seems dreary at first but is ultimately inspiring.

The exhibition is made possible by the coordination of several forces: students of UBC’s School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies program, RBSC staff, Francesca Marini – a professor within the department, the artists, and Jaud.

Says Jaud, “UBC has such a broad range of art producers and people already interested in the arts; conduits and reflectors. More bridges need to be built between these various groups so that our ideas can be shared, our messages can strengthen and access can blossom.”

The SUB Art Gallery is currently showing “Tragically Rescuing His Family From the Wreckage of a Destroyed Sinking Battleship”, works by Kevin Day, from Oct. 13th – Oct. 23rd.

“Drippytown” shows at the SUB Art Gallery from Oct. 26th –  Nov. 3rd and at Rare Books and Special Collections from    Oct. 23 – Jan. 31st.

-Rebecca Slaven for Sad Mag