Contributed by:
John Zwick
Article Contributed on: 6/27/2006 12:30:24 AM
It's a good thing
Spin (the film, not that obsolete magazine -
watch it here) touches on the occasional local music points or I couldn't even pretend to be qualified to talk. Maybe that's all well and good. It's people similarly afflicted - music geeks who do better on wax than celluloid - that have really taken to it.
There's gotta be some amount of tastemakers who "get it" to account for the local film's 30-ish festival wins, sure, but what blew
Spin up - across the Web in particular - were the beat junkies that can't tell their
Ingmars from their
Ingrids. They've given Denver's
Jamin Winans and his
Double Edge Films company a shot in the arm and international exposure - all for less than 500 bucks.
At the center of his eight-minute opus is Scratch, played by deejay
Hayz II, a well-meaning warrior of the ones and twos who can spin back time itself. A twitch of the tables and flick of the switch and Scratch's wheels of steel start to unravel and reshape a chain of events - but not always for the better.
A twist of a knob might stop an errant basketball from sending a bike messenger hurtling into traffic, but Scratch, likened by Winans to "an angel who likes to party too much" doesn't get off so easy.
"He's sent on various missions to fix little kinks in the system," Winans said. "Sometimes he doesn't always get it right the first time around. He frequently kind of half-asses it." Winans' vision of Denver's Riverfront Park neighborhood is a busy one where street performers and hopeful Romeos share real estate with smack dealers and gangbangers, and one moment of semi-divine intervention can set off a shockwave of unforeseen consequences. And that's when Scratch has to get off his duff and do a little metaphysical crate-digging to figure out what's really going on and figure out the inner music of the situation.
Turns out the deejay scene isn't immune to flattery. (Who'd have thought?) "There's a stigma that goes with that community," Winans said. "I think people enjoy seeing a positive light reflected on their community- not just partying but there's some good people there. I think they appreciated the film." And so after Double Edge put
Spin on their Web site to drum up publicity for their previous effort, the full-length thriller
11:59, word got out. It trickled across deejay communities online through America and Europe and then to the Net at large. Traffic hit DoubleEdgeFilms.com so hard that movie hosts like
AtomFilms were tapped to help out.
Unapproved outlets like video host and youth favorite
YouTube.com picked up the extra weight. "There are a lot of people who get bent out of shape about 'oh they stole my movie or our song off the Internet,'" Winans said, "and I guess I understand that, but it's a really great thing. I think it's a good sign when people want your stuff that bad."
As it made waves online, word spread back to the civilized, organic world. Festivals began doubling back and asking for
Spin to be submitted. "It used to be a really big deal when we got into a festival and there's so many now that it's hard to keep up with. It's a good problem to have."
To see the full Q&A with Jamin Winans,
click here.