DESCRIPTION:
Illegal Civilization - A FADER short film

No doubt you're already familiar with the work of the multi-talented Mikey Alfred. He's the skater and loosely affiliated Odd Future member behind one of our favorite streetwear brands, Illegal Civilization. What you might not know is that while the team has been incorporating scripted segments into their skate videos over the past six years, Mikey Alfred and his crew have much larger cinematic aspirations.

"The past year," Alfred told The FADER, "we've been taking narrative film making seriously, renting locations and using sound guys, the works." When The FADER stepped in to collaborate on a video project, the Illegal Civilization team had a treatment ready and waiting. "Me and my friend Lionel Boyce had written the general concept of the short already, so the timing was insane. FADER paired me with [the director] Aaron Brown, who helped make the ideas a little more grounded. He added an art aspect to it instead of us always trying to make these super dialogue-heavy Scorsese-feeling pieces."

Over the course of filming, Brown and Alfred geeked out on cinema. "He told me about films I've never known about like Brothers McMullen and old John Cassavettes movies," Alfred said. "The finished project came out amazing." It's tough to categorize: part skate film, part narrative short with a surreal bent, part lookbook. The collection was Alfred's first dive into the businessman aesthetic that typifies his team's intense motivation and creativity. "Most things seem to either be all about 'fuck it, fuck everything,' or they're just too clean-cut and boring. Not enough big movements push balance. You can be ridiculous and have fun as long as your business is handled."

The result of Alfred, Brown, and The FADER team's efforts has finally arrived: a genre-bending, unexpected little short that takes you on a wild tour of Illegal Civilization's Los Angeles, one that basks in the same slumming angels and sun-blinded sidewalks as Raymond Chandler's noirs, but fits squarely into the optimism and motivation of Mikey Alfred and Illegal Civilization.


http://www.thefader.com/2016/03/03/illegal-civilization-film

http://www.thefader.com/2016/03/03/il...

Director: Aaron Brown
Producer: Robert Semmer, Brande Bytheway, Mikey Alfred
Executive Producer: Joseph Patel
Executive Producers: Jon Cohen, Andy Cohn, Anthony Holland, Rob Stone
Associate Producer: Madison LaClair
Co-Production: The FADER, Focus Creeps, Illegal Civilization
Written by: Mikey Alfred and Aaron Brown
Story by: Mikey Alfred, Aaron Brown, Brook Linder
Cinematography: Frank Mobilio
Editor: Brook Linder
Production Design: Carlos Laszlo
Sound Recordists: Emmet Casey, Jake Viator, Molly Young
First Assistant Camera: Rachel Fox
Production Assistant: Eric Estrada
Visual Effects and Compositing: Paul LaBerge
Title Design Graphics: Madison Bullard
Score and Sound Mix: Zach Goheen at High Lonesome
Colorist: Gregory Reese at The Mill