Friday, June 1, 2018

T21 WEEKEND WORK FLOW - HOTFOOT Sneak Peeks

Like most of our current work, we’re keeping HOTFOOT production largely under wraps, but we thought sharing some visuals from the work-in-progress on our social media would be a good way to honor the memory of tragic events of May 31st - June 1st, 1921; events that forever shaped our city, our creative LoJoWerkz output, and our souls.  Scroll forth, LoJoFam, to read more about the project.
“HOTFOOT” started as a grand experiment.  The question: could we create a visually compelling short film on a below-micro-micro, shoestring budget, working almost exclusively on green screen, creating a world out of the whole cloth of our imagination, TuTchT graphic work & historic research?

We approached one of the most in-demand dancers on the world stage, Charles "Lil Buck" Riley & to our surprise, he gladly stepped in to collaborate with us. This was the main ingredient we needed to start cooking something unique, full of LoJo flavor.  The experiment was on.   

We set to work crafting a narrative concept that would feature Buck's virtuosic Memphis Jookin’ skills in a way that hadn’t been seen before.  We settled on the idea of merging Jookin with an early Jazz stride piano style, dropping this mix into a Chaplin-esque silent film comedy environment. Our next decision was to set the story in a fictionalized version of Tulsa’s historic Black Wall Street, 1919-1920, just before the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 which burned it all to the ground.
We have researched the events of the Tulsa Race Massacre since our first book musical in 1997 (A Song of Greenwood) and the history has remained central to a great deal of our LoJoWerkz projects. HOTFOOT gave us a chance to focus on the historic, richly textured Black community in a very positive, light-hearted way.  Without an abundance of funds, the project is taking years to complete but the amazing performances of Buck along with some of Tulsa’s top talent make working on the project a true labor of love. (S/O to the capture crew: Mike Williams of Aces High Studio, James Sims of Blue Flame Productions & Nita Smothers.)




DO YOURSELF A FAVOR AND SPEND SOME TIME TODAY RESEARCHING THE TULSA RACE RIOT OF 1921.  IT IS HAUNTINGLY RELEVANT TO AMERICA’S CURRENT UNDERCURRENTS.

You can start here with this excellent out-of-circulation cinemax documentary: