The Second Half of TWOThousandTWELVE

Howdy

Thanks for stopping by TheseAreDreams.com.   If you are new to this website:  This is a site created by Phil Ristaino - I am an actor/artist/and musician living on the west coast.  Please look around the site, there's tons of material derived from about 20 years of living the artist's life in NYC, San Francisco, New Mexico, Europe (a little bit) and wherever else I wandered to during the time between when I graduated college and now.

New stuff:  One of the more recent new things is this:  www.theTWEx.com   This is the site for the power pop/psychedelic rock band the Troy Westfield Experience, a band I front and play drums for from time to time.  Our latest album, "Business on the Lanai: a Refresher Course" was released summer 2012.   5 songs, 3 music videos so far, one more vid coming.  Here's the latest video, the lead off track, "Danny the Street."   This video was shot and edited by Mike Gordon, and animated by yours truly.  It features the enigmatic Mr Three Fiddy.  Check it out, it'll make you tweek:

We also fixed/remixed/remastered our classic album from 2001, "Tantric Scrimshaw."  It sounds amazing!  Both albums were produced and mixed by the great Allen Towbin at his Maze Studios NYC in Brooklyn.   Here's the lead of track from that album, sounding 100 times better than it ever did:


Both albums can be purchased at the TWE's website: www.theTWEx.com

 The band also played a couple shows on the east coast in celebration of the both records being released.  You can see some great pics from our NYC gig here.

On the acting front:  I've been worked on several projects since I last posted news this summer.  In the midst of playing gigs and releasing TWE albums this summer, I managed to fit in a week of filming an entire feature film, called "Brother Sister Lover."   I play the brother.  We really jammed on shooting that film, I think it should be a nice little piece of drama - the actual filming of the movie only happened in 3 days!  It was intense, but our director Jason Torrey (of Blood Was Everywhere) and his crew kept the three actors on track, and I think the intensity of shooting over such a short period of time added to the tension, resulting in a few moments that even surprised me.  Here's the facebook page for BSL:  facebook.com/brothersisterlover

Next up, a short film I starred in called "Fix."  This film was shot over 5 days or so right at the end of 2011, rolling over into the new year.  We actually shot it during the new year's celebration here in downtown San Francisco.  That was a challenging shoot.  I was mixing it up with lots of poor and insane folks in one of the hardest-lucked parts of SF, the Tenderloin.  I play a down and out guy who lives under ground and must travel to the surface world during new year's eve to fulfill a secret mission.   "Fix" also marks the first time I've acted with rats.  Actual rats.  This film was shot by a 4 person crew from Salt Lake City, Utah, but you'd never know because it looks really astonishing.  Excellent editing, excellent cinematography, a great soundtrack.  I would consider this the most polished piece I've gotten to be a part of, not counting the Hollywood films in which I've appeared as an extra.  The film was on my website for a while, but the film makers took it down because I believe it is about to be screened at Slamdance.  Cool.  You can, however, see it if you go to the Stowaway Films site.  Its well worth a view.  I can't wait to be able to show it again on TheseAreDreams.com.

Since this summer, I've filmed a few short internet pieces, a short film called "Michael Sadler's Crusade" about a 19th century English politician who changes the child labor laws, I've been an hippy in feature called "The Garden of Eden" about a strip club in SF in the late 60s, and done a few episodes of the Japanese show "World's Astonishing Stories."  Lately I've been auditioning a bit, so hopefully more gigs will materialize in the near future.

In terms of the website itself, I've done a bit of work to make it easier to navigate, cleaned up and added content to a lot of pages (like the Voice Acting and Interviews Page, for example, or the Dreams for Sale page, for another example) and even added a page that features old tunes I recorded with various friends mostly from the 90s while I was learning how to write pop music.  Here's an example:

There's lots more like that (or unlike that, really) at the Old Tunes page on my site. Hopefully I'll unearth more rare tracks to share in the future.

Please take some time to really look over the site, I think its in better shape than its ever been!  And stay tuned, I will have more to share, maybe even before the end of the year, because there's another Troy Westfield video on the way...

Happy Dec 21, 2012

phil