Next To Heaven Returns for a Second Season in 2011
What: Award-winning, surreal, funny, and disturbing remixes of vintage films and live action shorts
Where: Nexttoheaven.net, robparrish.blip.tv/, or youtube.com/user/robparrish
When: Every Wednesday (starting on January 12, 2011)
Contact: Rob Parrish at hoppervideo@hoppervideo.net
Preview: See three sneak peek episodes of Next To Heaven Season 2 here, here, and here!
Rob Parrish’s award-winning web series Next To Heaven is returning for a second season in 2011. Season 1 was composed entirely of remixes of public domain film footage from the Internet Archive. Season 2 will feature more public domain remixes as well as live action short films shot exclusively for the series.
Episode 33 from Season 1 (“The Tapes of My Father”) won a Rosebud Award, given for filmmaking excellence in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. “Rest”, a live action film to be part of Season 2 also won a Rosebud. Episode 39 (“Eyebrow”) won the grand prize at the “Love” NewTeeVee Pier Screening in New York City.
Of Season 1 Film Couch’s Paul Moore said “[s]ometimes funny, sometimes tragic and always bizarre …Next to Heaven is an experimental series that simply would not have existed, much less been seen, pre-Internet . . . [Parrish has] created his own aesthetic.”
Karina Longworth writing for New Tee Vee said that NTH Season 1 fell into the genre of “the comedy of personal misery.” She continues stating that: “[E]ach episode also works as a kind of convoluted joke. Throughout the series . . . you never see the punchline coming right away . . . . sometimes, it’s not until ‘m laughing out loud that I remember that I’m watching a manipulation.”
Michel Tully of Hammer to Nail said “[M]y problem with the concept of webisodes is that I assumed people were going to only use the format to make low-rent, paper thin, one-dimensional soap operas and/or sitcoms. And while many do, Parrish’s vision couldn’t be more different and exciting.”
Rob Parrish, a Baltimore, Maryland native, is an Arlington, VA based video artist and filmmaker. Rob’s work straddles the line between experimental narrative film and video art. By way of raw material, Rob favors the filmic equivalent of the rusty beer cans littering a scrubby patch of woods next to a highway. Much of his work uses discarded public domain media as raw material. Even the work not built from found footage often takes its inspiration from lost and damaged media, people, and places. Rob’s thematic concerns include: the beauty of the discarded; desire as the primary source of suffering; and the relativistic nature of human perception.
Rob’s work has been shown at The Baltimore Museum of Art, Transformer Gallery (DC), Civilian Art Space (DC), The Museum of the Americas (DC), Curator’s Office (DC), The Washington Project for the Arts (DC), The Fridge (DC), The Pioneer Theatre (NYC), DC Shorts (DC), and, Pixelodeon at the American Film Institute (Los Angeles, CA).