Film Screening: 'How to Bend Concrete in 108 Easy Steps'

Please join us for a free screening of How to Bend Concrete in 108 Easy Steps, a short film directed by Open Signal producer Mahesh Madhav about furniture and lighting designer Neal Aronowitz.

How to Bend Concrete... was recently awarded accolades in these festivals:

• Best Short Documentary -- Los Angeles Film Awards 2019
• Best Inspirational Film -- Top Shorts Film Festival 2019
• Best Sound Design -- Top Shorts Film Festival 2019
• Semi-Finalist -- Festigious International Film Festival 2019

The screening will followed by a Q&A session with the filmmaker and featured artist. The artists's Whorl Console sculpture will also be unveiled at the event. 

Mahesh Madhav explains, "Engineering meets art as we follow a designer in his efforts to bend concrete into elegant furniture. Underneath the story of the physical process of manifesting the sculpture, we also document the ethos and mental process of ideation, discovery and presentation—capturing the eternal struggles of all content creators."

The short film began as a video project in Open Signal's Advanced Documentary Filmmaking class with instructor Sean Conley in February 2018. Mahesh continues, "it was started in Studio A, and it feels right to screen it for the first time in Studio A."

About the artists:

Mahesh Madhav is a filmmaker and Open Signal producer. He was introduced to video production in 2012 by an inmate at Oregon State Penitentiary who was serving a life sentence. He used his newfound skills to give back to the community by producing cultural and spiritual programs in the South Asian diaspora. He is also a creative technologist, gaining notoriety from his optimization and enabling work on the video post-production software DaVinci Resolve. Recently, Mahesh edited an Open Signal class production named SPARKY, which won the award for "Best Music Video, Independent Producer" at the 2019 Hometown Media Awards.

Neal Aronowitz is a furniture and lighting designer. Neal founded his design firm in 2014 with a few powerful and iconic pieces of furniture and lighting, and in a short time has won acclaim in the international design world. In 2017, he made his first foray into lighting with the Boro Boro Light, a dynamic and exuberant Chandelier which won second place in the LAMP International Design Competition. In 2018, his ground-breaking Whorl Console Table was recognized for its inspirational sculptural form and its innovative production with the prestigious Gray Award in the category of furniture product design and the Interior Design Magazine Best Of Year Award for residential furniture. Find his website here.

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