Vance Mellen Mellenhead Productions

Vance Mellen
DEMO REEL
ARTIST STATEMENT
My first childhood memory: my psychiatrist father bandages a moaning escapee from the Kansas State Mental Institute. She bleeds all over our front steps after jumping off a bridge into the ravine in front of our house. I grew up one block away from this asylum. Its halls, basements and sub-basements helped make Screatures a grotesque and campy metaphor about confronting almost repressed memories.  

My art best represent my biography.  My most recent experimental video is entitled Screatures.  Screatures is a LOW budget autobiographical fiction, resembling my memories of Topeka, Kansas.  Topeka boasts of being "The Mental Health Capitol of the World" with more asylums, per capita, than any other city.  I am fascinated by psychology's hidden history of horrors, desperate manipulations, sadomasochistic experiments, and fried Frankensteins.  

I often workshop my scripts through live storytelling.  I have been a professional storyteller specializing in "Tales of Terror" for over ten years.  Storytelling can create an altered state akin to that of hypnosis or psychodrama.  I act all the roles in an effort to hone the story, gauge audience response and refine the pace of the script.  I use film, video, photography, computers - anything it takes to get the art out.  

I pushed into this experimental vein by studying at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where I earned an MFA in film and videomaking.  I love to study modern and contemporary art through pilgrimages to museums here and abroad.

But all is not darkness.  I have a bit of an artistic dual personality.  To balance the morbid, I escape into family, faith, and Hollywood film history.  After seeing my brother electrocuted then raised from the dead by my father, I became a bit religious. I just finished a script about the fanatically religious Kansas abolitionist, John Brown.   His obsessive cult personality made our world fascinating and sometimes treacherous.

I received a broad undergraduate education at conservative Brigham Young University.  BYU's film school emphasized traditional Hollywood Narrative storytelling.  Now, no matter how experimental or low budget my work, I always try to anchor my ideas in a great story. 

I am currently producing Revelations.  Preacher Bill Z. Bubb attempts to jumpstart the Apocalypse by training a hip young insurance salesman to be the Anti-Christ. 

Screenwriting is often my auto-psycho drama-an attempt to process many of my curious Midwestern memories by converting them into strange symbols enshrouded in some campy exaggeration.  

So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.  
	    -- Revelations 3:16
Vance Mellen
2047 N. Racine Ave. 1F
Chicago, IL 60614
e-mail:kvmellen@hotmail.com