NEWS !
[ WHAT HAVE WE BEEN UP TO LATELY ?? ]
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OPTIC SINK "DON'T LOOK DOWN" MUSIC VIDEO September 15, 2025
“Don’t Look Down” @opticsink music video directed, shot, & edited by us ♡ So grateful to have worked on this visual narrative with some of our favorite artists for their single release.
@feelitrecordshop is releasing this one and has the full length video on their YouTube.
The full album comes out October 31 😈
GOODBYE FOR NOW BLUFF CITY VICE AUGUST 23, 2025
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@bluffcityvice last night with their last show, for now .. What a special night, we had to bust out the digi cam for it ! It’s not goodbye, it’s see you later.. @melindamusic_ & @beersigaccount killed it last night too. @carryripple & half of @infinitystairs with the visuals. Until next time (((o(*ﾟ▽ﾟ*)o)))♡ |
Bluff City Vice
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Beer
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Melinda
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BOY HARSHER AT DOG DAYS MUSIC FEST IN SAVANNAH, ga June 6, 2025
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When they allow cameras at the venue of a show for one of your favorite bands, you archive it. Been a dream of mine to see Boy Harsher live, and an even bigger dream of mine to shoot the show once I knew I was going to see them for their set at Dog Days Music Fest in their genesis city of Savannah, Georgia. Once I found out that I could take my camera with me and film, I made my way to the railing front row and captured the show. The day after I woke up to the festival wanting me to send them my footage and Boy Harsher themselves also asking for it. I woke up another day a weeks after that and had seen Boy Harsher posted one of my clips to their Instagram page. A true honor, all of it. So grateful for opportunities like these. |
EASLEY MCCAIN RECORDING X LOW BUDGET FILM PRODUCTIONS AD JUNE 5, 2025
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Are you some band recording audio at Easley McCain Recording? Well you’re in luck because low budget is offering its services here at Easley McCain Recording!
So so honored to have our services offered to clients here. Big shoutout to Matt Qualls @letsjumpin for giving us this opportunity after he saw our digi cam footage from the @kurtvile show that @opticsink opened up for @hernandoshideawaymemphis <3 Growing up in Memphis around the blues and going to Beale Street on the weekends to listen to music for free invigorated such a love for this signature soulful musical sound that you can only find here. So grateful to help archive the scene and share the talent here (and anywhere) continually :,) @mickythordarson edit + direction @m_kate.ultra produced We both took turns with the camera and saying lines 📹 🤭🫡 |
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Can’t Forget You Now Mary Hatley single promo video March 21, 2025
Can’t Forget You Now single release promo video @mary_hatley （＾Ｏ＾☆♪
What a sweet honor to get to help make some visuals for this album. Such a talented artist + vocalist too and delightful soul - truly a kismet fit. <3
Can’t Forget You Now is out now! @letsjumpin did a sick job on this album - big shoutout to Matt + Easley McCain recording for the project.
More coming 4/25.
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HaPPY 1ST BIRTHDAY lOW BUDGET FILM PRODUCTIONS MARCH 4, 2025
Happy first birthday to low budget film productions:,) They grow up so fast I’m in disbelief.. But seriously it’s been a wonderful year of growing, learning, and finding our voice here within the first year of business. This baby is starting to develop its little personality too and it’s been such a journey as they find it. We’re here to continually create crazy visual media, tell stories, and make intrusive thoughts from our head come to life. So grateful for all the support and love this year and beyond excited for what’s to come.
Shot by Buck Billings
Edit by Micky Thordarson
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YOU MAKE MY HEART FLUTTER FEB 14, 2025Happy Valentines loves! Here is an animation loop we made to spread some sweetness to anyone on this day --> or any day really..
24 digitally edited and manipulated stills put together to make this. Thank you for the love and warm support <3. |
PRINCE MONGO, WHATCHA DOIN' SPIRIT? NOV 2, 2024There’s a few ways to start guerrilla marketing the production of a film. There’s no more appropriate for one featuring the town eccentric other than plastering posters of the Prince all around to help greet the spirits that come out during this season. Starting in one of the newer epicenters in Memphis for creative energy, the spirits and I made the first round of advertising at the Crosstown Concourse. From there, Low Budget went to the streets of Broad Avenue during the Art Walk that was occurring. The second round of marketing took over the streets of Midtown and the Cooper Young neighborhood. Right as the last poster of the day was being hung up in East Memphis, maybe two minutes after putting it up, someone at a red light immediately jumped out of there car to try and get the poster. This and other ones that have been making their way into the hands of the Memphis public truly means the world to me and makes my day. More to come, these were just the first stops. ʕ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʔ more about the doc will be here [click me] |
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KURT VILE AND THE VIOLATORS AT MEMPHIS' HERNANDO HIDE-A-WAY OCT 22, 2024
Kurt Vile and the Violators live at World Famous Hernando's Hide-A-Way with local Memphis band Optic Sink opening the show. Had to get there early to archive the intimate sound from the two sets in this historical venue. When it was announced that Optic Sink was getting to open for this show a ticket was purchased. Was so excited for them and the show because of how great it is for our local bands to be getting to play with such a wonderfully known musician.
Vile easily brought about 20+ guitars into this cozy venue. Each being meticulous tuned and switched out depending on the desired sound was such a sight to see up close, and something Low Budget loves to archive. Each detail of difference and dynamics in his performance was heard and captured so well in this intimate setting and really allow the viewer to hear Vile's incredible talent behind any kind of guitar. You could hear the Memphis influence in the entire set.
Shot and recorded on a bullet digicam by Low Budget's Creative Director and editor, Michaela Thordarson.
Vile easily brought about 20+ guitars into this cozy venue. Each being meticulous tuned and switched out depending on the desired sound was such a sight to see up close, and something Low Budget loves to archive. Each detail of difference and dynamics in his performance was heard and captured so well in this intimate setting and really allow the viewer to hear Vile's incredible talent behind any kind of guitar. You could hear the Memphis influence in the entire set.
Shot and recorded on a bullet digicam by Low Budget's Creative Director and editor, Michaela Thordarson.
CONSUMED BY DOTS: AN 8-BIT REALITY WORLD SEPTEMBER 16, 2024
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First look into a world consumed by dots... Hand-drawn animation ...
Song / Pain - Boy Harsher Edit / Michaela Thordarson Connect / I love building weird fantasy worlds |
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SPIRIT ARCHIVAL PROJECT TEASRER AUGUST 23, 2024
Teaser for an archival project featuring Memphis' Prince Mongo. It be said that the Spirit predicted Elon Musk bringing the supercomputer well before our time. Just the beginning of the conversation...
Archive clips are from: Real People with George Schlatter and Memphis WREG Channel 3 News. Images from ABC News and Forbes online magazine.
Archive clips are from: Real People with George Schlatter and Memphis WREG Channel 3 News. Images from ABC News and Forbes online magazine.
RECORDED RADIO INTERVIEW WITH PHIL HENDRIE JUNE 12, 2024
Phil Hendrie talks radio history and theater of the mind with Joe Thordarson and Producer Max on Geek Tank Radio. From how he plays multiple characters at the same time while live on air, his beginnings as a disk jockey, to Chicago’s Disco Demolition Night. Geek Tank got the pleasure of interviewing Hendrie and seeing more of his method to the madness.
In efforts to get her father's radio show of 10+ years nationally syndicated, Low Budget's Michaela Thordarson has been creating video content to pair with the aired radio audio.
Grateful for more opportunities to share people's stories; especially a person's journey as a creative.
FOUND FOOTAGE + AUDIO EXPERIMENTING/RESEARCHING FOR AN EDIT continued MAY 19, 2024
More discoveries of timing of a song paired with movement in a dance number have been found. Vintage footage of the Duncan Dancers paired with the beat heavy intro of The Talking Heads' This Must Be the Place coincide nicely together.
**This experimental test piece is for all intensive research related purposes for a longer visual edit in progress.**
Found footage + audio experimenting/researching for an edit MAY 17, 2024
As a part of Thordarson's independent research with cognitive functioning while spinning, she started a visual edit of classical ballerinas performing dance numbers. Serving as observational research for learning timing of movements, hand coordination, and body posture etiquette of professional ballerinas has made her question the connection this all has to eye movement + position while spinning in motion when regarding overall bodily balance and motion sickness fatigue. To start testing these theories, she has been analyzing these expert level movements to put into her our dance practice, so as to have findings to start compiling psychological data.
Thordarson looked over the found footage of a dance number titled The Dying Swan while listening to Epitaph by King Crimson on Spotify. The movements of Natalia Makarova performing the piece at the time she did during the certain point I was at in the song lined up so well I had to pause both the separate video and audio to hold the time marker. After ripping the studio version of the song and meticulously putting it in the right spot this piece of visual research was born!
**This experimental test piece is for all intensive research related purposes for a longer visual edit in progress.**
Thank you King Crimson & Natalia Makarova for beautiful music and movements. <3
It’s always so satisfying when a song in post unintentional goes with the video: here are those results —>
(hi it's editing Michaela back on this post! YouTube didn't like the edit with the orginal song so I will do like I did with the edit on my Instgram. the post is here —> HERE .)
GETTING INTO THE GRAPHICS! VISUAL STORYTELLING THROUGH SINGLE 2D IMAGARY MAY 13, 2024
With a fresh new system for editing, Thordarson was finally able to mesh her formal painting + drawing handiwork with her technical + digital multilayering skills of post-production editing to create graphic designs. With past technical skills in Photoshop and other photo design programs in the Creative Cloud, jumping into the latest version of the software came as no difficult feat.
To build formal content for graphic design, Thordarson made an edit from an ancient Japanese work on impermanence titled Hojoki (方丈記) by Kamo No Chomei. Taking found graphic elements from the actual work, paired with digital painting, physical drawing, and text overlay resulted in this album cover like design.
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In her independent research, Thordarson based her past results of vision + pupil studies (when she was a research assistant in a cognitive psychology lab) with this cathartic release the body 
has when spinning/dancing to formulate a hypothesis for psychological reasoning as to why it is a calming affect and not sickening. Stills captured from recorded video of Thordarson spinning + dancing in her backyard on Christmas Eve formed into this one image. More research findings will be posted here as the results are found.
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SYSTEM UPDATE + OTHER CATCH-UPS MAY 10, 2024
Over the past few weeks Low Budget's Michaela Thordarson had been troubleshooting getting Photoshop to run on her 2019 MacBook Pro. With little internal RAM left to update the Creative Cloud to even run Photoshop while still being able to run Premiere Pro became a challenge and resulted in Thordarson buying a brand new gaming PC system.
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Before excepting total defeat, she tried to update the internal systems on her family's 2011 iMac desktop computer, to see if it could at least run an older version of Photoshop. Unable to get a newer macOS installed, the computer was too dated to update the old version of the Creative Cloud that already lived on the iMac, meaning that Photoshop was in the end not compatible on that system as well. She successfully was able to download and install an outdated version of GIMP, a free and open source graphic design program, onto the iMac. However, the program ran slow, lagged, and the tools were not to any advance level for the input of edits needing to be worked on. After hours of technical troubleshooting on both Mac systems, it was decided that a total system update was necessary. Computer technology can have varying lifespans depending on the type of usage + amount of usage being done daily on these machines. The 2019 MacBook Pro is still a fine and great running computer for quick edits, internet use, presentations, writing, etc. Too many stories to be told to have our systems slow us down at these times! |
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{ ARCHIVE } (JUNE 2022) CAPTURING MOTION ON FILM - ANNUAL KNOXVILLE PRO ROAD NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP RACES April 24, 2024
Knoxville, TN has a hilly and vast landscape with being in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. Because of this environment it attracts cyclists of all levels to explore its streets and beautiful trails within the city.
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Annually in the month of June professional road cyclist compete in the Pro Road National Championship races in the streets of downtown Knoxville. Several downtown roads and streets within the Market Square + Old City area are closed off and used as race tracks. Spectators gather around the barricades against the streets and watch as athletes go upwards to 25+ miles an hour on a bike.
Low Budget's owner Michaela Thordarson went to the Pro Races back in June of 2022 with her Minolta film camera and captured + studied the motion of the cyclist on film. |
ROZELLE ELEMENTARY FILMMAKING + MEDIA SAFETY WORKSHOP PRESENTATION APRIL 10, 2024
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A week after the our initial filmmaking workshop with the aftercare group of Rozelle Elementary, Low Budget came back to discuss with more of the classes about making visual media. Based on the notion of observation discussed during the workshop a week prior, students at the final presentation were asked to make note of things they saw in there environments in relation to the topic we were talking about. Additional footage was taken during this second part of Low Budget's presentation with the children involved. Footage is in edit and to be for educational purposes to learn about basic film composition + lighting + camera angles, etc for the kids at Rozelle. |
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{ ARCHIVE } (APRIL 2022) A TRIPPY WALK IN BAXTER GARDENS - KNOXVILLE, TN APRIL 2022
Before Low Budget was ~officially~ born, Thordarson went through a phase of recording video with her family's old Samsung Hi8 film camcorder. During this time, she took a walk in Baxter Gardens. This private estate opens up its lush and beautiful gardens + landscaping to the public only during the month of April.
While walking around and recording the property, Thordarson kept getting songs from Mort Garson's album Plantasia in her head. Because of this, she could not help but time the motions of the camera movements + classic zooms to these songs in her head while filming.
Playing into the distorted nature of the video the Hi8 film made it seem like a hazy fever dream caused by the melancholic nature of Mort Garson’s “Rhapsody in Green”. There were several unintentional moments during this edit where the music naturally lined up well with the cuts, which was satisfying to see.
If you are in the Knoxville area and need a hidden escape out of the city, be sure to check out the gardens before April is over.
{ you can find Thordarson digitally HERE }
OVERTON PARK SOLAR ECLIPSE ARCHIVE - MEMPHIS, TN APRIL 8, 2024
Spectators across North America and other viewable points from this recent solar eclipse got locals in Memphis excited about seeing an eclipse at 97.7% totality coverage.
Low Budget played it low this day, taking the time to observe the spectators at Overton Park in Midtown Memphis. While the sun slowly started dimming the atmosphere and the temperature dropping, there seemed to be a stillness in the park from just pure awe.
Rozelle elementary filmmaking + media safety workshop APRIL 4, 2024
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Had a wonderful time teaching the kids of Rozelle Elementary School about filmmaking + creating visual media. Rozelle is a performing arts school where its mission "is to create a supportative, nurturing atmosphere that encourages children and allows them to experience success in a challenging environment." With the power of modern technology knowledge of its functionings is key, especially for the impressionable youth of today. Students attending the workshop were in the after care program and asked to participate in creative discussion + observation based on movies, television shows, and other media that they consumed. The answers they gave were straight from the source of their minds right in that moment of conversation and not one child gave a dull or unoriginal response. |
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This is part one of our two part workshop with the school. Students in the workshop (with parents' signed approval) were filmed and asked questions about basic observations in their environment. These clips then will be edited into a short video to show the kids the elements of filmmaking we learned during part one of the class - different shots + angles, lighting, capturing motion, dialogue, etc.
Low Budget has lots more in the works with these kiddos and more in Tennessee. The amount of hopefulness these kids give to the arts community is amazing. The talents and pure intelligence of their young minds is not something that can be ignored.
WHAT FOR? FESTIVAL AT THE PILOT LIGHT IN KNOXVILLE, TN: 40+ FREE SHOWS PLAY DURING BIG EARS MUSIC FESTIVAL weekend MARCH 21-23, 2024
The Pilot Light is a cozy and intimate venue in the heart of the Old City in Downtown Knoxville. During the end of March, the streets get flooded with live music and a huge crowd of sound lovers for the annual Big Ears Music Festival. With the festival being in various venues all across the downtown area, the Pilot Light + Hologram Electronics + Knoxville Community Media decided this year to have local/regional musicians + live performers put on 40+ shows for the public for their first annual What For? Festival.
Low Budget got the opportunity to break in the Datavideo Mobile Casting multi-cam system for the three days of free shows + archive and record video for Knoxville Community Media. Media shot on the cameras at the Pilot Light will be available through Knoxville Community Media + archive.org. Footage and stills below are from Thordarson's Samsung bullet cam she collected shots with while working the multi-cam switcher board.
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David Dastmalchian ON GETTING OVER WORRY FOR THE ROLE IN LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL March 19, 2024
Low Budget's Michaela Thordarson graciously got the opportunity to ask David Dastmalchian how he processed the feeling of worry when preparing for his character in Late Night with the Devil. Thordarson the Geek Patrol on Geek Tank Radio (Memphis radio 98.11 THE MAX) to discuss the film before its release on March 22.
We are excited for all other conversations about filmmaking and the world of visual media, and for this being the beginning of those conversations!