Apparently it took a whole weekend to get this next shot right. Shot and Directed by Paul Greenhouse, the video for To The River by James Wallace & the Naked Light is a very simple one but very well executed.
I’m mad about ‘Making of’ videos and this one is a real gem. First, you need to watch the video they’re talking about here which is Wasting My Young Years by London Grammar. Also quite a simple idea but much harder to execute. The technique used in order to pull this off shows incredible ambition and dedication. A bucket of gold stars to Owen Silverwood and Dave Bullivant (Bison) who are the brains behind it all.
Making these looks like it could be quite therapeutic and that seems partly why Sarah enjoys it so much. I might give it a go myself, though I doubt I’ll make anything half as interesting as her pieces!
This week I have been shooting films a lot more than watching them and as I write this, I am sitting in the cafe of The Hepworth gallery in Wakefield preparing for another. We are here to document an afternoon of performance entitled The Ultimate Form by Linder Sterling. The event promises to be an exciting collaboration of creatives including award-winning choreographer Kenneth Tindall, dancers from Northern Ballet, original composition by Stuart McCallum of The Cinematic Orchestra and costumes by fashion designer Richard Nicoll. You can watch the Illuminations trailer for The Ultimate Formhere.
Anyway, I hope to one day live by a lake. Melbourne based Betty Wants In just happened to have reminded me of this fact.
More and more now, short films online seem to represent exactly what the title of this next film suggests. Fragments of Time details Daniele Manoli‘s very own personal portrait of Hong Kong shot over a period of two years. What I love about this kind of filmmaking is its strength in evoking particular feelings and sense of place. There aren’t enough outlets for this kind of work to exist and thrive in so it’s always great to come across it online and be completely taken by it.
Daniele’s recent work includes an impressive project of short films each dedicated to a letter of the alphabet. Forget Sesame Street though this series has much more nostalgia, music, chaos, randomness, hallucinations and vomit! You can work your way through them all here, and it really is an epic journey! One of my favourites is Q.
If you still haven’t been up to the top of the tallest building in the European Union then this next video should give you an idea about what you’re missing!
The long awaited new album from Bonobo emerged very recently along with the first promo for single ‘First Fires’ and I love it. Great job by Young Replicant who are also responsible for the equally impressive video ‘Chained’ by The xx which is also hosted on their site via the link above.
Another short instalment from Lonely Leap and then I should probably leave them alone for a while for fear of them feeling web stalked! What can I say, they’re very annoyingly clever over there. This short looks at Photographer Chris Burkard directed by Jeff Taylor.
This is quite something; when the volcanic ash cloud fiasco happened back in 2010, your first thought probably wouldn’t be to try and get over to Iceland in an attempt to capture some cinematic footage of it unfolding. Well, Sean Stiegemeier did just that. Was it worth it? Hell yes.
This next video is via one of my regularly visited blogs, Dezeen. ‘Tweets sent to this machine are transmitted from one form of media to another and cannibalised at every stage until they emerge as distorted, printed headlines.’ (With some quite amusing results I might add.) You’ll need to watch via this link because of embed permissions.
My admiration for the work of Diego Contreras has been no secret on my blog and his latest video shows his first experiment with the much discussed Black Magic Cinema Camera.
I’ve got some gooduns this week and I even had to leave a few out of the line up for fear of overload. The five here are the best group of ones that I’ve enjoyed this week including work by Lonely Leap, Callum Cooper and Mark Bader.
First though, we go to the birthplace of John Wyver, the man behind Illuminations, to Whitstable for a seaside story about whelkman.
Callum Cooper, a Royal College of Art graduate explores the segregation of class in Britain by finely stitching together 4,000 photos of different London houses from postcode E6 to SW7. A quite remarkable device was used in order to make this film possible and you can see it all become clear here: http://bit.ly/YZldaA
Next a double whammy from New York and London based production company Lonely Leap. The first is a rather brilliant promotional video for the Music course at Goldsmiths University. This is the kind of thing that makes me wish I was still a student! You’ll need to go here to watch it though because of embedding permissions. The second is an award winning film that forms part of a three part series made about Kew Gardens. Each of the episodes are fascinating to watch and can be found within the Lonely Leap Vimeo channel here. My choice of the trio is the investigation of the Fungarium.
I think I’m going to start making a habit of finishing these posts with a creative process film until I have made my own to show you. This last one comes from Mark Bader about Brickett Davda Ceramics. It is just SO beautiful, that is all.
This is only my sixth week of posting my videos of the week and I’m delighted that it is being hosted on the Illuminations blog for the first time. This week is probably the most mixed bag yet so I hope that readers from both my own site, and the Illuminations site, find something that interests them.
Kicking off for us is the news that this week New Zealand became the 13th country to legalise same-sex marriage. MP Maurice Williams delivers a very entertaining speech that underlines the bill being passed.
I got very excited by this after watching the next video. Some very clever people over at hyperlapse.tllabs.io have built a site that links with imagery from Google street view and allows you to create your own 60 frame ‘hyperlapse’ between ANY two points on Earth. This is quite a lot of fun to play around with and once you have exhausted the 60 frame limit, if you’re clever enough, the source code is available (here) for you to manipulate yourself and remove all of the limitations! Here’s one I made that moves along a stretch of road commonly known as the ’5 mile road’ in Jersey where I grew up: http://bit.ly/XKA23e
Despite most of us consuming a large percentage of our media online now, a lot of us still enjoy having something physically in our hands to look at. For me it makes something feel more precious than just seeing it on a webpage or computer screen. This is just a fantastic idea about how to bring the variety of the digital world together in one personally curated book or portfolio by utilising an online ability to build media. A good one for future presents to people as well!
Here’s another one for my process video archive that I went off on one about last week.Anton Alvarez is an RCA graduate who makes furniture without joints or screws.
Next is my weekly film-tech-geek-fix. Everyone’s talking about 4K resolution. 4K, in it’s most basic terms is supposedly double the resolution quality of standard high-definition. 4K (4,000) refers to the number of pixels running length ways across a captured image. Standard high-definition currently outputs an image that has 1,920 pixels across and 1,080 pixels high. Commonly known as 1080p or 1080i. For high end cinema 4K will probably become standard in the next 5 years or so? However, broadcast will take much longer to adopt this kind of specification (if it even does so that is). For the kind of content we make at Illuminations, 4K isn’t worth the debate. It’s excessive to say the least, not to mention hugely expensive to shoot (the camera responsible for the footage below is currently priced at just over £90,000) and process and edit and output. There is no denying however, that it looks SERIOUSLY COOL. The video below shows the first proper footage take from the new Phantom Flex camera that is capable of shooting 4K RAW at 1000 frames per second. For anyone unsure of what that means, it is basically capable of capturing the kind of slow motion that makes you see the world in a different way and at the kind of quality that makes you appreciate being alive! (I did warn you this was a film-tech-geek-fix right?)
This week I’ve re-visited a well established trend of online videos that continue to emerge. They usually come from artists’ studios, graphic designers, factories and even inventors. They show the process of creation and the beauty involved in that process to illustrate and document an object coming into the world. As you will see from some of the videos below, these objects are often beautiful to look at in their own right, but somehow, being shown the means in which they were made makes them more so, or presents a different kind of intrigue and understanding that allows us to remember something more clearly and appreciate it more. This trend in videos like this have been born out of the recognition that documenting a process, an event, a story or an experience via the use of video, is of more importance than it ever has been. It was over a year ago that my girlfriend and I filmed her screen printing and it served (for a time) as a vital piece of media that allowed her to communicate to a much wider audience what it is she does. We plan on doing more of these in the run up to her final MA show with plenty of inspiration to feed from! Most recently notable for me are the Glithero studio, where everything is documented in this fashion.
Last week I linked to a film called ‘The Shoemaker’ which is taken from a series by Dustin Cohen called ‘Made in Brooklyn’. Although these are more documentary like in their presentation, they are initially derived from the elegance of several traditional techniques.
‘Made by Hand’ is also a series of short films that celebrate the people who make things by hand — sustainably, locally, and with a love for their craft.
This week I start with a short film by the Rosete Brothers that has seen a huge amount of praise in it’s short life both online and theatrically. I remembered some of the lines from it months after I had watched it for the first time. I watched it again and it was then that I realised how brilliant I thought it was. This has to be one of my favourite short films ina very long time. It’s unexpecting, transient, thought provoking and entertaining. It’s beautifully written and shot and I curse the clever minds that made it!
