Videos of the Week

First up we have a video that I first watched once it won the Vimeo Awards Grand Prize in 2012. It really is one that delivers on repeat viewing and demonstrates the age old mantra that the simplest ideas are often the best. The Everynone team have a broad collection of similarly enticing videos on their website including Moments which I cannnot even begin to understand the approach to its execution. Once you start to get a feel for Everynone’s work, all of the films maintain the idea of simplicity but you begin to wonder how they all came together when the range of material required to achieve them is so vast. Truly great work.

Symmetry from Everynone on Vimeo.

Next up, Leonardo Dalessandri shows us his video postcard from Morocco. If, as his description suggests, this was made by him simply having a camera on him whilst on holiday, this is quite special. Some unbelievable cinematography here enhanced by an equally impressive edit.

Watchtower of Morocco from Leonardo Dalessandri on Vimeo.

Nothing says ‘good times’ better than the launch video for French creative influence agency Kids Love Jetlag made by Fred and Farid Group who both have very interesting websites. Kids Love Jetlag is the digital agency within the Fred and Farid Media Group based on Paris and Shanghai.

KIDS LOVE JETLAG | OPENING from Fred & Farid Group on Vimeo.

Through the Lens is a new series of videos that follows professional surfer Rob Machado as he returns to visit the people he has met throughout his career that have inspired him and shared his passion for surfing and the arts. In this episode, he spends time with San-Francisco based artist Jay Nelson and they work together in customising Rob’s van. Tyler Manson of Acne is the man behind the lens and I look forward to seeing his next instalment.

THROUGH THE LENS with Rob Machado from Through The Lens on Vimeo.

As an art form, the music video has to be one of the most open mediums to work with. I am fascinated by the creative freedom that music can give you as its visual interpretation can be so different for everyone who hears it. Alex Southam‘s own interpretation of ‘Hearts’ by Swedish indie band I Break Horses is a masterful matching of music and and visual. Although the narrative is no more than a journey, the images compliment the music perfectly and does exactly what any music video should endeavour to do, breath a new visual life into a song and take it to a further audience. You can see more of Alex Southam’s work here.

I Break Horses – Hearts from Bella Union on Vimeo.

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Videos of the Week

It’s all about in-camera techniques and masking tape this week starting with some beautiful footage of London in 1927 IN COLOUR!

London in 1927 from Tim Sparke on Vimeo.

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.

To The River from JWATNL on Vimeo.

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.

LONDON GRAMMAR – Wasting My Young Years – Behind The Scenes from Academy Plus (A+) on Vimeo.

Sarah DiNardo loves masking tape. She loves it so much, she makes sculpture out of it!

Sarah DiNardo. Tape Artist. from gnarly bay productions, Inc. on Vimeo.

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!

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Videos of the Week

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 Form here.

Anyway, I hope to one day live by a lake. Melbourne based Betty Wants In just happened to have reminded me of this fact.

By The Lake, Tasmania. from Betty Wants In on Vimeo.

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.

Fragments Of Time from Daniele Manoli on Vimeo.

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.

Q from Daniele Manoli on Vimeo.

Here’s one for the pyromaniac in me.

Fire drawing from Glithero on Vimeo.

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!

A View from the Shard from The Film Artist on Vimeo.

Although it’s not quite the same, it might make you think there’s now no need to go up it at all!

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Videos of the Week

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.

Bonobo – First Fires from Young Replicant on Vimeo.

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.

Chris Burkard – Photographer from LONELYLEAP on Vimeo.

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.

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

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.

Conyne Eylandt [BMCC Test] from Diego Contreras on Vimeo.

Lastly, if you’re at a loss as to what to do this bank holiday, why not get Lost in Manhattan with Gunther Gheeraert?

Lost in Manhattan from Gunther Gheeraert on Vimeo.

Enjoy the bank holiday.

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Videos of the Week

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.

The Whelkman of Whitstable Harbour from Vern Cummins on Vimeo.

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

Victoria, George, Edward and Thatcher from Callum Cooper on Vimeo.

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.

KEW GARDENS – Beyond the Gardens: The Fungarium from LONELYLEAP on Vimeo.

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.

Brickett Davda Ceramics – handmade in england from Mark Bader on Vimeo.

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Videos of the Week

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

Google Street View Hyperlapse from Teehan+Lax Labs on Vimeo.

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!

“Print-on-demand has completely changed the way we think about books” from Dezeen on Vimeo.

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.

Thread Wrapping Machine by Anton Alvarez from Dezeen on Vimeo.

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?)

– First footage from the new Phantom Flex4K – “Let me know when you see Fire” from Gregory Wilson on Vimeo.

And if all that wasn’t enough to make you go mental, then this will certainly have an affect on your eyes, or brain, or both. Amazing imagery here.

Illusions (part one) from Animal on Vimeo.

Have a good weekend.

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Videos of the Week

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.

Making of a Blueware Vase from Glithero on Vimeo.

Paper Planes from Glithero on Vimeo.

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.

The Violin Maker from Dustin Cohen on Vimeo.

‘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.

Made by Hand / No 4 The Cigar Shop from Made by Hand on Vimeo.

And lastly, two videos illustrating the power of the pen.

The Making of “Hero” from Miguel Endara on Vimeo.

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Videos of the Week

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!

VOICE OVER (English subtitles) from Kamel Films on Vimeo.

The Shoemaker from Dustin Cohen on Vimeo.

Life Drawing at The Book Club from Wriggles & Robins on Vimeo.

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Videos of the Week

Bitten By The Frost from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

SEMI-PERMANENT 2013 TITLES from Danny Yount on Vimeo.

Circa from Hypoly on Vimeo.

Atoms For Peace ‘Ingenue’ from Trim Editing on Vimeo.

Memory Fifteen from Bill Newsinger on Vimeo.

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Videos of the Week

MONUMENTS from Diego Contreras on Vimeo.

j.viewz – Salty Air (feat Noa Lembersky) from j.viewz on Vimeo.

Lights and Water from James Adamson on Vimeo.

One Min || On the Way to Rapture from sixtwelve on Vimeo.

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Videos of the Week

DRIFT from Tim Sessler on Vimeo.

New York Rework from Sebastien Desmedt on Vimeo.

Stranded – A Short Film from Sitka on Vimeo.

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Sickbed Hitlist

If there’s any solace in having the flu, it’s catching up on a bunch of tv you missed and watching a handful of films. This is something I haven’t managed in a long time. Without saying too much about each, I’d recommend them all other than perhaps one.

Both series’ of The Hour. Not much praise for this one at the time but I really enjoyed the energy around the making of television at a time of change in the 50s.

The production side of series one is stronger for me. The cinematography is more precise thanks to Chris Seager’s highly acute attention to detail, and, the edit is more dynamic as a result I think. However, the storyline is undoubtedly better in series two. It has more pace, more relevance (for the time) and fewer endlessly ringing unanswered telephones.

Continuing the 50s theme, it’s perhaps slightly shameful I haven’t seen Rear Window before seeing as it is a “classic”. I found it more engaging than other Hitchcock films I have seen and yet far less complex in it’s structure.

In part, this may have everything to do with the voyeuristic nature in us all. I often people watch and find it quite normal. We find each other interesting. In Rear Window, Jeff is driven to spying on his neighbours through his own immobility with a broken leg. What I love about his pursuit of the truth is that we only ever see it unfold from his perspective. The camera never enters into the apartment in question because the set is so well designed that you can see everything that you need to in order to start to piece together the clues yourself. Speaking of puzzle building, Jeff Desom went a step further with his film ‘Rear Window Timelapse’ which won the Remix category of the Vimeo Awards 2012. Jeff has pieced together footage from the film to create a panoramic view of the courtyard and its surrounding inhabitants. The wide angle view then plays through the entire film in less than three minutes! Hats off.

Rear Window Timelapse from Jeff Desom on Vimeo.

Is there anything Ryan Gosling cannot do? In Drive he is a getaway driver that ends of biting of more than he can chew. This guy oozes cool and even in the most brutal moments his air of calm is terrifying. My favourite shots are from inside the car at night, looking through the windscreen with Gosling’s hands in leather gloves, gripping the steering wheel at the bottom of the frame. This months Sight & Sound talks about Drive as one of several 21st Century Noirs.

I think Meryl Streep’s performance in The Iron Lady is outstanding. Well duh, she got an Academy Award for it. I don’t know very much about her current life but I thought the presentation of it interleaved with her political one was extremely clever. It certainly wasn’t the ‘here’s a representation of Margaret Thatcher’s life front to back’ that I expected. It was a far more intimate character examination that makes Streep’s performance all the more extraordinary. I actually felt myself feeling sorry for her. Heavens.

Bryan Cranston is definitely shaking off the label of ‘Malcolm’s Dad from Malcolm in the Middle’. I am now about halfway through the first season of Breaking Bad having yielded to the enormous hype. There are a few characters that I don’t fully believe in terms of integrity or authenticity, particularly the dealers themselves and the behaviour of the police drug squad (DEA). They seem stereotyped and these shortcomings seem to be covered up with shock factor moments like a bath tub full of hydrofluoric acid and a dissolving body falling through the ceiling. I am assured it gets better though.

Will Smith seems to spend 90% of Seven Pounds speaking in code and providing complete randomers with sensational get out of jail free cards. It’s only in the last twenty minutes that we start to understand exactly what’s happening. Now, maybe I just didn’t cotton on quickly enough, but even if I had worked the whole thing out after forty minutes, it wouldn’t have made the remaining hour and a half any more interesting. Episodic engagements with characters are left unexplained, the payoff isn’t even that dramatic AND he donates bone marrow WITHOUT an anaesthetic for no reason that we are lead to believe other than ‘this guy is as hard as nails’. There is also a very big and very cool dog called Duke. It’s the kind of film that leaves you thinking for a while but when I say a while, I mean the sort of while that it takes the kettle to boil.

Anyway, back in the real world of the healthy now so I probably won’t write anything like this again until next winter.

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Videos of the Week

Bonobo – ‘Cirrus’ (Official Video) from Ninja Tune on Vimeo.

L A P S E S from Diego Arambillet on Vimeo.

ISAORA Triptych Film – FW12 from ISAORA on Vimeo.

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I Know What

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