The “VFX guy” is Sina Taherkhani, who happens to be a friend of mine here in Brooklyn, he works for a big agency in the city as Art Director working on the big stuff. We got together a couple of times to sketch out some ideas, revolving around creating a submerged world, and after giving him my rather dry edit, he’s been on the case, enhancing every single shot with all sorts of hotness.

The track is Porc #1 by Moderat, which has always been a favourite of mine… Check out this other video I made back in the day when I went to do a job with Matthew Dear.

I’m so honoured to get involved with Orlando’s ventures again (check the 4Play doco I made last year), this time promoting his Tapes & Money single which received a bunch of new vocals (though I really didn’t mind the original version). He wanted to transmit the energy of the live show, something that is hard when shooting a video in a studio. So the idea was to film at one of the shows to capture the real thing: pretty simple, and I think I’ve got the hang of these live event videos (REBELRAVE / Richie Hawtin / Matthew Dear).

I really enjoyed editing this as I’m particularly inspired by a lot of these acid/VHS style videos, and I wanted to try to make something similar using the live concert footage as I think it really matches TEED’s esthetic. This style is something you can’t really predict, you’re just overlaying images on top of each other and building compositions on the fly, and until you render it out you don’t really know how it’s going to turn out. As I was editing I was really impressed by some of the still frames which looked more like oil paintings than anything else, however you probably miss them when watching the video as it’s so fast-paced. So I saved some of the stills on my Flickr, check them out!

On the filming side I received the invaluable help from a great up and coming DP called Spike Morris, who I came to know through Vimeo and who I’ll be working more with in the near future. The venue was pretty big, and the crowds were heaving, so we couldn’t have made it without the help of a third camera, operated by Oscar Hudson, and a fourth camera operated by Polydor’s very own Sam Seager (check out his photo blog!)

After taking the footage back home, I only had 8 days to get it out. I definitely wouldn’t have been able to make it without the help of Bryan Cosgrove who worked alongside me during the edit.

Check out the Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs website for more magic

While I was editing Afterlife together with James Mountford back in 2009, I came across a tune called Pain in the Ass by some Nina Kraviz which completely distracted us from the job at hand. We did some investigating and after a few clicks found some photos of this Nina, who back then was relatively unknown in our circles. We were still running high on inspiration with the Afterlife video and felt like we had stumbled on a great subject to make our next video project, so I dropped her a message and suggested to make something together, sending her some of my videos. She responded sooner than expected expressing interest but saying that videos weren’t in her schedule at the time.

So last September while I was hanging out in Spain, she posted a status message on Facebook asking for someone to make her a video for an upcoming single. I don’t usually do this sort of thing, but I responded. Within a couple of months I’m on a flight to Berlin (delayed by 10 hours… yes, ten), meeting up with Nina, shooting for a few hours in the streets and finally grabbing a couple of hours sleep before heading out to Arena the following day.

Finally being under the club lights, surrounded by smoke with Nina in the viewfinder, often brought me back to when I first got in touch with her, when I didn’t really believe anything would ever come out of it. Classic example of the great times we’re living in.

…Rambling as usual!

The video wouldn’t have been made possible without the help of
-Hakan Can who helped me out immensely during the shoot
-Jon Hester for the support during my airport troubles, for killing it at 4AM in the freezing streets of Kreuzberg despite having to catch a 7AM flight.
-Georgina Philp for  her great performance in the venue.
-Arena for letting us use their incredible space
-Christian Fritzenwanker for Nina’s makeup
-Nina for the enthusiasm and patience and for trying to make this happen!

GO BUY Nina’s album!! beatport | juno | itunes

The model is Viktoriya Sasonkina

The second little project that happened during my 10 day stop off in London (here’s the first) was for the guys from Bloc, to create the promo for this year’s festival which will be finally moving away from their usual Maidenhead resort and relocating to a really cool spot in the Far East of London: an abandoned industrial site with a humungous old factory in one end, a silo in the other, and a hard-edged canal down the middle. Apparently people are thinking that the event will take place inside the factory, which is not the case.

The move is a pretty big deal for them, and they figured it should be the focus of the advertising campaign. They got their lighting crew to come along, who brought a van full of all sorts of gear, and spent a good couple of hours arranging all of it around the building. My brother Adam Docker came along to take care of the filming (using both the 5D and his Sony PDW700), working alongside Bloc’s art director Stuart Hammersley.

I also made the Bloc sting, both audio and visuals, which from now on will be inserted at the beginning of all their video pieces.

If you fancy some reminiscing, check the video promo I made for their 2011 campaign.

I also made the soundtrack for this, helping give it the twist that we usually like.

I’ve never had a passion for skateboarding, but using one as a camera dolly was rather exciting.

It’s over a year since I made this video, I’m very happy to finally be able to release it.

This tune has been very special to me from the first time I heard it, back in my London days when I didn’t really have any dealings with Minus, and since then I became a huge fan of JPLS, even more so after hearing “The Depths” album.

At the period when I first heard Spooker, I was starting to edit Lydia K, and for my initial test I actually used Spooker as the soundtrack. You can check out the test here: Lydia K / mood 1. In the end I went with some other music and ditched the first version.

So by the time last summer arrived, two years later, I had made some contacts at Minus (thanks to my Minus Embed video), and I remembered about this test I made so I sent it to JPLS, who I’d never spoken to, and asked if he’d be ok with me making a longer version, and he said yes. That’s pretty much the story, and since then we’ve been keeping in touch via ichat and a few weeks ago in NYC we got to meet up for the first time which was really cool.

And now for the overrated schpiel on the video, which is what video art is all about. I’ll try to avoid using terms like “exploring” or “boundaries” or “connection” or “discovering”. Instead, let’s say I just slowed down the footage and I really liked it. Then I mirrored it and I liked it more, but thought it was a bit obvious. So I dropped some distortion effects on top of it, it wasn’t obvious anymore and it became quite creepy so I really liked it. Then I added some grain, and did some funky things with the curves… NICE. I tried to do some funky edits, but it just didn’t go with the music. I just like the simplicity of the cuts, it’s not pretentious, and it goes with the retro feel of it.

I’ve been submitting it to various video festivals all over the world, and for each one they ask me to fill out a synopsis or a description. Any suggestions as to what I should write? I always leave that part blank. Probably why no-one ever picks it up, apart from Video is the Only Constant in London and then at Digital Graffiti in Florida who both screened it.

In other news

TUMBLR
As you may know I’ve been populating my tumblr account with all sorts of videos that I like, usually a mixture of acid video art, dramatic fashion videos, or just underground music visuals. The other week I built a flash player that loads up the entire feed so that essentially you can play all the videos back to back in fullscreen without having to navigate, perfect for those times when you just want to sit back and watch some cool random stuff. Also great for parties if you have a projector. Check it here.
Also, with the launch of my company FALKOHAUS we’ll be upgrading this tumblr to something more official, calling it NIGHTHAWKS. But for now just keep tuning into the tumblr account: davidterranova.tumblr.com

PLASTIKMAN FILM
Still going. Almost there. Yes I know. Shh.

BLOC
This week the edit for the BLOC film begins. Featuring Laurent Garnier, Matthew Dear, Visionquest, Magnetic Man and other.

SECRET!
Something pretty cool has come up.

FASHION FILM
I’ll be travelling to London in a few weeks to work for a couple of days on a extremely cool fashion film with James Mountford.

KRIX on The Creator’s Project
My visual/music got talked about here.
Read my original blog post about the piece here.

Last night I got to experience my first ever broadcast on TV of my work. Growing up in an era where Vimeo and a possible festival screening is the only outlet to show my works, having something go on TV is another level of excitement.

I wrote a lot about this project when the trailer got released, so please head over there if you’d like to find out more about this project

Flash: Some time ago I built an engine called “Random Shape Generator” that generates random polygons and moves them around (I also made a screensaver based on it)

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Music: Last week I made a track called Krix.

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Video: Yesterday someone sent me this video by Haythem Zakaria, so I decided to try something similar out using my Flash engine, I dropped the shapes animation into Final Cut and played around with them, using Krix as the audio baseline.

I spent 4 days with Orlando, first at his home in Oxford, and then on the road going from London to Dour (Belgium) and then to Berlin, capturing the happenings around two of his gigs, one of which was at Melt Festival.

Working with someone with such true talent and with so much to say made things very easy for me. I find that most docos on musicians and performers today are a bit contrived, simply because being an artist and generating hype has become so easy and widespread, most of the time you find yourself watching an overly elaborate story that is trying to make someone average appear to be above-average.

TEED however doesn’t fit into this category, having grown up in a family of classical musicians, touring in a renowned choir from the age of 7, being multi instrumentalist, knocking up jungle/jazz beats from the age of 13 on Reason, and now producing a wide range of dance music that no-one knows how to categorize, and being able to turn a tent full of hundreds of bored people into a mass of roaring energy that sends people into bliss (or tears). On top of that he is someone who’s pretty opinionated on the state of dance music, and presents his ideas eloquently without sounding like a knob, for the lack of a better expression.

That said, I found myself struggling to cram all of this into an 11 minute edit. On top of his quotes I had to feature his music, his performances, his dinosaur costumes, the dancers, the crowds. It became clear straight away that this was meant to be a much longer documentary. I had to cut so many golden moments out of this, and had to cut down on my usual experimental moments in favour of maintaining the story line which was just overflowing. I played around a little bit with the audio, working on the flow of his music, going from one track to another. Orlando sent me the stems for a few of his tracks and I was able to use some of them to create an abstract backbone of his music.

This was a FALKOHAUS production, my new company together with Corvin Dhali, who came with me on the trip and helped out immensely. I wouldn’t have been able to make the edit in time for the deadline if it wasn’t for the help of Bryan Cosgrove, who has been working with me for the past couple of months.

Broadcast on 21st October at 1:15 AM (Thursday night), on Channel 4.

My second video for Fabric (the first one is here) is for Dave Clarke’s “Fabric 60″, put together during a period of several overlapping projects. The cute dancing girl is the talented Sonoya Mizuno, filmed in a small studio in Tokyo.

With the release of this video I am finally able to launch my new brand FALKOHAUS which I’ve been planning since last year together with my good friend Corvin Dhali. For now it’s a temporary site, with just a small collection of my past works; however the aim is for it to grow into a hub of audio-visual works from myself and other like-minded people, a resource for cutting edge visual works. You can subscribe to its news on Facebook and Twitter, over the coming weeks there’ll be lots of interesting stuff happening!

This is the first episode in the REBELRAVE series that I had to outsource. Luckily some time ago I came across Jocie Cox after she made this video for Mulletover in London, who I immediately got in touch with when I decided I wasn’t able to make it to Miami for the Get Lost party due to the Plastikman film (which I’m still working on).

We kept in touch via Skype while she worked on the video from her base in Ibiza, and once the general edit was built, I got my hands dirty by working on mixing all the music and audio together into a single track.

I was nervous at first about handing an episode to someone else, but seeing the first cut was really exciting, and I’m really happy we can keep the series going in one way or another even if I’m tied down with other work. Love the slomos!

Check out more of Jocie’s work here.

The video I made for JPLS‘s track called Spooker (on Minus) will be shown at Digital Graffiti, which is an outdoor projection art festival in Florida. I made this video quite a few months ago, but as it’s for an old track that JPLS released a couple of years ago, Minus decided to wait for his next release to combine this video with. JPLS is working on his next release so the video coming out should be imminent.

http://www.digitalgraffiti.com/2011finalists/

The REBELRAVE series has been an evolving creature ever since it began, and each episode is a very clear representation of where I’m at personally in terms of video experience. Not only in terms of video production, but also in terms of taste in audio visual experiences.

For this episode the upgrade from the previous episode was to shoot on a 5D mark II. Compared to the Sony Z1 that I’ve been filming with all this time, the quality of the footage is far superior. And in terms of grading, this has been a completely different ball game, so I was really able to play with the colours a lot more than usual without losing information.

I don’t have much time to write about this, but you might find some more info when I last wrote about it for the trailer here

And you may want to see some photos I took on the way here.

I put this together as some sort of show reel piece to show prospective fashion-related clients

I re-edited some of the footage from the promo I made for Bloc Festival to produce a 10 minute video that will be projected at the festival as a filler whenever other VJs aren’t performing.

Being club visuals, I didn’t use a soundtrack to edit to, so for the purpose of posting it here on my blog I thought I should add some music to it. But now seeing how well the music goes with the video I kind of regret not having done this during the edit as it has some potential to be quite dramatic if the two were synced up properly!

Music by Michael Nyman: “Memorial”

In January I spent a week with Damian Lazarus wandering around Peru, before heading down to a REBELRAVE beach party outside Lima. During this trip we also flew to Cuzco and paid a visit to Machu Picchu. One of my favourite trips so far.

I’ve been very excited to start making this episode, however I’ve had to delay this edit until I get some other projects out of the way, which should be in the next 5 weeks or so. So for now I made a quick teaser for the episode, which also includes a second part to promote the Rebels’ “Get Lost” party in Miami in March.

The music is all upcoming on Crosstown Rebels new sublabel Rebellion, I’m very proud to be involved with this special group of people and such amazing label.
Track list:
-Solomun: Daddy’s Jam
-Russ Yallop: The Crossroads

You can check out some photos I took in Peru here.

In other news:

REBELRAVE IN PERU
Tonight I fly to Peru to spend a week with the Crosstown Rebels before their beach party in Lima. We’ll also be doing the amazing Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, lots of amazing footage for the next episode of REBELRAVE!!

PLASTIKMAN MOVIE
..It’s underway, not much else I can say about that right now! Check out what Rich has to say about it here.

JPLS “SPOOKER” official music video
My video for JPLS’s SPOOKER track will be screened at Video is the only constant this coming Sunday 16th Jan (Facebook event here). Minus haven’t released the video officially, so consider this an “exclusive screening”. Ooooohh!

Facebook Page
Keep up to date with this stuff on my Facebook page.

Here’s something we filmed during one of his latest shoots for Metal Magazine, featuring Ranya Mordanova (ranked #36 on models.com), wearing Matthew Ames, styled by our friend Angela Esteban Librero. Shot on the 5D and slowed down in After Effects.

The music is by my friend Marta de Pascalis who lives in Rome. She’s an upcoming talent in electronic music!

Film: Aingeru Zorita & David Terranova
Music: Marta de Pascalis
Model: Ranya Mordanova @ Ford Models
Stylist: Angela Esteban Librero
Makeup: Fara Homidi for Chanel Beauty
Hair: Shin Arima @ Frank Reps
Production: Wei-Li Wang

Other news!
The JPLS video is finished, I’m waiting for it go through the Minus machine for it to be released officially! Check out some of the still shots.

An enormous project for Plastikman Live is about to kick off in 10 days, I’ll be going to Tokyo with Hawtin & Co to produce a monster of a film project that dwarfs everything else I’ve ever worked on so far.