Matthew Dear – Black City trailer

One of the most exciting things about moving to New York was reconnecting with Matthew Dear for his upcoming album Black City. Getting to work with his art director Will Calcutt has been an inspiration and has really opened up my eyes to a fresh new ideas and visions.

To promote the album and the following tour, Will had the idea of developing an ongoing series of beautiful and abstract imagery, all viewable on a single portal, that could represent the various aspects of the album.

So over the past few months Will has developed a single look for all the videos, following a very specific technique that processes regular-looking footage into breathtaking art, giving everything a vintage feel that is reminiscent of film experiments from the 1920s. But he takes this all a step further by morphing and time-stretching the footage using some pretty modern-day technology, generating some of the starkest imagery that most people will find difficult to categorize.

So for the launch of the campaign Will got me involved in making the trailer, a teaser of what is to come over the next few weeks. We spent the whole weekend in his office in Dumbo filming a whole bunch of different things, which I then edited and passed onto him for him to pass it through his mysterious box of magic tricks. Oh, before the edit I actually started off by mixing Matthew’s tracks into a single score.

In the last few scenes you can see my eye, which we filmed while projecting my enemies animation using a macro lens on a Canon 5D mkII.

Keep an eye out on Matthew Dear’s website over the next few weeks for more beautiful work by Will: www.matthewdear.com

Links:
-Matthew Dear
-Will Calcutt portfolio
-Will Calcutt on Ghostly Int

Wolf+Lamb Youtube loops

What are they called? You see them all over Youtube, those entries that are made purely for playing songs, which in most cases just have an image of a sexy bottom or a slideshow of images that have nothing to do with the song to accompany the music. Whatever they’re called, Wolf+Lamb wanted to make two that they could use and re-use for their releases on both their labels, the second one being their W+L Black Label.

I thought it would be nice to include the various characters who live at The Marcy Hotel in the video, without making them too prominent, so you can see Gadi (Lamb), Greg and Nick (both from No Regular Play) re-arrange the lettering on the back wall, as well as some other little editing tricks that are just meant to come up and tickle the Youtube viewer who is just there listening to the music.
The second one contains a bit more trippy elements that you may or may not notice.

Below is the first version, you can watch the second here


Other news

Lydia K in Vice film-art competition
“Lydia K” has been entered into a film-art competition run by Vice and VBS.tv, and is now part of the top 10 finalists. There’s a screening this Wednesday 7th of July at the Old Blue Last in London, and in September the winner will be announced. Apparently the public vote will help the judges narrow down the selection for the winner, so you can head over to the event on Facebook and click on “Like” where “Lydia K” is linked. You need to rsvp to be able to activate the Like button – you can just RSVP “not attending”. I hate these public voting things, but I’d appreciate your contribution!

M-NUS EMBED
My project for M-NUS is finished and has been sent off to the label, so should be up any day now!

REBELRAVE | UNCUT – Le Loup

Almost exactly a year today I came to New York to film the Crosstown Rebels’ party at the infamous Marcy Hotel, home of Wolf + Lamb. At the time I didn’t know that this was to be my neighbourhood within the following year, so just the other day it brought back some nice memories to find by accident the footage from the event that I thought I had deleted (backed up to tape).

One of the most special moments from that party was something I never used in the final episode of REBELRAVE #8. So under REBELRAVE’s UNCUT label (which is about showing special unused footage from my episodes) I decided to release this little gem: Lee Curtiss is hosting a Blind Date between Wolf + Lamb (Zev Eisenberg + Gadi Mizrahi) and Le Loup (Leonard Perret). The Marcy Hotel boys had just released a track by Le Loup, however this was to be their first encounter with the young Frenchman, so we decided to make a fuss over it.

I’d like to change REBELRAVE.TV by adding an UNCUT section, but until then you can check out other UNCUT videos from a somewhat abandoned YouTube channel that I made about a year ago:
-Damian Lazarus + Seth Troxler at Get Lost, Electric Pickle, Miami, 2009 (WMC)
-Jamie Jones at Get Lost, Electric Pickle, Miami, 2009 (WMC)

I’ve also jumped on the Facebook fan-page bandwagon just like the rest of the world. Become a Fan, Like, Follow or whatever you want to do with REBELRAVE‘s page, and also with my own one which I creatively named DAVID TERRANOVA.

REBELRAVE #9: The U.S. Tour

The one thing I loved about this episode was the footage that Damian and Jamie sent me, filmed on their little digital cameras. I couldn’t go on all of their dates of the REBELRAVE Tour so I asked them to do some filming, hoping that it be usable in the episode. It turns out that it’s the most exciting footage to watch, mainly because it gives a real insight into their worlds, which is what their fans and friends love the best.
Also their footage was just perfect for being twisted and warped out of shape, playing around with the audio, and just making it become rather “dreamy” (my mum reads this).

It’s been a huge project to work on, as the film needed to feature footage filmed over two months, the last date being in Miami. But before I even flew to Miami I had already half of the video ready with the footage from New York, LA and San Francisco. So the edit has been a bit of a journey, when I began in February and ended last week, and that’s why it feels very choppy, but probably that’s a good thing.

There are some really quick shots of clouds, a fetus, a white rabbit… Those were part of the visuals that I made for the tour: I made a 25 minute edit that Damian could take on a DVD to the various clubs around North America to be projected during the parties. At Avalon in LA I actually VJ’d, mixing these visuals live using VDMX, which is why I got someone else to film the party.

Video: Railway

While I was in London last week I took the train with my brother Ces up to my Mum’s place, and trying to kill time during the journey I discovered the Motion Capture feature on my tacky little Samsung camera.

Irina \ part 1

Déjà vu… It’s 1AM on a Thursday night and I’m overlooking the streets of Shoreditch from my brother’s office while waiting for a render to finish. I’m back in London for a brief visit, and thanks to the volcanic eruptions in Iceland my flight back to New York has been cancelled and I’ve been stranded here for 5 days more than I planned.

So while I’m currently juggling 4 video projects (including work for Richie Hawtin, REBELRAVE, and Ghostly International) I decided to take the day off today to spend it working with James Mountford to make this, which we filmed a few weeks ago in New York when he came to pay a visit.

James had popped over to New York for a fashion shoot, and while he spent a week there we thought it to be a good chance to shoot something together. So he made a few phone calls, and within the hour he managed to secure the help of makeup artist Tamah K and model Irina Vodolazova.

On the day of the shoot we went to my rooftop and rigged 3 small digital cameras together on a piece of wood, so while I filmed on my regular camcorder and James filmed on a Canon 5D, we took it in turns to also film with this triple camera setup, which produced a whole bunch of footage of Irina filmed from slightly different angles that can be synced together with interesting results!

But this has also meant that it’s a pretty complex edit, so while time has been ticking away, and while I found myself a mile away from James’ place today, we thought of editing this secondary footage that we shot in the elevator, which is a lot simpler: it shows a fairly aggressive-looking Irina in a grungy elevator breathing heavily in distress.

Just a note on the video: more than anything else I see it as a humorous take on the typical Fashion Video that seems to be the craze these days.

Part II will be coming soon!

Video: Seagulls

Today I saw some seagulls and I attempted to film them on my cheap digital camera that I usually take snaps with. The footage contains some really interesting digital distortion whenever the sun would come into shot so I immediately snapped it up, stretched it out, crushed it , graded it, cut it up, messed with it, duped it, fiddled with it, shook it about, zapped it, cracked it, flickered it, exported it, and uploaded it.

…and blogged it.

Here’s some photos I took at the time.

On a separate note, I’m trying to slowly merge all my work that I post on this blog into a more practical page, so for now I’ve set up a Vimeo Channel where you can subscribe.

RebelRave US Tour

This is quite an interesting period, partially because of my relocation to New York, but mostly because of the fact that three days after arriving I got mugged in broad daylight in the middle of peaceful Williamsburg. I got hit in the face by something which felt like a bat, this broke my zygomatic arch (cheekbone: from eye socket to jaw, from ear to nose) which needed to be fixed up with some surgery.

This was a week ago. A day after being discharged I was already on Skype with Mr Lazarus discussing (under the effects of some hardcore morphine) RebelRave’s next big step: The REBELRAVE U.S. Tour.

Here’s a small promo I made for it, for more info go to rebelrave.tv/us-tour-2010

This tour is going to be special: 26 dates across the country with Damian Lazarus, Jamie Jones, Seth Troxler and Deniz Kurtel. I’ll be filming parts of the tour which will be featured in REBELRAVE #9, and also I’ll be producing the visuals, which actually I need to get onto right now as there are only 2 weeks left until the first date at Pacha New York.

The U.S. tour will then carry on in Europe in April for a second phase, which again I’ll be filming for episode #10!

Afterlife (a requiem)

I am so excited about this because I have finally had the chance to collaborate properly with James Mountford on a commissioned film.

James and I go quite a while back, right back to my teenage years in Rome. While I delved into the nerdy world of web and programming, I felt little connection to his own work even though it always fascinated and inspired me. But this year has been the year where I have taken a new direction with things by leaving Flash behind and entering a new world of video, and James’ photography has really inspired me to work with him on fashion-based concepts, bringing his stark style into video form.

So after trying things out together on simple videos like Angie and Lydia K, we often spoke about making something a bit more substantial. And coincidentally Wonderland Magazine asked him if he wanted to make a fashion film for them, which he involved me into to collaborate with.

We developed the idea of a live projection feed, featuring two characters on two different film sets, one set being projected onto the other in real time. The concept was to use light and shadow from one set to hide and reveal parts of the other set, which opened up a mind-boggling combination of different options, the variables being the background and character colours of each set, in different combinations with each other.

Soon enough we had found our two stars: Nick Cave’s son Jethro Cave and his girlfriend Sophie Willing. Finding a couple was perfect: our two film sets were to be opposite each other so that the characters could interact with each other across the studio, so the fact that they actually had a special connection was the icing on the cake.

So here is a story about afterlife.

The makeup is by the fabulous Adam de Cruz and the hair by Ben Mohapi, both from Punishment.
A big thank you goes to Way Perry from Wonderland Magazine for making all of this possible.

Oh and here‘s a video I shot on my phone that might give you a better idea of how this was set up.

Credits
Commissioned by Wonderland Magazine
Directed and edited by: James Mountford & David Terranova
Styling by Way Perry
Make-up by Adam De Cruz
Hair by Benjamin Mohapi

Lydia K

With the end of the year approaching I’ve had to push a little extra to wrap up any outstanding work before my life gets turned upside down in four weeks. First on the list is Lydia K.

Marko Perendija and I were asked by Mark Knight to produce some visuals to back him over the course of his world tour. So with the help of James Mountford we put together a shoot with dancer/model Lydia.

For the purposes of the visuals we actually processed the footage in such a way to make Lydia barely recognizable: the photographic elements were stripped down to become rather graphical, as opposed to photo-realistic, which is in fact more suited for club-visuals.

We delivered these visuals quite some time ago now, and it felt like a bit of a waste to have all this footage crushed down to an unrecognizable pulp of shapes and colours, so I thought of making something else out of it. So here is a short promo dedicated to Lydia as she worked so hard for us and had so much patience under those hot lights.

The amazing sounds are by a talented duo from Rome who make disturbingly good experimental/electronic music. Their unreleased album “Platforms” is played on repeat during my every night shift in the studio. They are called Plaster (plastersounds.com | facebook).

Thanks also go to Holly Silius for the hair and makeup, and to Bayo @ The Eye Casting for finding Lydia!
And of course to my buddies Marko Perendija and James Mountford (blog | portfolio), who nowadays I find extremely hard to work without.

Credits
Directed by: David Terranova, James Mountford, Marko Perendija
Editing: David Terranova
Dancer: Lydia Kowalska
Music: Plaster
Press & Screenings
Finalist: Vice/Kopparberg Klash July 2010
Finalist: Videoart RomaEuropa Webfactory March 2010
Screened: Big Screen Project, NYC Winter 2009
Included in the CD release of PLATFORMS, by PLASTER

Lydia K // mood 1

Here’s a short extract from the visuals I’ve been making with Marko Perendija for Mark Knight.
Not much to write about this right now as I’m running low on time, however more details on this project will be posted up here, together with a dedicated promo for Lydia K who did an amazing job at performing for our camera.

DOP: James Mountford
Model: Lydia K (link on its way!)
Hair and Makeup: Holly Silius
The rest: Marko Perendija and myself

An enormous thank you goes to Bayo @ The Eye Casting for putting us in touch with Lydia.

RebelRave #8: Wolf+Lamb

Getting the chance to fly to New York for another REBELRAVE episode earlier this year turned out to be a life changing experience in a weird way. I came back to London with a hunger for drastic changes, and New York was the gateway that could make that happen. Six months have gone since then, and lots has happened on the personal side of things, but most importantly I am in possession of a one-way ticket to the USA which I’ll be making use of on the 7th of January 2010. Exciting? Yes.

So I went to New York for the 8th installment of REBELRAVE to document the happenings in and around the “Wolf+Lamb” crew: their magical parties have become something of a myth, set in their extremely cosy home/studio/party-venue/pseudo-hotel. Zev and Gadi from W+L were really excited about me filming and made sure we got everything covered, with the help of Lee Curtiss who surprised everyone with his Blind-Date host skills.

A whole day’s filming interviews with the various W+L members was followed by a 18 hour party, which speedily moved through the deep hours of the night into a hot summer’s day, sun rays streaking through the sky light, filling the dance floor (the living room) with an incredible energy. I’ve attended quite a few after-parties and this was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I came away inspired, the kind of inspiration you feel when waking up after an amazing dream.

So editing the footage just brought all those feelings back. Seeing what these guys do is a real inspiration to me: their Burning Man projects, Deniz Kurtel‘s art and music, their Black Label, the Marcy Hotel, their unforgettable parties, all the artists on their label. Finding a way to tell this whole story has been an impossible task to fit in a 10 minute video, so unfortunately you’ll only get a taster of some of what Wolf+Lamb is about, but hopefully you can get the general picture!

Go see this on rebelrave.tv (contains tracks info and links to buy)

Audion: Hecatomb Tour

A few weeks ago Matthew Dear gave me the opportunity to make a promo video for his latest world tour, Hecatomb. The show sees him performing live as Audion, playing an intense and mesmerizing selection of his releases, old and new.

The music is backed by a set of generative visuals that he controls using a touch screen interface. The concept behind the visuals ties in with the rest of Audion’s artwork (check the record sleeves at the bottom of audion.me), a modern twist on psychedelic shapes and patterns generating within perfectly contained circles.

This particular video was shot at Fabric in London during the last show of Audion’s European tour.

Roberto

The other week I went to Fabric to film a short promo for Matthew Dear for his Audion show. My friend Robbie came with me to help me out, and while we hung out backstage we decided to film some extra bits.

In other news:
-RebelRave #8 is nearly finished and I’m feeling more excited about it than most other episodes. It features the magical place that is the Marcy Hotel, home of Wolf+Lamb in New York.
-I shall be starting the Audion promo this week.
-Today I have found my new desk space and will be relocating in two weeks’ time, into the studio of Bunch, which actually happens to be next door to my current studio, so I won’t be missing out from Pret A Manger’s occasional free coffees.

Anastasia Kollakis: a promo test

A few weeks ago my friend James was taking pictures for Anastasia Kollakis, an up and coming jewelry designer from Greece. During a break he decided to film the model for a few minutes using a small digital camera, thinking that the footage would be good to create a test promo for Anastasia.

So with a few tweaks and some extreme time-stretching this is what we came up with.

RebelRave #7

The bubble has popped and I’m back in the real world: REBELRAVE #7 is out. Probably the most significant episode so far for me, as it has really affected me on different levels in combination with Damian’s world tour (read about that here), and an overload of other work. Well, I say I’m now back in the real world, but that’s not really accurate as it’s now 8AM and I’ve just been working solid for the past 20 hours!

Once again, there’s just so much to write about this as it’s a very convoluted story, so because I don’t have much time on my hands I’m going to keep this one short. The only thing I’d say about this episode is that it’s the first of a two-part series; the second part features a very special crew in New York who I went to film a few weeks ago, but this edit will only come into my schedule in the next few weeks. Again, this is going to be a very special episode, which will also feature a short personal take on dinosaur documentary-making.

Many thanks to the lovely Anna once again for doing a great job at being in front of the camera, and to Marko and for his help and advice on the postproduction, and to all the guys in LA! A special thanks goes to Red Earth Studio (my brothers’ production company where I rent my desk) for the huge support.

Moving on in the latest news headlines, things to expect in the next few weeks are the launch of the Skunk Anansie website (finally!), some visuals for Mark Knight, a video promo for a really cool hair stylist, and finally a music video for a hot new band!

Angie

Six months ago James Mountford and I got together to shoot the lovely Angie for the visuals for TRNSSTR (I wrote about this some time ago). Angie’s slow and snakey movements go really well with the fast and roaring beats of TRNSSTR, however they go even better with the deep and slow sounds of Orbital’s soundtrack to Octane (), as both image and sound move in harmony at the same pace.

So tonight I finished off this quick edit which I started a couple of days ago…

…and tomorrow I get back to proper work: a second holding page for Skunk Anansie will be going up and I’ll also be logging the rushes for the next episode of REBELRAVE!

I’m also looking forward to visiting Japan with Damian Lazarus this Thursday, where he/we will be performing in Nagoya, Tokyo (Womb) and Osaka.

Angie is represented by Bookings, you can find her details here. She also has a blog.

Damian Lazarus talks about his album

Marko Perendija, who is becoming more and more involved in the hardcore work force that is the Laz Machine, put together this little promo for Damian. The dodgy camera work is my own, and while Marko did a great job of putting the issue to me as politely as possible, he just got on with a nice piece of editing.

We just dug up a few episodes of REBELRAVE and used some footage from the visuals we made for Damian, which is the first time we’ve shown any of it online. Quite happy to see LazWabit in there too!

The track is called “Lullabies” and is taken from Damian’s album “Smoke The Monster Out”

Damian Lazarus: Neverending

Damian appears to be gloriously taking over my portfolio in a way that would put my other clients to shame – yes, shame on you! In December last year he asked me to produce the official music video for his single “Neverending”. As exciting as this may sound to some people, I found that once again I had taken on more than I could handle, with close to no experience in the field.

So once again Marko Perendija came to the rescue and got the project rolling by calling up his friend Vanessa Whyte, a young and talented DoP. She popped round the next day and by the end of the evening we had an idea that we sent off to Damian. From that point on things moved very quickly, and a crew of very clever people suddenly took shape.

Vanessa took on the role of directing the video, and did an impressive job at carrying the project from start to finish. I enjoyed playing around with some effects towards the last stages of the project, whilst Marko churned away at grading over 300 different cuts.

Damian Lazarus live @ SXSW 09

The past 10 days have been a much welcomed change of scenery for me. As I write now I’m sitting on Damian’s sofa, looking out from Echo Park onto the valley and hills of Hollywood. I arrived here primarily to film the next REBELRAVE episode, dedicated to the Droog boys and their new label, Culprit, but also to “vj” for Damian’s first show of his world tour. Read my previous post to know more about how I’m involved in this.

My time here has been full of stories to write about, and I’ve kept my close friends and family posted with essay-length extracts (according to Anna) of my daily happenings: the days spent in Damian’s studio rehearsing, flying to Texas for SXSW, staying at the “Bunker” (Droog’s villa in Hollywood), gawping at the views from the rooftop of the Standard Hotel in Downtown LA (check the mind-blowing photos from the party here), laying on the beach in Santa Monica, thrift shopping in Melrose Avenue, and tomorrow flying to Miami for the third and final leg of this trip. But I’ll delve no further than this list, and in fact I’ll keep this blog post short and sweet, and hope you enjoy the video: Damian Lazarus live at La Zona Rosa, SXSW, 18th March 2009.

The visuals were made by myself with an enormous helping hand from my friend Marko Perendja, who spent many sleepless nights and days at my side as we filmed and edited all of the content. Without him this project wouldn’t have turned out the way it has.

As Pete Tong says on Beatportal:
“By the end of the set everyone in the room was mesmerised, not only by the mad K-hole visuals but also by this unique and engaging character who looked uncannily like Fagin in Oliver Twist, mumbling, sometimes screaming into the mic (on an awkward 6” stand) over dubby dark and minimal techno beats. It rocked. Full marks for having the balls to do something original.”