Over the past couple of years I have developed a Flash-based engine that I can run at clubs to control and generate randomized visuals. I can basically just let it run all night without needing to control it, as it picks and chooses different generative animations (for example one of them is an alternate version of the header at the top of this page), always randomizing parameters such as time, scale, velocity, colour, etc. It’s built to run on its own, but I have also built in extra functions so that if needed I can interact using the keyboard.
Over the weekend I shot the video for Zev’s new release “Don’t break it”, which I’ll be editing over the next couple of weeks. For it I asked Rob Davidson to take the main (and only) role in the video: Rob runs a contemporary dance company here in New York called Kinetic Architecture and the stuff they do is very experimental. I’m far too ignorant about dance to be able to describe what they do, so instead please check out these videos on Youtube (contains nudity): Metochos, Over You, Pretty Air.
The video is split across two different scenes, one where Rob is shown as a regular looking guy in the city, the other is in a parallel dimension where Rob is almost naked, his body writhing in sweat, contorting himself in a closed space filled with smoke. So from this second scene I shot around 50 clips, here is one of them that I just wanted to put up. To film this I was hanging halfway over a banister which had a bike chained to it that I had to lean on, so please excuse the shaky camera!
I just stuck my own music in there to keep things simple and to give it a mood.
I must say Rob has turned out to be the rawest embodiment of what my vision has been for many projects. I love seeing the human body as an animal, as a machine and as a mass of meat, muscles and sweat, and so far I’ve always dreamed of making something about this. So having Rob turn up for Zev’s music video has been a true blessing for me.
Probably for this video you won’t be seeing much footage like the one above as it doesn’t really belong to Zev’s music, however I would love to work again with Rob and his partners to create something a bit on the dark side for future projects.
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
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!
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Although I spent a larger portion of my working life as a Flash Developer, I have lately developed a taste for video. This kicked off when I began making a video series called REBELRAVE for an underground techno label, and since then I have enjoyed making a variety of abstract and experimental videos.
I have also been making music since my teen years, so occasionally I may publish something I made in my spare time in between long video renders.
Flash is still something I use on a weekly basis, making websites, experiments and visuals.
