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.
As video is becoming more and more prominent in my portfolio, I can’t help but feel more and more detached from Flash. So having something like this in my portfolio makes me feel a bit better about betraying my geeky roots. I really hope to spend more time on Flash as it would be a shame to let it all go after how hard I pushed to study it years ago; but I fear that time is going to be difficult to find and that maybe outsourcing work to new talented kids would be a possibility if a company structure were put in place! This company is actually in the pipeline and logistics are being discussed during these weeks, so maybe I’ll have some news in the near future about this.
Back to Skunk Anansie, the website for the return of this 90s rock band has been all over my schedule for almost a year now, and finally having it out of the way is a relief to say the least! I worked remotely with Casper Franken from Shotopop to make it all happen. He too care of Art Direction and Design while I fiddled around with things that fall under Development and Interaction.
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!
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.
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 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.
Once again I’m sitting around waiting for a video render to finish: I’m working on the second part of Damian Lazarus’ visuals, which will be played in full for the first time this thursday in Stockholm. I consider this to be the second beginning of his world tour, as so far he has only been performing half of his set.
Anyway, I’ve been staring at the render progress bar for far too long, so I decided to upload a little Flash toy I made to be used in Damian’s visuals, the “Random Shape Generator”.
…it does exactly that! open it up
During my incredibly busy times working on video-based projects for Damian Lazarus I managed to squeeze in a nice little web project for Skin, who I’ve got to know through Smokin Jo. While talks of a website for her Format 3 project are still being made, Skin also asked me to build a brand new website for the return of Skunk Anansie.
I remember telling a few people in LA about this fairly big news piece, but to my surprise they had never heard of the band. Is that just an LA thing? I found it quite intriguing.
Anyway, I don’t know how much I can say about what’s happening exactly with the band (apart from the fact that they’ll be playing at the Water Rats tonight and tomorrow), so I’ll just stick to explaining my side of things briefly: I brought in talented designer Casper Franken from Shotopop to art direct the whole project, and I’ll be taking care of the “creative development” (that is my job title, after all).
The holding page is up right now, and the full site should be live towards the beginning of May, so take a look: skunkanansie.net.
The photo above is by James Mountford.
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.”
Damian Lazarus’ debut album “Smoke the Monster Out” is coming out in a couple of months. Before I go on, I really should mention that there’s a reason why I never thought of becoming a music journalist. The reason is that my English vocabulary is limited and I find it extremely hard to put words to emotions. When, in cases like these, I need to describe something, I resort to this fairly simple calculation to find the right words (in programming the following are called Arrays):
Positive_feeling_words = ["nice", "beautiful", "amazing", "mmm"]
Negative_feeling_words = ["awful", "ouch","yuck","hmm"]
Simple as that.
So when I say that Smoke the Monster Out is a beautiful album, you should understand that it may well be a lot of other “positive” things too. Another important thing about it is that it’s not techno, which came as a surprise when first listening to it. But on second thought I realized that it made perfect sense for this to come from Damian, and that in fact the album’s tone matched his love for the weird and wonderful (but mostly the weird) in his dj sets, podcasts and the Get Lost compilation, be it techno, psychedelic, “ballady” or experimental.
If my skills at album-reviewing are urging you to scratch your eyeballs out, go read what a proper journalist has to say about it, here and here. Or even here.
Anyway, as this is not a music blog, and I clearly should leave the reviewing to the Reviewers, let’s move things forward: to promote this release, Damian will be performing at some of the biggest clubs around the world over the next few months, starting in a couple of weeks where he will be playing at SXSW in Austin, Texas.
The long and short of this post is that I’ve been producing the visuals for his show, which will also see me VJing alongside him. I’ll have to go into more detail about this at some other time, as right now I’m racing against time to get the content ready before I go to L.A. next Saturday.
So while you anxiously wait for me to write my next post about this, you can rest your eyes on Laz Wabit, who will be one of the creatures entertaining thousands of clubbers around the globe.
