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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.

Part II will be coming soon!

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.

I have a neighbour called Marc, he’s from Barcelona and he’s a photographer who has lived in London for most part of his adulthood. Like me he relocated to New York two months ago in the search of the new, and seems to be really getting into the swing of things here. We live two floors away from each other, so elevator trips to and from his and my place are becoming frequent, sometimes transporting goods such as sandwiches, wine and cakes to fuel our hard-working ethos.

He needed a new website, so I whipped out the old Flash and knocked this up: marcregas.com

I’ve been almost been 2 months here in New York and I’ve happened to land right in the middle of a fairly interesting group of people, all of whom work in one way or another in fashion. The most special these people is a (cute) Spanish girl called Zahara Gallardo who is a (cute) graphic designer at Menage A Trois and a part time photographer. She plays around with video from time to time and recently made this cute little fashion film for magazine VNFold, and used a track of mine as soundtrack to these dark retro/futuristic images.

Video by Zahara Gallardo!
I should state that my involvement in this was just on the music front.

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!

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.

(if the image link doesn’t work you can find the video directly here)

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.

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.

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.