Back in January I had the good fortune of being offered to go with Damian Lazarus & friends to visit Peru for their party on a beach in Lima.
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 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!
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.
The promo i made for Bloc’s festival has just gone live. Playing around with dropping acrylic paints in a tank of water.
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.
Since moving to NYC I have made some new friends. One of my first acquaintances in New York was a hilarious spanish guy called Aingeru Zorita who wears an amazing tache and incredibly bright red socks. After gaining a few years’ experience as Phil Poynter‘s first assistant, this year he started working more on his own shoots, slowly building up a very cool portfolio.
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.
Credits Directed by Aingeru Zorita & David Terranova
Model: Ranya Mordanova
Commissioned by METAL Magazine
The beginning of my new year in New York kicked off with producing the visuals for the REBELRAVE tour. I made a 25 minute video, an assortment of various visuals and graphics that were played at the various gigs around the US and Europe. Anyway, that’s old news, but two days ago I dug it out and used a short segment of it as a video promo for Crosstown Rebels’ latest release, named after the video series/tour/brand.
“Crosstown Rebels present Rebel Rave” is a collection of some of Crosstown’s best music, classic and current, here’s a sampler.
In other news, in the next couple of days I’ll be publishing a 8:50 music video for JPLS, accompanied by a separate video promo for his latest single “Spook Trax Vol III”. Exciting stuff!!
Here’s a small promo made for Damian Lazarus‘ mix for Fabric 54. I wanted to replicate the album cover and to bring it to life in the video, so I made an animation in Flash with a few crosses and the Fabric logo and just projected it onto a wall in my flat mate’s room. With the help of my adventure partners Marc Regas and Zahara Gallardo we filled the room with smoke and they dressed me in white silk as I stood over a fan pretending to be creepy for the camera.
My face was also covered and there was no way for me to review the footage until we finished the whole shoot, so it was just a leap in the dark. But watching it back for the first time with the contrast pumped up was a really good feeling, it was a surprise at how it came out even better than planned. Smoke and projections are amazing companions.
The audio is Yoyo by Lee Jones, with my vocals on top.
In other news..
Interview on Visao Media A nice chap called Alex Trujillo ran an interview with me for his blog Visao Media. Here it is in two parts: Part 1 and Part 2 Feels very awkward to read such an in-depth story about me, and I’m not sure who would bother reading the whole lot, but it’s exciting nonetheless!
Lydia K screened in NYC Over the next few weeks Lydia K will be shown on rotation at this open air cinema (with sound!), a project lead by Kimpton’s Eventi Hotel and the Big Screen Project. N9 Productions, who originally got in touch with me about this, are curating the fashion side of the project. You can watch Lydia K here and read the official press release here.
A long time ago I attempted to emulate in Flash a grid system developed by Burak Arikan who Ali Demirel collaborated with to produce the Minus Contakt visuals, I called it Minus Grid and made it into a screensaver. You can read the original blog post from back then.
During renders today I decided to upgrade the screensaver, as it needed some tweaking.
In the preview there is an extra bar full of controls that isn’t in the screensaver, and also in the screensaver the “lines” are always set to ON.
Don’t forget that once you install it, you can customize the grid size by clicking Options… in your System Prefs. Different grid sizes produce various interesting effects!
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After posting this I started browsing through Burak’s site again after all this time, and I’ve found some new screenshots of his Meta Control visuals. “Gridnet” is the true name of what I’ve been trying to replicate. Check out his incredible work here. This is the stuff that blew my mind and became a huge source of inspiration for me when I first went to the Minus Contakt show a couple of years ago.
Also to be noted is that my Minus Grid is actually (if you haven’t noticed already) quite far off from his original (run his Applet here). With the last version I decided to randomize the weight of the lines, and also to randomize whether two dots connect or not.
For the past couple of years it has been my good fortune to have been in contact with Ali Demirel, the artist responsible for the mind bending visuals at Richie Hawtin‘s gigs, as well as Contakt and the latest Plastikman show. He’d seen some of my REBELRAVE episodes and asked me to collaborate with MINUS on a couple of occasions, but I had to turn these down because I couldn’t fit them into my schedule, which was very frustrating for me as I had been a huge fan of all these guys and was flattered to have an opportunity to work with them!
Anyway at some point last year Ali asked me if I would be interested and free to spend New Year’s Eve with Richie Hawtin on a three-day European tour to produce the third instalment of MINUS EMBED, which is an interesting project run by Rich’s brother Matthew. When I read “private jet” in the email I just knew this was going to be a once in a lifetime opportunity, and immediately said YES!
I was to begin the trip from Berlin (where I was by that time already on holiday with friends) and on the 31st I would take a plane from Berlin to Messina (in Sicily), where I’d hook up with Richie & Co. for dinner. He would play at the club at midnight for a couple of hours, then we’d take a private jet to Riccione (north of Italy) where he’d play at Cocoricó at 6AM. Following that we would take a plane to Madrid at midday, spend the afternoon relaxing, and then head over to the club where he would play at midnight. The next morning at 7 we’d catch a plane back to Berlin and we’d end the tour that night at Weekend Club.
As huge as this was for me, I also received several heavy blows of bad luck, which transformed this trip into a nightmare of epic proportions. Things were going wrong right from the start when the camera rental place only gave me half of the kit, and from then on it was just one thing after another. But I’m going to skip the details and jump to the most crucial part, right at the half-way point of the tour when things went very bad indeed. It was 9AM, we were at Cocorico’ in Riccione, everything had been non-stop since my flight from Berlin the previous morning, and none of us had slept yet; Rich was just about to finish playing to a disturbingly wild crowd (see the photo above), we were all imprisoned in a tiny booth, which itself was full of organizers, promoters and all of their friends and family. It was CHAOS. Then came the moment to leave for the airport, and packing away the kit for the second time that night was a messy process of shuffling around on the alcohol-drenched floor in between people’s feet, often bumping into Nima who was also doing his best to pack Rich’s kit away. It turned out that I left the club without noticing that the camera charger wasn’t in my camera bag. Yes, the camera battery charger – gone. And my two batteries were almost dead. (Much later we came to the conclusion that it must have been taken by someone else by mistake)
By the time I realized this (photo above) I was in the private bus to the airport with half the Minus crew sleeping around me (apart from Ali and Nima who were trying to help me out), and there was no way to go back to the club as we didn’t have any spare time before catching the Madrid flight. I don’t think many people can truly imagine what was going on inside my head during those moments, coming face to face with such a monumental disaster at 9AM after being awake all night working. I was in a terrible state, and confronting Rich in the airport to give him the news was probably one of the worst moments I can remember ever having. I suggested that I should leave the crew to go on without me while I return to Berlin, but these people are an extremely nice bunch and they did all they could to cheer me up (in vain) and to find other ways to film the rest of the trip, so I pulled myself together and resolve the situation in any way I could.
Landing in Madrid at 12 AM on the first day of 2010 I immediately got in touch with a friend who lives there (thank you Ivan!), and then met up with him on the other side of the city (cost me €80 in taxi fares!) to pick up his tiny little stills camera that he lent me for the rather dismal occasion. I went back to the hotel, passed out in a heavy tormented sleep for a couple of hours (my first sleep time since leaving Berlin) and then headed over to the arena to film the Minus showcase (Richie Hawtin, Gaiser, JPLS, Ambivalent, Fabrizio Maurizi). This was the biggest show and crowd of the tour so far. So there I was, on stage with some of the world’s most idolised DJs, facing 5000 fans, filming with a little snap camera – awkward doesn’t even begin to describe the feeling well enough.
It has to be the highlight of the trip for me, which is a shame because there are many other moments that on the other hand were amazing: meeting Ali, traveling with the hilarious Nima, leaving a -10º Berlin which was covered in 1 foot of snow and landing in a 28º Sicily, spending the afternoon on the sea front eating clam spaghetti with one half of Booka Shade (who was also playing in Messina that night), meeting and dining with Richie and his parents and his brother Matthew, meeting Kevin (Ambivalent), taking a 6-seater jet to Riccione, meeting Jon Gaiser and Fabrizio Maurizi, bumping into Tiga (he was on our same flight to Madrid), then meeting Steve Bug on the flight back to Berlin (he was to play at Weekend with Richie that night), and then getting to enjoy the amazing party at Weekend, finally re-united with my best friend and my girlfriend, feeling like I had been away for years.
I wanted to deliver the final product to them before the end of the month, as I knew that from February onwards I was going to be busy on the RebelRave US tour. This was when I was moving to New York, so three days after arriving in my new hometown I got mugged (they hit me in the face with something that felt like a baseball bat) and I got sent to hospital with multiple fractures on the left side of my face. This is why this video filmed at NYE has just now been released at the end of August!
On the editing side I had a bit of a task at hand as I had to deal with different types of footage and merge it all into a single video. In Messina and Riccione I’d used a Sony EX3, in Madrid a little crappy stills camera, from the trip to Madrid to Berlin I used my little Harinezumi (an amazing little digital super8-emulator camera), and in Berlin I used Minus’ HD camera. So this explains why there are all these different looks and styles throughout the sections of the video.
Leaving Berlin, still disturbed by the experience in Riccione, I wanted to push my own boundaries to deliver something exceptional, however on the creative side of things this film didn’t quite come up to my expectations given the difficult circumstances. But I think I have managed to salvage a project that seemed doomed, and in that sense I’m very happy with the result, and feel I’ve really achieved something!
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Update 5 September 2010 I’m getting lots of people asking me about the music used, so here is the tracklist:
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!
Julien Donkeyboy is one of my favourite films. Ever since watching it I have always wanted to sample the audio from the scene that sees this black albino spontaneously jump into this 5 minute rap, surrounded by fellow mental patients who are getting really excited by his performance, which is one of my favourite scenes of the movie. Here’s part of it on youtube.
I only just made this last night on my headphones and haven’t had a chance to listen to it on decent monitors, so probably doesn’t sound great.
Last year a hot girl called Zahara asked me for some music that she could work to. So I put this mix together.
Other stuff going on right now…
AH AH AH AH You should check out Zahara’s blog (it’s not quite a blog) that I built for her: ahahahah.zaharagallardo.com. Careful – it contains boobies. You can subscribe to her Facebook page to keep updated on the latest happenings in Sexy World.
M-NUS EMBED #3 My edit for Mr Hawtin and Co. is pretty much finished, I’m waiting for some final feedback right now, so I’ll be posting a link to this in the next few days when the video launches! Very exciting
Zev – Don’t break it The boys from Wolf+Lamb asked me rather nicely if I could make a video for Zev Eisenberg’s next release “Don’t break it”. So I spent last weekend up at Zev’s place upstate filming him in the middle of a forest, equipped with a smoke machine and a strobe light. Oh and a log splitter. I started editing this yesterday. Interesting stuff
Wolf+Lamb youtube loops I went to the Marcy yesterday to make a couple of video loops that the Wolf+Lamb guys can use whenever posting a release up on the youtube. I haven’t seen any interesting ones, so I think what we did last night could be quite new for all those youtube jockeys.
Facebook page I’ve set up a Facebook page for my work that just alerts people whenever I post something here on my blog. This is for two reasons: firstly because I’d like to try to keep my personal profile private, so diverting strangers to the page should work in theory. The second reason, which kind of goes against the first one, is that I’m using Facebook more and more as a tool to receive updates from blogs and websites that I wouldn’t otherwise voluntarily go an check out on a regular basis, so I figured it would be a good way to keep people updated on what I’m up to!
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.
Another rendering session, this time for my M-nus Embed project… So a track of mine that I started early last year and never really finished just arrived in my playlist. This is actually an earlier version, I made lots of other versions following this one which stretched across the whole of last year. I even got to a stage where I sent the final piece to a sound engineer friend of mine to mix and master it, but it kind of got a bit too crazy and loud. So here’s one of the first versions, obviously needs to be mastered.
The audio is taken from Edgar Alan Poe’s “The Raven”
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.
