Over the past 2 months I’ve been playing around with this track during occasional monster renders (not renders of monsters), but not having any decent monitors here in New York means that I’ve got a bit stuck with it and it has been risking ending up being stored away and collecting dust like dozens of my other tracks.
It probably won’t sound very good on a decent sound system, so I would be flattered if someone offered to master it.
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.
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.
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)
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.
I have a list of projects here on a piece of paper: they are the projects that I am currently working on, and they are 12. You need three hands (which I don’t have) if you wanted to count them with your fingers – unless of you just use a single hand to count batches of five. So I’ve just spent the second night this week working through the night, watching progress bars crawl across my screen.
Once this period will be over I will have a few bits of nice work to show on here, but in the meantime I am posting a song I made last night during several rendering periods.
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.
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”
