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.
My friend Lucia Martinez shot this great video during a fashion shoot for Harpers Bazaar the other day. She came round my place and I put it together using two tunes from my buddy D.I.E.I.N.M.O.N.O.
The second little project that happened during my 10 day stop off in London (here’s the first) was for the guys from Bloc, to create the promo for this year’s festival which will be finally moving away from their usual Maidenhead resort and relocating to a really cool spot in the Far East of London: an abandoned industrial site with a humungous old factory in one end, a silo in the other, and a hard-edged canal down the middle. Apparently people are thinking that the event will take place inside the factory, which is not the case.
The move is a pretty big deal for them, and they figured it should be the focus of the advertising campaign. They got their lighting crew to come along, who brought a van full of all sorts of gear, and spent a good couple of hours arranging all of it around the building. My brother Adam Docker came along to take care of the filming (using both the 5D and his Sony PDW700), working alongside Bloc’s art director Stuart Hammersley.
I also made the Bloc sting, both audio and visuals, which from now on will be inserted at the beginning of all their video pieces.
I’ve come to London for a couple of weeks for a couple of projects, the first one being with my friend and fashion photographer James Mountford. Shot at the marvelous Town Hall Hotel, and styled by Way Perry this could be considered our first trial in making something a bit more cinematic than our other works together. The star of the film is Ilona from Union Models.
I also made the soundtrack for this, helping give it the twist that we usually like.
I’ve never had a passion for skateboarding, but using one as a camera dolly was rather exciting.
It’s over a year since I made this video, I’m very happy to finally be able to release it.
This tune has been very special to me from the first time I heard it, back in my London days when I didn’t really have any dealings with Minus, and since then I became a huge fan of JPLS, even more so after hearing “The Depths” album.
At the period when I first heard Spooker, I was starting to edit Lydia K, and for my initial test I actually used Spooker as the soundtrack. You can check out the test here: Lydia K / mood 1. In the end I went with some other music and ditched the first version.
So by the time last summer arrived, two years later, I had made some contacts at Minus (thanks to my Minus Embed video), and I remembered about this test I made so I sent it to JPLS, who I’d never spoken to, and asked if he’d be ok with me making a longer version, and he said yes. That’s pretty much the story, and since then we’ve been keeping in touch via ichat and a few weeks ago in NYC we got to meet up for the first time which was really cool.
And now for the overrated schpiel on the video, which is what video art is all about. I’ll try to avoid using terms like “exploring” or “boundaries” or “connection” or “discovering”. Instead, let’s say I just slowed down the footage and I really liked it. Then I mirrored it and I liked it more, but thought it was a bit obvious. So I dropped some distortion effects on top of it, it wasn’t obvious anymore and it became quite creepy so I really liked it. Then I added some grain, and did some funky things with the curves… NICE. I tried to do some funky edits, but it just didn’t go with the music. I just like the simplicity of the cuts, it’s not pretentious, and it goes with the retro feel of it.
I’ve been submitting it to various video festivals all over the world, and for each one they ask me to fill out a synopsis or a description. Any suggestions as to what I should write? I always leave that part blank. Probably why no-one ever picks it up, apart from Video is the Only Constant in London and then at Digital Graffiti in Florida who both screened it.
In other news
TUMBLR As you may know I’ve been populating my tumblr account with all sorts of videos that I like, usually a mixture of acid video art, dramatic fashion videos, or just underground music visuals. The other week I built a flash player that loads up the entire feed so that essentially you can play all the videos back to back in fullscreen without having to navigate, perfect for those times when you just want to sit back and watch some cool random stuff. Also great for parties if you have a projector. Check it here. Also, with the launch of my company FALKOHAUS we’ll be upgrading this tumblr to something more official, calling it NIGHTHAWKS. But for now just keep tuning into the tumblr account: davidterranova.tumblr.com
PLASTIKMAN FILM Still going. Almost there. Yes I know. Shh.
BLOC This week the edit for the BLOC film begins. Featuring Laurent Garnier, Matthew Dear, Visionquest, Magnetic Man and other.
SECRET! Something pretty cool has come up.
FASHION FILM I’ll be travelling to London in a few weeks to work for a couple of days on a extremely cool fashion film with James Mountford.
KRIX on The Creator’s Project My visual/music got talked about here. Read my original blog post about the piece here.
Last night I got to experience my first ever broadcast on TV of my work. Growing up in an era where Vimeo and a possible festival screening is the only outlet to show my works, having something go on TV is another level of excitement.
I wrote a lot about this project when the trailer got released, so please head over there if you’d like to find out more about this project
Credits Directed by David Terranova
Producer: Corvin Dhali
Production Assistant: Bryan Cosgrove
Production Company: FALKOHAUS
Video: Yesterday someone sent me this video by Haythem Zakaria, so I decided to try something similar out using my Flash engine, I dropped the shapes animation into Final Cut and played around with them, using Krix as the audio baseline.
Since returning from Burning Man I began editing my 4Play piece that I shot in July, featuring one of UK’s most talked about upcoming artists, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs.
I spent 4 days with Orlando, first at his home in Oxford, and then on the road going from London to Dour (Belgium) and then to Berlin, capturing the happenings around two of his gigs, one of which was at Melt Festival.
Working with someone with such true talent and with so much to say made things very easy for me. I find that most docos on musicians and performers today are a bit contrived, simply because being an artist and generating hype has become so easy and widespread, most of the time you find yourself watching an overly elaborate story that is trying to make someone average appear to be above-average.
TEED however doesn’t fit into this category, having grown up in a family of classical musicians, touring in a renowned choir from the age of 7, being multi instrumentalist, knocking up jungle/jazz beats from the age of 13 on Reason, and now producing a wide range of dance music that no-one knows how to categorize, and being able to turn a tent full of hundreds of bored people into a mass of roaring energy that sends people into bliss (or tears). On top of that he is someone who’s pretty opinionated on the state of dance music, and presents his ideas eloquently without sounding like a knob, for the lack of a better expression.
That said, I found myself struggling to cram all of this into an 11 minute edit. On top of his quotes I had to feature his music, his performances, his dinosaur costumes, the dancers, the crowds. It became clear straight away that this was meant to be a much longer documentary. I had to cut so many golden moments out of this, and had to cut down on my usual experimental moments in favour of maintaining the story line which was just overflowing. I played around a little bit with the audio, working on the flow of his music, going from one track to another. Orlando sent me the stems for a few of his tracks and I was able to use some of them to create an abstract backbone of his music.
This was a FALKOHAUS production, my new company together with Corvin Dhali, who came with me on the trip and helped out immensely. I wouldn’t have been able to make the edit in time for the deadline if it wasn’t for the help of Bryan Cosgrove, who has been working with me for the past couple of months.
Broadcast on 21st October at 1:15 AM (Thursday night), on Channel 4.
My second video for Fabric (the first one is here) is for Dave Clarke’s “Fabric 60″, put together during a period of several overlapping projects. The cute dancing girl is the talented Sonoya Mizuno, filmed in a small studio in Tokyo.
With the release of this video I am finally able to launch my new brand FALKOHAUS which I’ve been planning since last year together with my good friend Corvin Dhali. For now it’s a temporary site, with just a small collection of my past works; however the aim is for it to grow into a hub of audio-visual works from myself and other like-minded people, a resource for cutting edge visual works. You can subscribe to its news on Facebook and Twitter, over the coming weeks there’ll be lots of interesting stuff happening!
This is the first episode in the REBELRAVE series that I had to outsource. Luckily some time ago I came across Jocie Cox after she made this video for Mulletover in London, who I immediately got in touch with when I decided I wasn’t able to make it to Miami for the Get Lost party due to the Plastikman film (which I’m still working on).
We kept in touch via Skype while she worked on the video from her base in Ibiza, and once the general edit was built, I got my hands dirty by working on mixing all the music and audio together into a single track.
I was nervous at first about handing an episode to someone else, but seeing the first cut was really exciting, and I’m really happy we can keep the series going in one way or another even if I’m tied down with other work. Love the slomos!
The video I made for JPLS‘s track called Spooker (on Minus) will be shown at Digital Graffiti, which is an outdoor projection art festival in Florida. I made this video quite a few months ago, but as it’s for an old track that JPLS released a couple of years ago, Minus decided to wait for his next release to combine this video with. JPLS is working on his next release so the video coming out should be imminent.
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.
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!
—
Update 5 September 2010 I’m getting lots of people asking me about the music used, so here is the tracklist:
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.
