Twenty120 / Advanced Beauty / PSST! Pass it on

Oh dear, another set of amazing videos to while away your life to. But why not, these are a few interesting collections of work by a varied mix of artists, motion graphic designers, filmmakers and other creatives. 

Twenty 120 have just recently released their 2nd collection. Some great experimental work in here - thanks to motionographer for the heads up. As you may have guessed it consists of twenty x two minute films, and as you can just about see in the image below this years theme is Truth versus Deception. As they state on their website “The idea was to pull together a diverse group of directors free of any creative constraints to create using any medium to inspire by creating innovative content.”  The contributors are well established in their own right, and by creating content for a collection like this it must be a nice release. They have certainly taken it seriously, producing some really exciting pieces.

 

Their 2007 collection is also available on the site, click on the picture below for this.

 

 

Also, while we’re on the subject - PSST! Pass it on also has a similar scheme. This time a collaborative piece is produced by 2 artists, animators, filmmakers etc, with one starting the piece and one finishing it off. More wonderful stuff so feast your eyes.

 

AND, don’t forget, last but certainly not least the wonderful Advanced Beauty Video Podcast series are being released as I write, one a week for the foreseeable future. The Artists are very much influenced by the soundtrack, these are designed to be sculptural forms in video.

So set aside a few hours, or a bit here and there to check out the above. I guarantee there’s something for everyone.

music video commissions

There are plenty of bands and record companies out there trying to get music videos on the cheap and/or develop new talent. It seems to be a trend, certainly recently with Moby & Radiohead competitions. Radarmusicvideos has been doing it for a while as well, but after a couple of successful years under their belt, this year their major commission scheme has not emerged. Their site still has a number of small commissions available, but I think that the kudos is really in working for a major act or label. These schemes can get your work noticed and also allow you to show your work on the festival circuit with a top notch soundtrack. But of course there are many people trying to get something for nothing and you should be careful when submitting work.

While you’re at it, here’s just a few other schemes

http://www.modestmousemusic.com/video/

http://music.guardian.co.uk/intel/page/0,,1930466,00.html

http://www.modernguitars.com/archives/002761.html

http://earache.com/deicidevideo/

Radiohead nude / in rainbows videos

I’m really showing my age, but this is the computer kit I grew up with. Radiohead held a competition for a remix of their album “in Rainbows”, and James Houston has produced this great video for the song “nude”, a beautiful rendition using redundant technology.  I particularly like the hard drives. See his details here and check out some of his other work.

 

They also held a competition for a video to accompany their in rainbows album. The website has a number of videos available. Finals are on July 4th and The winner is announced on July 10th. Let’s see who wins.

Another video which has been getting a lot of attention is the entry by flight404. This is done wholly in processing, an open source visual programming language. This is the sort of thing that usually flies right over my head, and while I have a great deal of respect for these programmers/visual artists. I’m going to be investigating the use of processing for the course I run, the Foundation Degree in Creative Video & Moving Image, in Nottingham, East Midlands. But in the meantime, join me in looking at the astoundingly beautiful work produced by clicking on the video below. Certainly also check out other videos like Solar

 

 

Door - David Anderson

There is a great power in inanimate objects and architectural features, and exploited here is the door. A closed door is a very powerful image. Just seeing it places questions into the audiences mind, raising their emotional expectation. A closed door will inevitably open, but what is behind it? A very potent image, it links directly to our subconscious raising questions about choices and options, anticipation and fear.

Add in a keyhole and we begin a quest, searching to find the key to answer to our biggest questions.

Often drawn upon like Pandora’s box, a door can be something that once opened, cannot be closed

In David Anderson’s 1990 film “Door”, he explores this concept with acclaimed writer Russell Hoban providing the text and narration, producing a funny and powerful animation which also explores the use of a multitude of exciting techniques. Click below to see it.

 

 

The Action Cats

Motionographer, an excellent website for creative moving image work has an interview with The Action Cats, a group of designers, animators and filmmakers who use interesting experimental and traditional techniques to produce an innovative and dark look for their piece “The Experiment”

“The Experiment” was produced for Adobe’s “See what’s possible” competition, and stood out from the crowd by its unusual look and mix of technique. It’s refreshing to see techniques experimented and played with to such great effect. 

In the interview they explain their working processes and have included a number of videos and stills to elaborate on their processes. This is great to see the evolution involved. Follow the interview here and click the links below to see the work.

 

Pixilation

Pixilation is a great technique for producing quick and fantastic looking animation. Based on stop motion, where the animator places clay figures or other 3d objects in front of the camera, takes a frame then moves the objects and repeats.

The difference with Pixilation is that instead of taking a great deal of time making models, the subject of the animation is real people. By animating their movements you can make them do really amazing things.

In his 1989 film the Wizard of Speed and Time, Mike Jitlov shows what great fun can be had with this technique.

The classic Japanese horror film Tetsuo by Shinya Tsukamoto also contains many great examples.

watch the sequence starting about halfway through the trailer. This film is astounding by the way. From 1989, its unbelievably intense action and at times unfathomable storyline have really been influential for a new generation of filmmakers.

The pixilation technique has a lot of similarities to time lapse photography, mainly due to the inevitable rapid speeding up of time that happens when shooting and the fact that it is shot in a real world environment. To see great examples of this you need to see Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi.

This technique has been used by a great deal of influential animators and filmmakers, including Jan Svankmajer who incorporated it into his surreal films. The daddy of them all though has to be the grand master himself, Norman McLaren. A prolific Scottish animator who pioneered many exciting and new techniques and won the Oscar for his thought provoking short, neighbours. Not many people pushed the possibilities of moving image as much as this man.

 

And crikey, even Nokia have been playing with it for their recent ad campaign

Ink tank film experiments

Here are a couple of companies who have been doing really interesting things with the classic film technique of filming ink and other substances. By experimenting with this technique and then treating it in after effects or other post-production software you can really make astonishing looking work. These really push the integration of the ink and post production in a way that makes it greater than what many others have done.

 

                      

I really like the editing in of the spinning graphic element into the Dstrukt piece above - “Reading Nature”, and the way that the layers interact and subtract. The combination of different elements helps create a distinct look. The tracking markers also work really well in this piece about evolution, contrasting the low and high tech.

 

 

               

Sesucht, a German company have also played with inktanks for this amazingly choreographed piece “Symphony in Red”. This work is really in a class of it’s own, seamlessly mixing the filmed experiments into an after effects 3d space. At one point they use timeremapping to turn the ink into sprouting flowers. A very clever combination of a natural technique and software. Oh and all the text ‘washing’ away was done for real - no displacement maps, keying or other such trickery. Just Dishwasher detergent and the text printed onto foils. 

To find it you need to navigate through their website, click on Action, then References and it’s near the bottom. Once you’re there also check out their “Black Poem” which is absolutely astounding. Their use of sound is wonderful. 

Get an old fish tank and try it yourself.  Use inks, milk, detergents, oils, whatever you can find. To find lots more experiments that people have made, just checkout youtube entries like this one, and start clicking.

Idents

Is there anything worth watching on TV anymore? Not a great deal, but there’s usually a lot of nice idents about. For a while BBC2 and Channel4 have been fighting it out for the best channel idents, both producing innovative and exciting little pieces of television history, often a disappointment when the programme starts and you have to wait for the next one. But wait no more, go to www.idents.tv where they have a growing collection of the best (and worst – see BBC1 and ITV1’s very expensive but boring attempts). So I have taken a look and picked a few out for you.

 

Fiver – for Channel5

Some really funky new audiovisual idents for Channel5’s rebranding of Five Life. Simple, clean design, really exploring movement and colour. Produced by We are Seventeen. Really reminds me of the work of Oskar Fischinger.

 

BBC2

Not sure personally about the success of the new BBC2 idents Some very great simple ideas which stand out are below.

 

I love this one because it’s real – no cg or compositing required.

 

 

Definite recent faves had to be these ‘Cutting up Christmas’ ones

Going back a little bit further, you just had to love the characterisation of these little 2’s. Not shown here, but I loved the one which was a yapping jumping dog put inside a fluffy 2.

And going back even further

 

Channel 4

I think that Channel4 is probably my current favourite for innovative idents. You can’t help but have been amazed when you first saw the 4 logo forming out of disparate objects.

These have been running for quite a while now, but seeing a new one is always a treat.You can click on the few above to see them, or click here for a link to idents.tv’s full list.

It’s a real shame that idents.tv don’t have more of the older idents. I remember the previous idents being very interesting, remarkably different to these ones. I’ll try to dig some of them up.

And of course there’s the absolute classic design by Lambie Nairn. So Iconic that they have never tried to really mess with it, where the other channels have often had radical rebranding. In fact the latest idents are really harking back to the original idea - a series of disparate blocks forming a coherant 4 logo. 

As well - The Channel 4 offshoots E4 and E4 Music have some really great and funky idents as well. Some really great ones produced by Andy Martin can be seen on his website here.

Somebody’s really going experimental on us at S4/C, producing a series of idents which interact with the voice over. On the whole, very bizarre.

 

 

 

 

Rosie Pedlow / Joe King - Sea Change

 

A beautifully simple idea executed very well, Rosie and Joe’s film takes a seaside caravan park as its subject, and reveals through a series of smooth tracking shots, the beauty in the commonplace that we all too often take for granted. 

 

The piece was entered for the Jerwood Moving Image award. Their statement about the work, taken from the Jerwood site follows.

 

“About the work
Filmed on a caravan park at the end of the season, ‘Sea Change‘ reveals a landscape dramatically transformed by light and time, and resonating with the transience of human presence. The frail, hand-painted caravans that fill the site are soon to be removed and crushed to make way for a new housing development, so the film also acts as a kind of document for an unusual place on the brink of disappearance. The film is the artists’ response to place. The entire film consists of the same tracking shot, 300 metres long, filmed repeatedly at different times over a period of five days. It is closely akin to documentary in its use of camera as pure recording medium. However any semblance of narrative is rejected in favour of a framework that is at once formal and conceptual. This serves to focus the spectator’s eye on the essential elements: the flatness of the landscape punctuated by caravans; the continual and dramatic changes in light; and the unrelenting passage of time.”

 

watch their work at Finalists : Jerwood Moving Image Award

I really like it when people use the professional techniques usually employed on feature films for artistic works. I find that this combination of high production values with a great concept really makes something special. 

This style of work also really reminds me of the work of Mark Lewis, an artist/filmmaker who produces very strong, but subtle works, using feature-film equipment. Oh, and that post is just below this one.

Mark Lewis

 

I saw his work at the BFI Southbank gallery in October 07. He often uses strong effects, like the ‘vertigo shot’ / dolly zoom (or whatever you want to call it), playing films backwards etc, but the way he does it is very subtle. For example his piece Rear Projection featured the longest ‘vertigo shot’ I had ever seen, running at 4 mins. This length allowed you to fall into the scene, gradually pulled in by the effect. 

 

Rear Projection

 

My favourite had to be Isosceles, where a camera moves around a building in a move which wouldn’t look out of place in a hollywood feature film, but something is missing. There are no actors. We are following no characters, dialogue or plot development. What happens is the building becomes the subject, and what is often overlooked when watching a film, becomes the main feature. It is mesmerising to watch, and again a very simple but potent idea, executed with professionalism.

 

Isosceles

 

 

You should also check out my blog on Rosie Pedlow / Joe King - Sea Change

 

 

I have included the statement from the exhibition below.

 

“Mark Lewis’ films are remarkable not only for their rich and highly seductive qualities, but also for their extraordinary ability to question those characteristics that define mainstream and avant-garde cinema. This was Lewis’ first solo show in London and included three recent films shot in 35mm and transferred to High Definition, the latest technological innovation in video presentation. Lewis’ silent, short form films respond to the specific nature of the viewing subject of the gallery and museum space. This viewer, ambulatory, free and essentially privileged in the space in which he or she moves, has historically been formed very differently from the cinematic viewer. Therefore limited length, lack of added sound and the removal of most staging mise en scene, are the essential characteristics of films that attempt to engage with the gallery viewer and its history. The works on show highlighted how the artist investigates the ways in which the language of film has transformed classical art historical motifs such as portraiture and the depiction of landscape. Rear Projection (Molly Parker) - was co-commissioned by BFI and received its London premiere here. It investigates the canons of portraiture in relation to landscape images. Shot in Lewis’ lush, pictorial style, the footage of a desolate Canadian landscape is combined with a filmed ‘portrait’ of the actress Molly Parker - of Deadwood and Six Feet Under fame - by using the traditional method of rear projection, a technique commonly used in films up to the 1970s to shoot live action against a backdrop of seemingly moving images and now outmoded by blue screen technology. Lewis’ exploration of the depiction of landscape and how film language has developed techniques to follow the other pictorial arts is also evident in the recently shot Isosceles, 2007 and in Downtown: Tilt, Zoom and Pan, 2005 - both previously unseen in the UK. In the latter, the camera shifts its focus towards inactive areas and background details present in the shots. The work is created by filming two distinct pieces of film and joining them seamlessly together: one part was shot at dusk; the other (pan) was filmed in a clear morning. In this work the artist depicts everyday situations, actions and places while exposing methods of filmmaking process; using the latest digital image manipulation software he also suggests that the evolution of film and technology are intrinsically linked to other visual cultures.”

Links

 

http://www.bfi.org.uk/whatson/bfi_southbank/exhibitions/previous_exhibitions/mark_lewis

 

http://www.caac.es/descargas/hoj_lewis07_ingles.pdf

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_zoom