Mr. Plastimime, London Screening at RADA.

Last night I was very happy to attend a special London screening of Daniel Greave's new short film Mr. Plastimime. Followers of this blog will know that over the last year or two I've been recording the production work of this film, 'Behind The Scenes' and releasing a series of Making Mr. Plastimime mini-documentaries.

Well Dan's film is finally finished and will be showing-up soon at numerous several international film and animation festivals.

As a big thank you to some of the backers of the film and many of the art-workers and crew involved, Dan and Producer Emma Burch organized a splendid screening event at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts auditorium in Bloomsbury. It was a great evening, with the film screening, a few words from Dan and even some impromptu mime performance too!

I took a few stills, hopefully just enough to capture some fleeting impressions of the momentous event.

An expectant crowd of crew and backers await the screening...

Mr. Plastimime director Daniel Greaves takes to the stage.

Heartfelt 'thank yous' from Dan to all those who helped out.

Animator Steve Edge, Compositor Danielle Baiardini and Daniel Greaves... in the bar.

Lead Animator Steve Edge celebrates.

The star of the show Mr. Plastimime himself on screen at the RADA auditorium.

Digitizing Dad's Slides

Click on this to see the whole 4824x2714 image. Photos circa 1977 ©Michael Gavin

I've borrowed some of my dad's Ektachrome slides (circa 1977) and been re-photographing them with using a Canon DSLR camera. I'm using an A3 sized lightbox and a borrowed Kaiser rostrum stand to do this.

To get clear photos of each slide, I've been using an old 50mm f1.8 Pentacon M42 fit lens and one short macro extension tube. (I'm guessing this very same lens was used to take some of these pictures too.) With this arrangement, each 35mm slide image can mostly fill the frame of the Canon 600D (1.6x crop-sensor) DSLR. I've been copying each slide as a Raw file, allowing a little bit of colour and exposure tweaking; I've also been Photoshopping out a few dust spots and hairs from the slides along the way.

This seems like quite a quick solution for capturing the images from slides, but I'd still like to try some tests with my scanner's film adaptor for comparison.

Photo of me circa 1977 ©Michael Gavin

Lo-Fi Photography

A couple of weeks ago I was out for a family day out to the seaside at West Mersea, and decided to try out the Lomo Diana F+ camera I've had since Christmas.

So in went the 120 roll film (200ASA slide film), and joy of joys NO BATTERIES! I shot my 12 pictures at the large size and was then ready to hunt on-line for processing services.

I chose thephotoshoponline.co.uk to process my film. It turns out that slide film is more pricey than negative film would have been: for processing and scanning I ended up paying £12.95 + 1st class postage £2.70. I got back my 120 slide film as strips and a CD with the scanned images as 5MB .jpg files. The results are technically horrible in many ways, yet I quite like them too. Here are a few of the better ones...

The harbour at West Mersea.

Crab botherers on the quayside.

Local lads diving in the harbour.

Whoops, accidental double exposure!

Reflection in the sail-makers workshop.

So it's an expensive way to get some dark and grubby images, but I think I'll be having another go at this soon. Whatever the results, the process is lots of fun; very few controls on the camera, random results, delayed gratification and (did I say this already?) ... NO BATTERIES.

I've got some more rolls of the slide film to get through, then I might buy some negative film and shoot the smaller images (16 per roll) to get slightly better value. (Negative film at the lab I used is quicker and cheaper than slide film, 1-day processing is quoted at £7.95+postage for the process & scan) I'm also toying with the idea of dusting off my 35mm SLR too just for more analogue kicks...

Old Cinema

I'm also dabbling in 'analogue' stills photography now. Here's a still from the first roll of 120 film I've got back from the lab (Lomography Diana camera). It's the old cinema building on Essex Road Islington, just round the corner from the TANDEM studio.

Although it's seen better days, this is a huge 1930 cinema designed by George Coles with a very impressive Egyptian-themed tiled façade. The building was a cinema up until the 70s, then became a Mecca Bingo Hall up until 2007. Though the building has been derelict since, it is owned by an evangelical church group who are trying to get planning approval and finances together to do something with it.

Here's a hastily put-together panoramic ' showing the whole of the façade and a bit more of its setting in Essex Road (digital photos from my Canon 600d camera)...

I've become particularly intrigued by the story of this building, and am in the process of finding out all I can about it.

Jubilee Pageant

Here's a hastily assembled panoramic photo I took at the Queen's Diamond Jubilee river Pageant on Sunday. I turned up at London Bridge hoping to get some nice photos, but who would have thought that the authorities would block every possible access to the riverbank? I walked way down past Tower Bridge and this was the only bit of river frontage I could get to. Seems like this was an event for ticket holders, riverside property owners and corporate shindigs, not so much for regular punters hoping to turn up and take a look. All those miles of riverbank and none of it actually accessible to the tax-paying public... Ho hum...

Enfield on Super8 Film (More stills)

More stills of my home town Enfield. These were shot recently on my Nizo 156XL Super 8 cine camera. I've shot two 50 foot super 8 cartridges for this project so far, I reckon I'll need to shoot just one more.

The work-flow of sending the cartridges away is rather tedious, (the film goes to Germany for processing then Sweden for telecine!) but it's a real thrill when the film finally comes back. The second reel came back today. I'm currently editing the footage I've shot so far and I've still got to shoot some more.

There'll be quite some time before the film is finished, so in the meantime, please do enjoy these stills : )

Coming Soon ... Microfilm

+++ UPDATE NEW SHORT FILM COMING HERE SOON +++

Over the Christmas/New Year I got some time off from my work at TANDEM. I wanted to make another short film but this time something more 'experimental' and shorter than some of my previous efforts. I'd like to use the macro photography techniques I've been playing around with for a while. The film will feature extreme close-up views of common household objects.

I've been using my Canon 600D DSLR camera coupled with an old Pentax M42 mount 50mm lens and some extension tubes to get very tight close-up shots; most of the action takes place within a field of view around 1 centimetre wide. Getting really close to the subject seems to lend itself well to abstraction and a really wobbly and lively film.

The results are certainly wobbly and lively, so for the soundtrack I'm cutting my picture to sync up with some splendidly retro 1970s era library music I picked up recently.

It looks like this will be a little one minute piece, the working title is Microfilm. Watch this space...

Fun with EL wire

I bought a piece of EL (Electro Luminescent) wire earlier this year, one of those odd spur of the moment purchases. Who knows, this might come in useful for something one day?

Anyway, it's a plasticized wire about a metre long and 2mm in diameter that glows when AC current is passed through it... (A small converter box steps up the power from a battery to the required higher voltage AC current to drive the EL wire.)

The effect is something like neon, yet the material is flexible too. When photographed, it can also look a lot like those light trail long exposures people make with torches...

Here are a few photos I've just taken working late in the lab tonight. These were all taken with the Canon 600D camera and Canon 50mm f1.4 lens. The fourth, close-up one was taken with this lens too, but also with a cheap macro tube mounted between the lens and the camera.

Full Moon Photo

Well it's a big old moon tonight. This photo was taken tonight with my dad's old 150m lens (Pentax M42 screw fit) & his x2 Teleconverter adaptor attached to my Canon 600D.

Police 101 Promo

At TANDEM recently I was asked to make a promo video for the Police. A Learjet over to Sting's Tuscan villa? Well no, the client would be the UK Home Office, so instead I went to the M&C Saatchi offices in Golden Square to find out what it was all about.

My enquiries revealed that the police forces up and down  the UK are rolling out a new telephone response service for reporting 'non emergency' issues. The public are to be encouraged to use the number 101 for the types of calls which don't warrant the full emergency response of a 999 call. The police were asking for an on-line film to promote the new number and encourage the public to use it from now on.

I directed, shot and composited the film in about three weeks with a couple of days compositing help from Chris Forrester at the end of the schedule. Due to all kinds of constraints, I decided the film could be made (almost) entirely with stills photography and After Effects compositing, so that's the way we went. I shot the film all with my Canon 600D camera, mostly using the Tokina 11-16mm wide angle zoom , but I also experimented with some of my dad's old Pentax mount lenses when shooting the panoramic cityscape shots at the start of the film.

The film has appeared on-line now (It seems the Devon & Cornwall police have put it on YouTube already) so it seems OK now to embed that link here for you to see it...

Pictures Of Turkey

Here are a few 'artsy' photos from our recent family holiday in Cirali on the South Coast of Turkey. All of these were taken with my Canon 600D camera, some with the 18-55mm kit lens and many with my new Tokina 11-16mm wide angle zoom ... Keen-eyed readers should be able to spot these ones.