Elbow in a church

Last night, (big thanks to my cousin Steve), we got to see the band Elbow play at the St. John at Hackney church. The gig was arranged as part of the Little Noise Sessions in aid of the charity MENCAP.

The band are a really class act and they probably ought to be with this being their 20th year playing together. I was fortunate enough to also see them play at Cambridge Junction earlier this year (thanks again to my cousin Steve), so by luck I saw the band at both ends of their 2011 tour, and both times up-close in pretty small venues.

Seeing a gig in a church seems to be something of a modern trend, and the St. John at Hackney delivered well as a unique and quirky venue with lots of architectural character. The gig was being filmed; there was a fella re-purposing the pulpit as a handy vantage point for some adventurous Polecam shooting. I'd be very curious to see how that footage turned out...

Simon Draws: Simon's Cat

This last week at work I have been mostly editing for Simon's Cat Ltd. We're putting together some short educational films showing how the hugely talented Simon Tofield draws his amazing cartoons. This first film shows Simon sketching his much-loved Simon's Cat character complete with his own narration. Simon drew straight into Adobe Flash and we used screen capture software to record his performance. Simon's voice over was recorded simultaneously as high quality .wav files using an Edirol digital sound recorder and my Rode Videomic pro shotgun microphone. The backing music was specially recorded for the film by Shrooty (a.k.a. composer and sound designer Russell Pay).

New Film Old Camera

Well, these little yellow boxes on my desk can only mean one thing...



Yep, that's right, I'm scratching my 8mm itch again. Some weekends recently I've been out and about in Enfield shooting some proper cine film. I bought 3 rolls of this Kodak Ektachrome 100T film, and have shot almost 2 of them already.

I've been getting some funny looks from the locals whilst shooting... we don't get many tourists in Enfield, and even if we did, not many of them would be filming with a camera like this...



Yep, it's my 'new' Nizo 156XL, and the monstrosity stuck on the front is the Panasonic LA7200 Anamorphic lens adaptor. WHAT? Yes, I'm making my little film in Super8 16x9 format... exciting stuff.

The first finished roll has already been processed at Andec FilmTechnik lab in Germany and returned. (A round-trip of three weeks!) I've now sent that film over to Uppsala Bildteknik in Sweden for a Flashscan HD transfer. (I'll possibly blog a bit more about the logistics of all of this at a  later date.)

Who knows how the film will come out... Will it be jittery, will it be sharp, and for that matter will it be any damn good at all ???

Text Message

Spins From the Bin

Whilst archiving data off my PC hard drive, I've un-earthed many tests and experimental projects; lots of these are things that never saw the light of day, until now... First up, we have some of my adventures in the field of audio/music making.

Stunned
Back in 2005 then I was experimenting with Cubasis and playing around with some text to speech software. There's even a little bit of accoustic guitar in here, how rock 'n' roll is that?
Stunned by projectmusic

Xylofonos
This second example is also circa 2005. This repetitive piece of plinky plonky electronica became the soundtrack for my 2006 animation film Evo.
Xylofonos by projectmusic

Pony
Now to bring things more up to date, here is some 2011 material! I recently downloaded a demo version of Mixcraft and had another go; perhaps some kind of soundtrack piece, maybe for another short film...
Pony by projectmusic

Information Film for Camelot Property Management

At the very end of last year I produced,directed,designed and edited this 13 minute corporate film for Camelot Property Management. The company rents out living spaces in properties that would otherwise lie dormant and unused. Camelot Property Management hired me to create an informational film to be presented to all prospective customers of their service.

Given the information-rich content of the film and the importance of the legal and safety information involved; the client and I decided on a very clean 'info-graphics' style for maximum clarity. The video contains text-animation, simple CGI animation, 2D graphical animation and some 'rotoscoped' live action characters too.

The entire video is now over on the Camelot website and YouTube channel, so I now feel happy to embed a link to the film...

A Special Slide Show

We went to see The Specials play at Alexandra Palace last night. It was a cracking gig, and I'm still wondering where all of those middle-aged skinheads turned up from, I mean, where do they go the rest of the time?

Anyway, one of the clear highlights of the gig, didn't feature the band at all. Right before The Specials came on, we had John Barry's Theme from The Persuaders accompanied by a projected slide show of still photos covering life in Britain over the past 30 years. The first photo was Margaret Thatcher, the last one was David Cameron, the obvious question being, how have things changed/stayed the same over these last three decades?

The skillfully-sequenced pictures covered every news-worthy triumph and disaster imaginable. From sporting moments to terrorist attacks, the selection of images was spot on: a reminder of just how powerful these editorial stills can be.

The band kicked-off with Gangters, the irresistable ska took over and the Rude Boys (and somewhat fewer Rude Girls) began leaping up and down with increasing abandon; partying like it was 1979.

Cheap Book Club Chronicles : Volume One by Bob Dylan £3

Following in the esteemed footsteps of Oprah Winfrey, Richard and indeed Judy, I announce the Cheap Book Club... All books must be second-hand, borrowed, freebies or hugely discounted to qualify for review... No new or expensive books will be considered...

Here's a book I've just hugely enjoyed... It came out in 2004, but I've waited seven years for the £3 discounted paperback to appear...

I 'discovered' Bob Dylan in my impressionable 1980s mid-teens after seeing the D.A. Pennebaker documentary film Don't Look Back. (see the all time classic Subterranean Homesick Blues via YouTube embedded below). I was impressed enough then to seek out more; even to go out and buy a few albums. So Chronicles : Volume One was an easy read for me. I think you have to have some interest to pick up this book, but you don't have to be a hard-core Dylan fan to enjoy the story as it's told.

Bob Dylan seems to have lived an accelerated life; even to the extent of achieving his mid-life crisis in his twenties. We read here as much about his doubts and uncertainties as we do his output of songs and albums.

New York's early '60s folk club scene is vividly brought to life; then the book makes thematically-based leaps, lurching forwards and backwards in time from there. There are extended dry periods when Dylan seeks motivation and is continually bewildered by the expectations of others. There are curious gaps in his recording work and similarly in his telling of it too. The recording of most of the great albums goes without a mention, then he singles out the New Orleans recording sessions for the 'Oh Mercy' album with Daniel Lanois in 1989 for particular scrutiny.

Chronicles is an eclectic and entirely subjective selection of moments from an extraordinary life: yet it's the process by which Dylan comes to his writing that emerges from the tangled-up  reminiscences here.

Book club members (Well that's anybody really) are invited to use the comments feature below to discuss the book...

I liked it.

8mm Early 90s : Super8 film ... YouTube Reloaded

Here's a collection of my old 'college days' super 8 footage from the early 1990s. I've re-uploaded it to my YouTube Channel, because the quality of this now is so much better than it was with 2008 YouTube compression and low resolution settings I used previously... I mean, it was THREE whole years ago I first put this online.

I've also now upgraded my music licence for the soundtrack I chose back in 2008 to edit this to. The music is called 'Secrets From The Screen' by Chris Harvey; I discovered/licenced this through Magnatune.com

Fans of this blog. (erm... consider yourself to be one of a very small and select group in this respect) might notice I've just added FaceBook 'like' buttons to these posts. Go ahead, I invite you to try them out... You might also spot the comment button too... that has always been there (where it says 0 comments); but granted, it is easily over-looked.

Simon's Cat: Kitten Chaos Premiere Event Film

Well this IS very exciting! Two weeks ago I was hired by Canongate Books / Simon's Cat Ltd. to film the launch event for Simon Tofield's new book 'Kitten Chaos'. I shot lots of footage (and some stills) at the event and then spent around a week getting this edited down to this short web-friendly promo film. I'll probably post a bit more soon about shooting the event itself, but in the meantime, please enjoy the film embedded here from the Canongate Books YouTube channel.