New Documentary Film : Ottoman Art 1450-1600

Now online at the Hali Publishing website, here's the arts/history documentary film I have just made. This film was specially commissioned for an exhibition of fine Ottoman-era artifacts now taking place at The Palazzo Lomellino in Genoa. The film is in Italian with English subtitles.

Ottoman Art: new Arts/History Documentary Film

I'm especially pleased to have just delivered a new film to support a major exhibition of Ottoman-era artwork taking place at the Palazzo Lomellino in Genoa over the next three months. I was commissioned by Hali Publishing Ltd. (on behalf of the Bruschettini Foundation) to create the eight and a half minute film to introduce the exhibition at the prestigious gallery space in Genoa.



The film is an arts/history documentary piece taking viewers through the era 1450-1600, a time when the Ottoman empire rose to become the dominant power in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.


The cultural artifacts on display in this exhibition are particularly impressive, encompassing  a stunning collection of silk textiles, ceramics, armour and of course, fine carpets.

The film combines still imagery of such artifacts, archival illustrations and motion graphics to tell the story of the growth of the Ottoman empire and the important role that fine arts and crafts played in this era.



The script for the film was written by renowned US scholar Walter B. Denny and for this exhibition the story is narrated in Italian with English sub-titles. Currently the film is not available online, but I can thoroughly recommend a trip to Genoa to see it, here are the exhibition details.

Another Behind The Scenes film made for Simon's Cat 'Off To The Vet'

Here's another short video I've made for Simon's Cat Ltd. This is quite a simple interview video in which Simon's Cat creator Simon Tofield describes the inspiration behind his new Off To the Vet film project. As reported previously, this video was part of a month-long crowd-funding campaign by the team to raise funding for a major new film project.

Congratulations To The Simon's Cat Team

Regular readers will know I've made many videos for the Simon's Cat YouTube channel. I've made most of the 'extra' video content such as drawing lessons and behind the scenes films etc. I was also asked recently to make a pitch video for their Off To The Vet crowd-funding campaign.

Here's the 3 minute pitch video I made for the campaign...

+++ UPDATE! +++

Well I'm very pleased to note that the campaign has been an incredible success. The team surpassed their funding target of £275k with 3 days left of the campaign. The campaign has just closed, raising a total of £311,084 from Simon's Cat fans worldwide. Apparently this is one of the most successful film crowd-funding ventures in the UK to date. This is a huge achievement for all the team and will enable the crew to work to make a great film over the coming year.

New Behind The Scenes film made for Simon's Cat 'Off To The Vet'

As part of the ongoing Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign by the Simon's Cat team I was asked to make another short film. I really enjoyed shooting this one. This two minute film offers a glimpse into Simon Tofield's working methods showing how he uses sketchbooks, storyboards and animatics to plan his animated films. This was pretty much shot in one day and a one day edit too, so it's been quite refreshing to work on such a very quick turnaround.

I shot this in the Simon's Cat studio space using all my own equipment: Canon 600D DSLR and one lens; the Sigma 30mm f1.4. I really love using my Manfrotto 561BHDV-1 monopod for this kind of filming, it's a really quick way to capture shots with enough stability yet a looser and maybe more 'documentary' feel too. For audio I had my Rode VideoMicPro on the camera, but ended up using all the double system sound I had also recorded on my TASCAM DR07 MkII recorder with my newly-acquired Rode Lavalier microphone.

I edited in Premiere CS6.

New promo film made for Simon's Cat

Here it is! Above is the 3 minute promo film I've just delivered for Simon's Cat Ltd. I'm really proud to have been asked to work on this; multi-tasking as writer/director/camera-person & editor! I wish Good Luck and Best Wishes to Simon Tofield and his team and wish them every sucess with their campaign.

My Footage at Glastonbury 2014

I was watching the BBC coverage of Glastonbury Festival yesterday and caught Lana Del Rey singing her monster breakthrough hit Video Games. Playing on the screen behind her as she sang was the promo video for the song. So I watched closely and yes, a few fleeting fragments of my footage were indeed shown to the festival-goers and broadcast to the nation too.

Here she is...

And here's 'the source' of a few of those clips; my 2008 short film California 08 all shot on Super 8 cine film.

Simon's Cat hits 3 Million YouTube Subscribers.

Congratulations to Simon Tofield and The Simon's Cat team for gathering an online following of over 3 million YouTube subscribers as of today. Embedded here is a short message video I put together for Simn's Cat Ltd. in which Simon draws a special thank you message to his many fans.

New Directing Showreel: Summer 2014

Please enjoy this new show reel cut. These are all projects I have directed, and in many cases I'll have shot, animated or composited on these jobs too. You will see clips from some of my short films, plus extracts of many of the commercials and promotional films I have made. Some of this work is from my time as a Director at TANDEM and some from freelance projects too.

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.

TfL Promo Behind The Scenes Video

Here's a sweet little 'Making Of' documentary that Gemma Hogg put together for the Transport for London team whilst we were working on their 'Start Your Own Journey' promo film. The above video features interviews with TANDEM producer Emma Burch, and the two Directors, Tobias Fouracre and some other guy...

Simon Draws: Mice

Released today, another episode in the Simon Draws series of online videos I Direct/Edit for Simon's Cat Ltd. In this lesson, the inimitable Mr.Simon Tofield shows us how to draw Mice.

The Secret Nuclear Bunker: New Short (Cine) Film

Finally! I've put together my short film about The Secret Nuclear Bunker.

Followers of this blog will remember that I've made a couple of visits to this site to film with one of my 'old school' cine cameras. In this case the film was shot entirely on a Nizo 156XL Super 8; a fine German movie camera from the mid-1970s. Like most of my other recent Super 8 films, I shot with the Panasonic LA7200 Anamorphic lense adaptor to get a 16x9 format image.

As with my last couple of short films, this was shot on Black & White Argenti APX100 negative film, then developed at home in my home-made spiral processing tank. I shot three Super 8 cartridges to make this film, the first two were processed in traditional Ilford ID11 developer, the third roll in home-made Caffenol C-M developer.

The film was digitized frame by frame using my home-made film scanner. This device advances the film and captures each frame using a Canon 600D DSLR camera. The device is controlled by an Arduino card and some home-made circuitry. This capturing process is very slow, but works!

One great advantage of home-digitizing the film this way, is that I can capture a much larger image area than the single film frame, so I like to make use of this feature to present the film frames within the composited image that you see in the film. I sometimes like to leave in the sprocket holes and frame edges to get a 'fim within a film' feel.

I love shooting and processing real film like this. In my 'day job' I'm usually making films digitally, but I'm hoping that there might be a place for some of this analogue magic in some of my more commercial projects too.

Cinema 4D is Go...

For the last month or so, I've been spending some of my 'spare' time running the trial version of Cinema 4D. Well I liked it so much, I've now gone and bought the thing: the full 'Studio' version no-less. This is a pretty full 3D visualization, animation and motion graphics tool and I need to get up to speed with it.

I'll probably post a few images and thoughts about this as I go along, so expect to see a lot more of this kind of thing...

Adventures in Cinema 4D: Part 004

Well my trial period of Cinema 4D is nearly at an end, and I pretty much love it! This program is so much more accessible than other 3D software I have used, and it might just be 'the one' for me. There's a lot more I want to do with this...

New Spring 2014 Collection

Here's a new show reel of my directing work. I'm entering a new and somewhat exciting phase in my career now; offering my considerable film-making services direct to clients and agencies.

All of the work on this reel are projects I have directed, with quite a lot of my animation, shooting, compositing and editing in the mix too. Most of what you see are commercial jobs produced during my time with Tandem Films, although there are some freelance projects and clips from my own short films in there too.

I'm very keen to take on more work in the corporate video sector; promotional films, information films and documentary/event shooting too. If you have a video project in mind, please do get in touch an we'll develop your idea further together. Please find my contact details at the end of the reel.

TfL Film update 'Start Your Journey'

The short promotional film I made last year (co-directed with Tobias Fouracre at TANDEM) for Transport for London has been re-released today on the TfL YouTube channel. I've recently been asked by TfL to make a few updates to the film to reflect their continuing development of the tfl.gov.uk website.

Start Your Own Journey depicts a journey into London using the TfL website along the way to provide travel information whilst on the move. The film shows how the tfl.gov.uk website now offers improved functionality to mobile users including location-based information and real-time travel status updates.

The film was made using stop-motion animation to depict a symbolic journey through the city, but simultaneously through the virtual environment of travel information and real-time data. We also think that this treatment helps introduce the TfL Journey Planner as an appealing and user-friendly aid to negotiating the city.

I'm looking to make more informational and promotional web films directly for clients this year. Whether using live action film or graphical animation techniques, such films can help to convey ideas to customers and bring clarity to complex or hard-to-describe conceptual messages.

Please do get in touch if you have a commercial project in mind which might benefit from a promotional film. I've made many TV commercials and promotional films using a variety of techniques and can certainly bring an appropriate and unique treatment to your project too. More of my work in this field can be found at http://www.chrisgavin.com/p/corporates.html

16mm First Test: Kiev Alpha 16 Camera

I took my Kiev Alpha 16 down to the Thames one evening last week to get some test shots. Unfortunately the camera jammed again. However, this time the fault happened some way into the session, after I'd shot about 40 feet or so of film.

Tonight I DIY developed the film. The Film is Kodak 2210 (Black and White negative 'Surveillance ' Film). I processed the film in my home-made spiral processing tank using Ilford ID11 developer. I could see during the film washing that I had some images on the negative, but these seemed especially 'thin'. I think this is general under-exposure, not too surprising for these night-time shots. I put the film strip onto my light box and took a few stills. I'm always happy to see some kind of image for all this effort, but I'm pretty disappointed by the results here.

The focus is pretty awful, and there's probably a light leak here too. I think the focus problems are down to the dodgy eye-piece which moves about freely, making focus monitoring highly unreliable. I was hoping to be blown away by the 16mm frames (after working with so much Super 8) but this didn't really happen tonight.

The negative 16mm film as developed.

Digitally inverted to become a positive image.

Now desaturated to become proper monochrome.

More riverside architecture.

The London assembly building.

So in summary, I've tested out a 'new' camera and an unfamiliar film stock.The results and handling of the camera are somewhat disappointing, but on the other hand, this film works and can be home-processed. I've got a couple more of these 100 foot rolls left, so I'm encouraged to use this type of film again: but the camera... not so much.

I think I might keep an eye out for another 16mm film camera, maybe something Swiss next time.

Simon Draws: Rabbits

Just Released over on the main Simon's Cat YouTube channel, here's another short web video I directed/edited. This is another episode in the on-going series of drawing tutorials I make for Simon's Cat Ltd. In this episode, talented animator and artist Simon Tofield shows us how he draws the Rabbit character from his popular books and animation films.

These tutorial films appear on the Simon's Cat YouTube channel, and have also featured as 'extra content' on the DVD release too.

Adventures in Cinema 4D: Part 003

I'm looking into the C4D dynamics now, and having a little play with the materials too.