The main character in my film is someone who is trying hard to focus on pleasant memories but whose mind is continually invaded by negative ones. The character never speaks, so lens whacking is one way in which I saw fit to translate his psychology visually. The film's aesthetic is based around light and it's relationship metaphorically to memory, so this also made the effect well suited. By detaching the lens and moving it back and forth in front of the sensor, focus can be shifted rapidly from a slight depth of field to deep focus, and light leaks in natural, smooth streaks and washes onto the sensor. Additionally, we also chose to flag around the backend of the lens to have more control over the light and distorted the image by twisting the lens away from the sensor at an angle. A lot of cameras nowadays can shoot without a lens, particularly DSLR's, but we were using a Panasonic AF101E which doesn't, necessitating taping down the contacts to fool the camera. What was achieved by DoP Garry Torrance can be seen below. I'm very fond of when equipment is misused or pushed further than intended for artistic effect. Either for DIY necessity or visual aesthetic, there's something pleasurable about being witness to crafty and brash invention. I had the joy of working on Josh Loftin's I Can't Be Kaspar as a sound recordist, a film which used cheapo-espionage cameras in lighters and glasses. Josh wanted the film to live inside the head of the central character and also film real situations between his actors and the public without visible cameras. There's many examples of rough-and-ready cinematography. Ben Wheatley's A Field in England used a Holga toy camera and cheap telescope glass to create a fantastic otherworldly atmosphere (watch their behind-the-scenes video here). The hard-to-find Another Girl, Another Planet by Michael Almereyda, a favourite of mine ever since I bought it on a whim from a Global Video bargain bin years ago, used a Fisher Price Pixelvision camera, which records on standard cassette audio tapes and renders everything in a shimmering lo-fi somewhere below corner shop CCTV in quality. You could call it a gimmick, but obfuscation becomes viewer engagement and peering into Almereyda's ghostly murk feels immersive and dreamlike for me in a way no film apart from Primer has since accomplished. UPDATE: I've uploaded my VHS copy of Another Girl Another Planet here I'd love to find more examples, or hear stories from other filmmakers who have dabbled in weird techniques and risked breaking their equipment for the sake of a film, so please comment below.
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These photos were shot during a Hasidic Kaparot ceremony in Williamsburg, New York. The older men and women were teaching the children, who tended to the chickens, how the ceremony was performed. Kaparot, meaning 'atonements', is a ritual deemed by those who practise it as a transfer of the sins of the past year on to the chicken. The chicken is swung overhead three times as prayers are recited. The photo below was selected to be published by National Geographic online here, chosen by National Geographic photographer Randy Olson. After the ceremony, the chicken is ritually slaughtered and often the meat is distributed to the poor. The ceremony is very controversial with other Jewish movement and animal rights groups. PETA was present in Williamsburg attempting to dissuade against the use of chickens by giving out money, which is sometimes used as a substitute.
Learn more here FLASHBULB is a 10-minute drama about the power of memory in family relationships. Obsessed with recreating a happy memory from childhood, Daniel, a reclusive young man, builds an elaborate machine to help him regress to a past where he was more content. However, troubling memories of his estranged alcoholic father prevent him from happily dwelling in his ideal memories. The film, which I wrote and directed, will be screening at the 2014 Ickle Film Fest in Dundee, Scotland, during the 18th to the 21st of September. The programme is still to be determined. More info can be found here and STV published an article about the festival here Watch a trailer for Flashbulb below David Graham Scott's documentary Iboga Nights, which I was thrilled to be a part of as the animator of a drug trip sequence, is screening at the 2014 Open City Docs Fest, London's global documentary film festival. It's also up for the Best UK Film Award. The film will be screening on Thursday the 19th of June at 6pm in the Cinema Tent. See more about the film here. Synopsis: Iboga is a rainforest shrub and psychedelic that has been used for generations in West African possession rituals. Today in Europe, a burgeoning movement promotes iboga as a quick fix route to painless withdrawal from heroin addiction. In a Dutch suburb several addicts embark on the long night of psychedelic detox under the watchful eye of an experienced iboga practitioner. One client collapses and ends up on life- support. The provider is jailed. David Graham Scott (Detox or Die) investigates how truly effective, or dangerous, iboga is. Explicitly filmed from the drug- user’s point of view, this is fascinating and challenging viewing. VIMEO TRAILER Produced a promo for Hebrides Ensemble's upcoming concert series marking the centenary of the First World War. Details of the concerts can be found here. Hebrides Ensemble marks the centenary of the outbreak of World War 1 with a programme commemorating that era and its recurring themes of tragedy, loss, demoralisation, defiance and hope. Together, the pieces reflect the pre-war order and passion that turned to violent turmoil, and challenged our deepest human values. Baritone Marcus Farnsworth joins Hebrides Ensemble for the centrepiece of the programme, George Butterworth’s achingly beautiful A Shropshire Lad, which juxtaposes rural idyll with the tragic premonition of loss, especially in the famous The Lads in their Hundreds. American composer Ned Rorem’s War Scenes frame the programme with Walt Whitman’s more explicit experience of the futility of an earlier war, the American Civil War, whilst Stuart MacRae sets Wilfred Owen’s The Parable of the Old Men and the Young in a new work specially commissioned by Hebrides Ensemble. Extra Life have decided to call it quits. A great shame as they were one of the most unique and exciting bands around, equal parts intellectual technique and savage uproar. They leave a solid catalogue of great work though, all available on Bandcamp. Third - and now sadly last - LP Dream Seeds was released in April of last year. Below is the track Ripped Heart, a personal favourite from the EP of the same name. It defines the band pretty well: complicated arrangements of classical music theory/stadium rock collage that swerve unnervingly quickly from delicate to violent. Weed and war protest are still distasteful to the upper crust of France, but not enough to scupper the honouring of Bob Dylan. Despite fuss over his past, Dylan is to receive his Legion d'Honneur award today, securing him in the lofty ranks of the drug-free Miles Davis and Stonewall supporter Vladimir Putin as foreigners deemed worthy of French state praise. Dylan was originally proposed the honour on the 50th anniversary of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, but there was worry about whether Blowin' in the Wind was a vile ode to peace from pinko scum or merely a fun ditty about meteorological awareness. Anyway, a more important anniversary is that this month marks ten years since the last U.S. Maple album, Purple On Time. To wrap things with a bow, Purple On Time features a great - surprisingly straight - cover of Dylan's Lay Lady Lay. Funny how things work out. "The fucking pubs are fucking dull The fucking clubs are fucking full" Pub punk from Splodgenessabounds about the difficulty of getting them in before the bell. Oi! doesn't get you anywhere, apart from maybe Top of the Pops. Keep it civil. Leaning over with your elbows out on the bar makes you seem pushy, but you don't want a sidler to skip in. Just calmly try and catch the eye. And don't wave your money, for god's sake, it's not the races.
Formed in Peckham, The Splodges supposedly won the Melody Maker band competition in 1976 by appearing naked apart from cardboard boxes on their heads. This track was their debut single, released in 1980 with a parody of the theme for Return of the Saint and Michael Booth's Talking Bum as b-sides. It reached #7 in the charts and is now tragically best known as the basis for the title of a humourless 'sitcom'.
FUNimation release the 25th anniversary edition Blu-Ray/DVD of Katsuhiro Ohtomo's Akira today, a perfect opportunity to celebrate and re-evaluate the classic anime.
Condensing the plot of Otohmo's concurrently ongoing epic manga into a two hour film, the anime proved to be a runaway success and a gateway film for western audiences. The release of Akira in 1988, with the addition of Grave Of The Fireflies and My Neighbour Totoro the same year, marked a new sophistication in Japanese animation and the start of its mainstream success worldwide.
2019: It's been 31 years since Tokyo was reduced to a crater in a sudden flash of light, sparking World War 3. The remains lie as a black hole at the center of the new metropolis, Neo-Tokyo, built on the rubble. The egotistical Kaneda runs the Capsules biker gang, while long-suffering sidekick Tetsuo boils under his inferiority complex. A motorcycle crash after a run-in with an escaped subject of psychic experiments puts Tetsuo in hospital in the custody of the psychic project's leader, Colonel Shikishima, and reveals Tetsuo's own latent psychic powers. Dissident revolutionaries, apocalypse worshipping cultists and a secret government project related to Tokyo's destruction, known as Akira, whirl around the developing emnity between the ever-more powerful Tetsuo and the befuddled Kaneda. Who or what is Akira? Tetsuo seeks answers below Tokyo as he evolves increasingly god-like powers that eventually spiral out of control. The production techniques in Akira were ground-breaking for Japanese animation at the time, making full use of the mammoth $11mill budget and staff of 70 animators. Character's expressions and mouth movements were drawn to pre-scored dialogue, advanced multi-layered perspective was used for depth and sense of scale, and an expanded use of dark colours created authentic night scenes. Standard outlandish anime style was out, as was traditional heroic storytelling, in favour of darker and more realistic art, narrative and characterisation. Akira exploits Japan's specific societal concerns with overcrowding, youth alienation and generational disconnection from the wartime past, but also universal themes of technophobia, adolescence and the cyclical nature of war. Power is the core of the film; who has it and who wants to take it. Japan knows better than any country about the perils of technology and messiah complexes, and fear of power and its seduction pervades the film. Within the tangled web of themes and symbols in Akira is a confrontational allegory of generations, split by World War 2 and the nuclear bomb, that don't understand one another. However, all this grand subject matter in the film is in service to what is, essentially, a fast-paced action blockbuster with a moving story of rivalry and maturation.
Alongside the animation, Akira's soundtrack is another remarkable component. The hundredfold membership musical collective Geinoh Yamashirogumi were commissioned by Ohtomo following the success of their album Ecophony Rinne, which displayed a unique mix of traditional Japanese music and enterprising electronics. Led by artist/scientist Tsutomu Ōhashi, the collective recorded modular pieces based on various themes over six months, without the benefit of scoring to finished scenes. The influences were wide: Nogaku theatre, Buddhist chants, Christian choral, Balinese gamelan, progressive rock. The effect is a startlingly turbulent mix of ancient spiritualism battling modernity, which corresponds perfectly with the themes of the film. The freedom from the limitations of budget, time and scene-matching served the compositions, allowing focus on development of mood over pacing for the film's sequences.
Akira is a frequently baffling, convoluted film that suffers from the same frayed chaos as its setting. Despite this, the film holds together and the rambling strangeness and density are part of its enduring charm.
I think a great double-bill partner for Akira would be Shane Carruth's Upstream Color. Biological manipulation, bewildering puzzle narratives and great soundtracks. Watch them early and you can spend the rest of the night trying to work out what the hell both of them are really about.
For more Katsuhiro Ohtomo animation, watch Construction Suspension Order and Memories, for which Ohtomo directed the section Magnetic Rose.
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