“The video is part of an overall concept for 13&9 design that revolves around the soul of the design itself. As we have been supporting the label from the very beginning, the conception phase was also a collaborative process of discovery with the owners, focussing on the true essence of their brand.”

That ‘brand essence’ is a core value 13&9 extended beyond their visual work with Superplus and into the musical realm with their electronica DJ mix project:

So how did Superplus go about communicating the label’s core philosophy through their visuals?

“We wanted to capture the contrasts found in 13&9 design (man/woman, black/white, angular/curved) and present them timelessly in the video, reducing the broad product range to the very core of any design, namely points, lines and surfaces.

The video was filmed in one day in a studio with minimal basic lighting and a powerful digital projector. The projections were in part adapted and edited on set.”

Links

“I stumbled across the work of Werner Amann, specifically his Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, Kids Fashion Editorial, featured on booooooom.com and automatically was transported to when my Mum used to leave my brother and I in the car as kids whilst she did the shopping. It’s a weird experience as a kid because you feel this great sense of freedom and euphoria; you take control of your own island for a short while. Then my brother and I would always end up arguing or fighting, so it’s a bizarre mixed of emotions as you sit there waiting for your parent to return… But what if your Mum didn’t return…

The film was produced during my placement year at Create Advertising London. I study Film Studies at the University of Surrey and this is really my first conventionally narrative short film. 

I firstly brought on the actors who I found through casting websites and we spent the best part of a year trying to get the film made. The three young actors are all currently enrolled in drama classes outside of school and regularly audition for feature films in the UK. 

The film was originally fully crowd-funded through the cast and crew’s friends and family but due to cancelled shoots for various reasons the production ran over budget. After successfully applying for IdeasTap’s Top Up Fund 2012, the film was back on course in September.

 It was a small intimate production, with cast and crew becoming a family, albeit a dysfunctional one, but we all had fun making the film and believe the outcome is something to be proud of.

 For me the film was purely an expression of creativity and to have a team with you that can realise and breath life into the story and imagery that you’re trying to portray is really rewarding.”

Diving into a coma, a female body experiences extreme inner tension. Its mutating silhouette gradually invades an empty space to a point of complete saturation.

Links

Having just screened as part of Channel 4′s Random Acts series here in the UK, Under The Knife by director/editor Jeremy Cole proves that the series really does live up to its label of screening bold and creative shorts. Consisting of one shot of UK singer Etta Bond split into 1374 different layers, Cole’s kaleidoscopic imagery perfectly compliments the performer’s hazy ballad, creating one of the most hypnotic shorts you’re ever likely to come across. Makes me wish I had 1374 eyes!

Cole’s short works on two different levels – on the one hand it’s a film you look at and think what a simple idea, yet if you know anything about post-production you’ll instantly wonder how the hell he achieved his look. We spoke to the filmmaker about the development of his initial pitch:

“Etta Bond had this incredible hook on a track from Labrinth’s EP which we’d heard. Myself and the exec of Lemonade Money (James Payne) met with Etta to chat about expanding on the idea and perhaps writing a spoken word piece that discussed the subject of insecurity and the image-obsessed world that we live in.

I thought it’d be cool and somewhat relevant to design a simple visual style that would distort the performance from the eye, so we could spend more time listening. A couple of weeks later, Etta sent us a rough recording of this track and I was blown away. When it came round to shooting, Etta nailed it in one take on the first pass and floored us again.”

Cole openly admits that he pitched his idea without really knowing how he’d ultimately achieve the complex multi-layered look:

We’ve long been fans of the experimental side of filmmaking here on DN and the possibilities which lay before directors who are willing to discover and discard their own rules as a project progresses. As inscrutable as some of these pieces may seem on first watch, they often contain a coherence, which while not obvious, will gradually reveal itself to you on subsequent viewings as you become conversant with their internal logic. The Le Mystère music video from director Raoul Paulet for Hugo & The Prismatics is one such piece:

We asked Raoul for a guided tour through the creative and technical challenges presented by this journey of self-discovery, which mixes Kuroko, surreal optical illusions, animation and analogue visual effects:

“The main creative challenge was to merge performing arts with design, animation and VFX, without relying just on CGI techniques. I wanted to create a world, where geometries could mix together, while 2D and 3D spaces were blended into one dimension to create an optical illusion, a distortion of the reality. I also wanted to explore the idea of the Japanese Kuroko technique, by turning it into something more contemporary, with a strong link to the design and animation field. For example, I asked performers to animate objects and move things with a constant eye on the dynamic of those ‘manual animations’. But their roles weren’t just about this; they were also active presences on the stage. By interpreting all the black shadows the actress could see, feel, or was trying to escape from, it was my intention to give the Kuroko black mask people the space they deserve on stage as actors in their own right. I also approached the stage as if it was a Photoshop/After Effects canvas. I wanted to work within a living layout, whilst focussing on creating (beautiful and very aesthetical) analogue and ‘in camera’ effects.”

“One of the main technical challenges was to create the set: the main scene we built to represent this surreal world. The approach we settled on was to give the viewer the feeling that it was already retouched on Photoshop (that analogue effect, again!) Another big technical challenge was to design and animate dynamic scenes in camera, i.e. the scene of the mirrors. In this scene, we see the lead actress falling over a mirror, impact and break it into a lot of smaller bits. We had to:

A big plus of this project has been the collaboration with performers and dancers who already know how to deal with space and can reproduce the same dynamics of a slow motion/accelereated action.”

With so much of Le Mystère achieved through an inventive approach to practical effects and Raoul’s intention to maintain the feeling of watching a theatre stage, post was more of a ‘final touches’ exercise, in which a software mix of Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects were employed to retouched scenes with CG animation, vector shapes or colour correction to enhance the surreal world.

Links:

- Raoul Paulet
- Terrible Twins
- Pitch&Folks

Todiwala explains how the project came to be:

“We wanted to create somewhat of an alien atmosphere by using macro shots so we chose to film ink drops dropping in an aquarium. We back-lit the aquarium using a LED panel, dropped acrylic inks in the aquarium and filmed it using a 5d MK III and Zeiss 100mm lens. We brought the footage into After Effects, inverted the colors (so that we got a black background) and used several effects to create space. Effects such as mirroring, kelidoscope and so on. The sound mix was done using sounds from NASA’s Voyager archives. Some of the films that inspired us to create this atmosphere were Enter the Void, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien.”

“The ‘Man +’ series for me is a way to express myself in a very uncomplicated way, it is all about being human and with each film that I make for the ‘Man +’ series I try to tap into the human sense of how we perceive things.

A man with stockings on his head can not be a man with stockings on his head due to perception, he needs to be a robber a criminal, but it is not the clothes that makes the man evil it is the actions of the man that either makes him good or bad.”

Prepare to reevaluate your preconceptions:

You can see Onishi’s installation in situ below:

And if you long to see how Onishi’s simple shapes behave and sound when freed from their frames, take a look at his wonderful video for Haisuinonasa’s Dynamics of the Subway:

“The work consists of his three responses to the location: painting his subjective vision, his interview responses to the questions I asked while he painted and the music that his visits to Burnham had inspired him to improvise.”

And if you were at all curious about — how to use violence, stop motion animation and light bulbs to depict the life of a creative person in 60 seconds– here’s the making of:

Always a band happy experiment in their videos, Liars and director Markus Wambsganss put volumetric video to hauntingly good use in the promo for The Exact Color of Doubt from the band’s WIXIW album.

If like us you just can’t get enough of Liars and their strange music videos, take a look at ALEX/2TONE’s b&w basket ball promo for WIXIW, which we somehow never got round to posting.

Our body remembers more than we can expect and imagine. It remembers also the sorrow and pain of the predecessors, sustaining the stories of our parents and grandparents as well as their ancestors. But, how far back is it possible to go in the memory of the body?

“GQ Spain proposed a film to me inspired by the characters of the book that I see in all books shops, but it’s clear to me that in a contemporary sexual relationship a kiss hides more than a tongue.”

Heads up, there’s some NSFW images in these.

It’s also a collaboration between Japanese director Takashi Ohashi and composer Yuri Habuka; and 6 mins of the most wonderful animated visuals you’re likely to see for quite some time.

Not one to select projects due to their ease of execution, director Joseph Ernst hit the streets of London with a 100 year old hand cranked 35mm camera for documentary Londoners and even considered drilling a hole in his jaw to get the shot in experimental film Feeder. Joseph joins us to discuss finding projects that contain something of the unusual and the unseen.

I really wanted it to be about a community’s relationship with the camera.

Showlinks
Joseph Ernst Projects
@joseph_ernst
Joseph Ernst
Londoners
Feeder
Photographic Hire

You may remember Nickolas Duarte from our interview with him for surreal short What You Need, but a melancholic monkey boy looks positively run of the mill in comparison to his ‘shitty art movie’ Joke. I would tell you more about it, but it’s probably best to let Nickolas set out the on-set scene:

“This project had like zero money and so we could only rent out a shitty basement in what appeared to be a one time meat packing factory.

I decided to poke my head upstairs. The owner of the facility neglected to mention that on the main floor there’d be a major photoshoot all day. There were probably 2 dozen or more models walking around. Several photographers. Hair, make-up, stylists and wardrobe people. I locked eyes with a photographer my age. I was filled with anger and confusion. Somehow through a series of life choices, he was taking pictures of beautiful mostly naked women and I was wrapping a 2 day old dead chicken in worms.”

In case you hadn’t gathered, Joke is very weird and probably best not viewed just before dinner.