A few weeks back myself and Oli Kember shot with Boris and Sergey, two potty mouthed Eastern European puppets with a penchant for the theatrical. They are the proud employees of Flabbergast Theatre, run by Henry Maynard, an actor and compere who was also the star of my recent 48 hr short film. Henry’s a staggeringly talented chap and you can hear more from him on Wideopencamera here. I first became interested in puppets when I saw Henry perform Faeries at the Royal Opera House before Christmas and was just blown away by how fluid, expressive and entertaining the puppets could be. They’re operated in the Bunraku style, with three visible puppeteers but you become completely lost in the characters themselves and quickly forget that there are people actually moving them around. This is our first experiment in taking the puppets into film land as they’re normally very much a stage act. Strangely you actually have no idea how to frame the shots as there are so many subjects in frame. Concentrating on just the characters and not worrying if you cut off puppeteers heads is pretty much the best way. On stage you’re very aware of the actor performing the puppet and the interaction between puppets and puppeteers can be very entertaining, but with a film version it’s much more intimately connected to the puppets themselves. They have no facial expressions yet these guys are able to convey the most unbelievable amount through physical expression. It’s brilliant stuff and I’m looking forward to doing more. My career seems to be dragging me fast towards non-traditional methods of expression, filmmaking and storytelling and another big piece of work coming up involves creating a complete storyworld for a luxury brand in a way you’ve never seen before. Seeing how much great performers can achieve with so little on stage is so inspiring. We often agonise over every decision and the budget ramifications of those decisions, sometimes it’s nice to just let great performance do it all for you. Good fun.

Technorati Tags: black and white, boris, boris and sergey, bunraku, flabbergast theatre, henry maynard, puppets, sergey, short film, silent film, unrequited love

Chris Cunningham has always been one of my heroes. Along with Jonathan Glazer, Mark Romanek and Michel Gondry, he was one of those music video directors whose work you eagerly looked forward to. He hasn’t shot any music videos for a good long while now but his back catalogue includes the Aphex Twin masterpieces ‘Come to Daddy‘ and ‘Windowlicker‘, the Bjork ‘All is full of love‘ video, Madonna’s ‘Frozen‘, Leftfield’s ‘Afrika Shox‘ (unbelievable video) and my personal favourite, Squarepusher’s ‘Come on my Selector’. Cunningham only rarely shoots music videos these days, not surprising really given how far the budgets have shrunk. Last night I went to see Chris Cunningham live at the Roundhouse in Camden and was expecting to be blown away. But I wasn’t.

The show features remixes of other artists’ work, some original compositions and of course a potent visual element with three screens assaulting the senses with a dizzying mix of horror porn, flesh and danger. Cunningham himself shambles onto stage to hide behind a MacBookPro, long hair the only sign that this might in fact be the famous director. The crowd whistles, cheers, whoops and braces itself. Here be fans of the highest order. And it starts well, ambient noise accompanied by floating sci-fi lightscapes, reminiscent of Blade Runner, gently revealing themselves to be New York subway lights, passing through tunnels. The craggy face of what looks like a homeless man sings a dirge about New York, accompanied by thrashing drum hits and flashes of light. It’s a good beginning. It’s a remix of “New York Is Killing Me”, one of the songs he worked on for Gil Scott-Heron’s album ‘I’m New Here’. And it gets better. Next we’re treated to a nightmare vision of a young boy being pushed and prodded by invisible fingers, his body thrashing around to the manic drum and bass rhythms as the light bulbs in the ceiling of his room fire electric danger through his body. The action takes place to the menacing sound of a metronome thwacking relentlessly back and forth on the outside screens. It’s dark and disturbing, but as with all the best Cunningham work, there’s a sense of humour to it, and I found myself laughing. Again, so far so good.

But just when you think it’s all about to develop into something genuinely breathtaking, it just doesn’t. A pseudo dance piece featuring two naked protagonists evolves into domestic violence and ends in penetrative sex, Rubber Johnny, the lead character from his 2005 short film, makes an appearance and the ears are continuously assaulted and battered by the thumping, scraping, mashing music. I heard someone behind me nudge his companion and tell him to expect ‘audio rape’. That’s a pretty fair description. The problem with the show is that you can’t quite pin down what it’s supposed to be. Is it a DJ set, is it a film, is it something else altogether? It’s not quite clear. You can of course say that Cunningham is doing whatever he wants and that’s fair enough. As long as it’s good.

In isolation the pieces are extraordinary, but linked together as a show they demonstrate a mind-numbing repetitiveness and a surprising lack of creativity. To call it one dimensional is unfair, but Cunningham seems to have only two gears: thrash the shit out of everything, or sub bass drone. He revels in knitting the visuals so tightly to the music, every crackle, fizz, pop and slash cut with a razor by the images so that you sometimes wonder which came first, the music or the images. The Squarepusher video demonstrated this but it was breathtaking and so imaginative that it blew my mind. Watching last night it felt like he’d become so obsessed with that connection between the edit and the music that he’d gone too far. There’s seemingly no creativity, it’s just the same images repeated over and over again in the same pattern. Very quickly it loses its effect and, dare I say it, I actually got bored. It’s hard to imagine being bored while your ears are being pounded by one of the most extreme electronic soundtracks you’re likely to hear this year and your eyes are being drop-kicked by human forms being brutalised and punished, but I was.

The problem with the show is that it feels like its based on one idea that doesn’t know where to go. 45 mins is a long time to be subjected to the same thing over and over and I can’t help feeling he missed a trick to create a more varied journey. It’s peculiar, but he came across as a poor imitation of… well of himself. After 35 mins I was utterly utterly bored and I left. When you’re paying £28 to stand up and watch someone’s work you hope that it’s going to be better than that. More variety, more guile, more imagination, more ideas, is that too much to ask? Chris Cunningham’s videos left a profound effect on the way I appreciate the form and they are true originals, but he doesn’t appear to have moved on at all. Still the same fascination with the human body a la grotesque, and it all just feels a little bit old now. French director Romain Gavras is currently much more provocative and intriguing and if you’ve seen his video for Justice’s Stress, or M.I.A.’s Born free you’ll know what I mean. What happened Chris? What was he even doing on the stage, making sure the laptop didn’t go to sleep? The Roundhouse is an awesome venue and deserves a better use of the space than a triptych of screens. Oh well.

If I were to award stars the way reviewers do then this would get 2/5. Very disappointed.

Rating: **

Technorati Tags: afrika shox, all is full of love, aphex twin, bjork, chris cunningham, come to daddy, frozen, jonathan glazer, leftfield, madonna, michel gondry, roundhouse, rubber johnny, squarepusher, warp records, windowlicker

I have a growing library of books sitting on the shelves of my humble little office. I actually wrote a post about them for Iamneedcreative.net which you can find here. I’m self-taught and while a lot of what I know has come from just learning on the job I do find myself constantly coming back to these books to refine my technical skills, and to put the way I’m approaching a couple of projects into perspective. I don’t think I’ll ever stop learning but I do feel now, after ten years of doing this, that I’m starting to find my feet. Which is an odd thing to say I’ll admit. But it feels as though the quality of work I’d like to be known for is vaguely within reach. And that’s fantastic. But it’s only half the battle. I keep banging on about it in this blog but films are pointless if no-one sees them. Actually, that’s probably being a bit over the top but I think the goal of film is to engage an audience. The problem is that it’s bloody hard to find that audience and hold onto it long enough to really engage them properly. And this is what I’m wrestling with at the moment.

Transmedia is proving really interesting at the moment as we work through the madness of Super Massive Raver. That project is basically a laboratory for me, a chance to try my hand at comedy, to develop my After Effects skills and dip a toe into 3D animation. It’s also a project that could, only could at this stage, go stratospheric. That opens doors and gets you noticed, never a bad thing. Multi-platform storytelling is a bit of a bitch to get your head around as it involves handing over a big part of the process to your audience, which is completely anathema to the rigid, controlled process of traditional filmmaking. Broadcasters are crying out for transmedia properties in this country and it’s an inevitable fact of modern screen entertainment that we now have many digital mouths to feed. There’s a couple of books I highly recommend acquiring if you’re interested in learning more about transmedia and innovative distribution. The first is ‘Think outside the box office’, Jon Reiss’s ultimate guide to film distribution and marketing for the digital era. I heard Jon speak at the Photocine Expo last year and it really opened my eyes to the structured and smart way you could fashion and retain an audience.

In many ways it’s like building on wet sand. If you shake it, the water rises to the surface causing liquefaction, and your whole edifice sinks. However, sink short rods into the sad and these keep the whole foundation nice and stable. The social media, distribution landscape is a whole mess of wet sand, completely treacherous and very difficult to build on. However, by building your campaign on the support of a few key social media mavens intimately related to the subject matter of your project, you stand a much better chance of riding out what might be thrown at you. Jon’s book promotes the idea of bringing in a Producer of Marketing and Distribution at a very early stage in your project specifically to engage with your audience and build those rods right from the word go. Easier said than done but his film ‘Bomb it’ is proof that it works.

The second book, Frank Rose’s ‘The Art of Immersion‘ deals specifically with transmedia storytelling, looking at a number of successful and less successful case studies, including the WhySoSerious campaign for the Dark Knight and the Dunder Mifflin website that accompanies the US series of the office. He drifts off into a neuroscience at the end of the book to try and explain our psychological responses to unpredictable rewards systems (most obviously manifested in the ‘twist’ ending of stories) and why transmedia seems to be effective in creating audience engagement. It’s certainly given me some good ideas in my search for a way to create a truly unique experience with SMR and I highly recommend it.

You could quite happily go through your production career not knowing this stuff but for me, the need to be entrepreneurial these days is actually unleashing new avenues of creativity and I do find myself enjoying the challenge of it. I’ve spent the last two years since I turned freelance trying to work out where on earth I fit into the current production landscape as it just seems to be so uncertain and unknowable. With these two books on my desk I do at least feel like I’ve got a shot now.

Technorati Tags: distribution, film, frank rose, jon reiss, the art of immersion, think outside the box office, transmedia

I’ve been working on Super Massive Raver for some time now and it’s continually proved itself a great little intellectual workout to keep the brain ticking over while I’m prepping for film projects coming later in the year. Cheryl Cole, the pop pixie known as the ‘Nation’s Sweetheart’ in the UK was yesterday sacked from the US version of the very popular show the X Factor. We gave ourselves 24 hours to knock up an episode and get it on YouTube. We succeeded and we’ll be doing that every week from now on. Ouch. SMR now has a feature film script written and at third draft stage, we’re talking to TV production companies about how we might work to get the little nutcase on TV and we’re starting to see some real movement on that front. The project has really got me thinking hard about transmedia, multi-platform storytelling and there are some really creative and elegant ways we can build the project. At this stage we’re still just a tiny little adventure but that could quickly turn into something very much more intriguing. Multi-platform isn’t for everyone but with the right kind of project, and this is genuinely what I believe we have, it could really fly. Ultimately, if I could spend 18 months or so getting paid to dream up crazy and creative adventures for SMR that would make me very happy.

Technorati Tags: 3d glasses, cheryl cole, comedy, Super Massive Raver

There seem to be a number of inescapable facts surrounding film and video production at the moment, among them the proliferation of new filmmakers, good and bad, the increasing cheapness of the digital toolset and the industry’s seemingly headlong plunge into exactly the same mess the music industry is in. I’m a professional, earning my living working variously in television, music video, corporate and latterly mainly in post production. I had stopped directing anything other than my own material because I was fed up of giving all my creative energies to projects where I simply wasn’t getting anything back for it and, now I’ve put a decent reel together, I just want to go after the fiction work that inspires me and to which I want dedicate the majority of my time. But of course the problem is how to make money from it.

I wrote an article on WideOpenCamera this week (incidentally where you can find me generally being shouty and obnoxious twice a week now) criticising Tom Lowe from Timescape for the way he was presenting the pre-sales for his film. I was pretty harsh. Probably too harsh. Here’s a guy trying to make an honest buck and there I was hammering him for a pretty small issue. Strangely, those who hated me for it tended to be people who were relatively new to this world, whereas those who supported me had been around a little while. The debate rages on at WOC but in the end it all stems from the difficulty we all face in carving out workable revenue streams for our work.

Avatar was the most downloaded film in history, but it made an awful lot of money too. Piracy is a fact, and it appears we can simply do nothing about it. So, the challenge really lies in creating two things, a highly motivated audience who will gladly evangelise your work and ‘better than piracy’ experiences. Spotify is a classic example of this – it’s just a lot more convenient to pay a little bit for an almost limitless supply of music, streamed straight to you. This I like. I also like apps, the one click to buy purchase mechanism ensures your target audience can have what they desire instantly. Something I suggested to Tom Lowe on WOC was to tour the Timescapes film around the country and do a live show with a Q&A to follow. The material felt like it might work beautifully as a backdrop to a band playing a live album set. Musicians now use albums to drive concert ticket sales, there’s no reason we can’t do the same thing with films.

There’s been a decent amount of encouraging news for filmmakers of late with the introduction of new video streaming websites sporting quick and easy payment mechanisms. They’re not as straightforward as the app store but it’s a start. Distrify and Dynamo Player are well worth checking out. They offer integrated social media tools and embed codes along with a Paypal payment engine so your viewers can watch a preview, decide if they like what they see and make a quick purchase to continue watching. As with everything your pricing will determine how many click through. Distrify also offers the chance to buy a hard copy or even merchandise as part of your store. You do the marketing, if you’ve got a compelling product then people will probably buy. The embed feature means the content could literally go anywhere online and this is really big news. The hosting sites take an administration fee, but if you look at the pie chart for a modern feature film, distributors traditionally take a monstrous portion of your profit. That hurts.

I’ve been smashing my head against the idiocy that is YouTube for some time now and, though there are some really successful channel owners I’ve resigned myself to the fact that this probably isn’t the right platform for me. Blip.tv this week redesigned their website to reflect a new desire within the company to make it much much easier to find good content. Working with the top 5% of their content creators (yes, I don’t know how they work that out either) they’ll actively curate the content, meaning you should see dramatic increases in traffic to your work. Blip.tv prides itself as the home of original web series online and the numbers are impressive. “Last year we had producers of shows making $500,000 a year on their Web series,” said Mike Hudack, chief executive and co-founder of Blip.tv. “In 2011 we expect that number to hit $1 million for some producers.”  You share 50% of ad revenue with the site, a much more generous share than you could possible hope for with YouTube. “The goal of the redesign was to figure a way to help people discover new and original series on our site,” said Dina Kaplan, a co-founder of Blip.tv. “People have no idea where to go and where to find original Web video online — which can be a daunting task — and our redesign definitely solves that problem.” Itzon is another site offering revenue share, also curating good content with a slightly different bias, pitching itself as an online festival. Worth checking out.

Another resource I suggest you get begin following Ted Hope, Jon Reiss and Sheri Candler as these guys are streets ahead of the curve when it comes to monetising your work. I’m not suggesting it’s easy, but there are now more ways than ever to create a rational and workable business model for film work. The increasingly fragmented nature of media consumption these days means that destination sites are increasingly being superseded by the share and pass on model. Embeddable video is therefore really exciting, with end users able to appropriate the content and share it wherever they see fit. With destination websites those platforms need to work really hard to drive traffic or we’ll simply go elsewhere. The embeddable video slots straight into the way we’re now consuming media and this is good reason to get excited. The end user experience is the same but now I can initiate a dialogue about possible payment. It’s a start.

The biggest problem I see with all this though is the clunkiness of going through the Paypal payment system. Dynamo Player also offers the Amazon payment system which hopefully will mean you can buy with 1-Click. If we can get to a point where the payment mechanism is as speedy as buying an app on your iPhone then I think  we’ll be in great shape. Certainly, if you do your homework, and, crucially, spend time on your social media activities well in advance of release, then there’s no reason why you couldn’t be doing okay. Much to chew on. As always, if you work hard then good things should result. Should…

Technorati Tags: 1-click, amazon, blip.tv, distribution, distrify, dynamo player, jon reiss, paypal, profit, sheri candler, spotify, ted hope

It’s funny how these things happen, but a few months before NAB Paul Antico of Needcreative.net got in touch and asked if I’d like to take part in a documentary he was planning on shooting in Vegas called The Visualmakers with Kira MacAlpine. Being the vain bastard that I am and being offered yet another forum on which to voice my guff I immediately said yes. And here’s the preview trailer for the film featuring Kevin Shahinian, Cristina Valdivieso, Jon Connor, Mick Jones, Julia Swain, Jared Abrams, Ben Eckstein and of course his highness Sir Philip de Bloom. Apart from me being phenomenally hungover and ruining the trailer it looks like it ought to be pretty interesting. We all have different views on what drives us to do what we do. I’ve never been shy about baring my twisted little soul on this blog but it’ll be intriguing to see what the others say too. Paul’s a good guy and just another example of how this community has empowered people to just get up and start working in film because it gets them properly excited. Hats off to them for organising it, NAB is bonkers and I could barely find my shoes in the morning. Full film coming soon I hope.

Technorati Tags: Ben eckstein, cristina valdivieso, Jared Abrams, jon connor, julia swain, kevin shahinian, kiramacalpine, mick jones, needcreative.net, paul antico, Philip Bloom, the visualmakers

Note the title of this post. Note the words ‘Canon 5D Short Film’. No, this is not a collection of shots of flowers, or me shaving, or some other guff. It’s a narrative short film in the traditional sense of the word. With a script. With actors. Drama, don’t ya know? I’m just kidding, anyone can shoot whatever they want and call it whatever they want, but narrative fiction work is where my heart lies and I love the craft and the difficulty of doing it well. I told you I was going off to make drama, and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.

Here’s my latest anyway, a comedy we shot in just one day, written pretty much in one day too, but quite a lot of work went into making it funnier in the edit including introducing a whole new character. Comedy’s really strange, stuff you write often just isn’t funny, even though it’s funny when you make it. Somehow you have to actually rewrite everything when you edit, and tweak performance so the jokes actually come through. It’s a real art.

Technorati Tags: ben noy, Canon 5D, carl burke, comedy, drama, fiction, gez medinger, michele patricio, please hold, Redrock Micro, rob hoey, robin schmidt, short flim

A few weeks back I took part in a 48 hr film challenge and though we didn’t even come close to winning, not even being shortlisted, I was still proud of the job we did. It looks like those who went after the glossy, flashy kind of sci-fi were rewarded higher than those who placed an emphasis on story and acting and there were some great films that didn’t make the top ten cut. 175 or so films were made in total so it can’t have been an easy decision. I’ve now spent another 5 hours working on the film in the edit and feel pretty happy with it. I co-directed it, wrote the script, produced and co-edited it. It was shot on the Sony F3 with Zeiss ZFs and recorded witht he Ki Pro Mini (mainly). Full write-up will be coming on Wide Open Camera very soon, but for now, here’s the film. And below, the eventual winner. Enjoy!

UPDATE: There’s now a full write-up on our entry at Wideopencamera, the repository of all my full-on writings these days.

Technorati Tags: buzz films, Chrome Productions, drama, fiction, gez medinger, robin schmidt, sci-fi london 48 hour film challenge, short film, thriller

I have returned from the US, after ten days out in the sun meeting the good folk of Twitter and the DSLR community in general. I’ve seen good people fired, tech that doesn’t work, tech that does, and more than one news person declare DSLRs dead. Whatever you feel about that, there’s no denying the buzz of 18 months ago has receded. Large sensor filmmaking has been subsumed into the grand melée of filmmaking in general, closing the gap between the haves and the have nots, a much needed kick of adrenaline to an industry that was innovating far too slowly. While it might be convenient for bloggers to declare this or that camera a dslr-killer, to do so is to fundamentally miss the point. No video camera will ever kill DSLRs because DSLRs are not video cameras. They are a whole category all to themselves and have been embraced by a whole community of filmmakers who don’t want or need so-called DSLR killer cameras. Seb Wober at Cinema 5D has now removed Jared Abrams from his post as news master and taken up the reins himself, already having a pop at Vincent Laforet and proclaiming DSLRs dead. For a site called Cinema 5D that’s akin to Gerald Ratner calling his company’s products “total crap”.

There are more options for filmmakers than there have ever been. You might fancy spending six grand on a camera or you might fancy spending just six hundred, the end result can still look the same in the hands of the right person. The difference is now ergonomics and functionality, not so clearly quality based. For the young punk filmmakers who don’t care about such things they’re just going to go out and shoot and more power to them. These are the people driving the DSLR community forward and they’re vital, interesting, curious and occasionally, talented. If Seb wants to dismiss this community then that’s his prerogative, but it demonstrates a surprising ignorance of the community in which he’s meant to be an expert. The 48 hour film competition I just took part in saw the vast majority of the 175 finished films shot on DSLR. Most of them aren’t very good, but at least twenty were worthy of mentioning. Shot in 48 hours, these teams didn’t give a monkeys about DSLR killers, they cared about doing a killer job and enjoying themselves. And they succeeded. Stop talking about killing this or that camera, if anything should be killer it should be the work. I think the DSLR buzz is dead, they’re part of the landscape and there’s nothing particularly interesting to talk about anymore, but that shouldn’t mislead anyone into thinking that DSLRs are dead. Far from it, they’re alive and well and providing a whole heap of interesting talent to explore their creativity. I think Seb’s wrong, but it’s his site, and his opinions and more power to him.

NAB was instructive. I learned that I hate trade shows. Actually I already knew this. I’m not a gearhead, I like the mechanics of problem-solving and gear necessarily forms a part of this journey but that’s actually as far as it goes. Zacuto have turned out to be a nice bunch, even if Steve Weiss stitched me up by cutting out the part where I kicked his ass. Everyone and his dog is now making monitors. 4K is the big future game (but again that’s nothing new, just the next logical and profitable step for manufacturers). Third party media recorders are proliferating with options from Convergent Design, Blackmagic Design, Atomos, and of course AJA. The Scarlet looks okay, the chip’s too small for the look we all crave now. The Epic looks fantastic. High speed cameras are suddenly just within reach, and even if you can’t fork out to own one, the rental costs and the ease of use are now very much worth considering. And you know what, that’s it. I wandered round and round the convention centre looking for something that would get me excited and, really, it was only the portable high speed cameras that did so. That tells me something.

Since I originally wrote this Khalid, Vince and Jon have released the S-log 4:4:4 F3 footage and suddenly I’m excited again. That’s a serious camera now. I used it on a shoot recently and wasn’t bowled over by it. But it was a 48 hour challenge and really not the best environment to test it out. This isn’t a camera we can all seriously own, but it does point the way forward to a camera you hire for longer shoots. There are bound to be a ton of them bought which ought to bring the rental price down and encourage a strong secondhand market. As someone looking for the absolute smartest ways to do everything it’s good to see that we have options. I’d still take an Alexa with me on a shoot preferentially, but the Epic states a grand old case. We’re spoilt these days, and there’s every expectation that Canon will debut something interesting soon. But then again they might not. Plus ca change.

So that brings me to the final point of this slightly meandering post. It’s time to say goodbye to this blog as a DSLR beast. The grind and graft of finding something new to say about this funny little community of ours really isn’t that much fun anymore. I’d rather talk about filmmaking. I’m on this masochistic voyage of self-discovery, attempting to define a voice and a style as a filmmaker and that’s what I care about more than anything else. If I’m writing, I should be writing scripts. And so, for now, I’ll be focussing on shooting first and blogging second. From now on I’ll be writing a weekly column on Jared Abram’s new site Wideopencamera and probably posting irregularly on here about projects. I’ll be contributing to a few other sites but I’m hoping my own work will keep me too busy to actively blog. It’s been fun, and I’ve met some great people, been privileged to get my hands on kit I wouldn’t have done otherwise. It’s time to be a proper filmmaker again. It looks as if Super Massive Raver might be about to break big time and you got to see that strange weasly beast make its first baby steps on here so for that I’m very proud and you helped us get to Hong Kong and back. Again, thank you.

I’m not disappearing completely, and chances are I’ll probably post something once a month and it’ll be like well good innit. Rock to the Maxx.

Technorati Tags: NAB, steve weiss, vince laforet, wide open camera, Zacuto

Arm wrestling never looked so good. Music video for Irish rap group Republic of Loose.

Technorati Tags: arm wrestling, badgers, repton boys club, republic of loose