We Need To Talk About Kevin

My favourite film of 2011 was without doubt Lynne Ramsey's We Need To Talk About Kevin.  On a par with Ramsey's previous films Ratcatcher & Morvern Callar, We Need To Talk About Kevin draws you in with it's mesmerising, dream-like flow of images and sound whilst maintaining attention with strong narrative/ character interest.  Finding this perfect balance is something I felt The Tree of Life failed to do, although some of the editing & cinematography in Terrence Malick's film was stunning.

William Eggleston

Some of my favourite William Eggleston photographs.

David Lynch

It's good to see David Lynch hasn't lost his touch.  Having not released a film since 2006's Inland Empire and devoting most of his time these days to his painting/music/meditation I was pleased to stumble across this trailer that he made for this years Viennale.

The 3 Rs

It reminds me of his early experimental work, especially The Grandmother.

The Art of the Title

The Art of The Title is a great resource for researching title sequences.

Here's a selection grouped under the heading 'Fetishistic Advocacy for Speed in Titles' that includes my favorite David Lynch title sequence, Lost Highway alongside others that combine the titles with driving POVs.

Dear Photograph

Here's a pic of me when I was seven on my parents back step inspired by the website dearphotograph where you can submit a picture of a picture from the past in the present.  

I'll try and expand this into a bigger project at some point.  My parents have lived in the same house since I was born and have loads of photos taken in and around the house so there's plenty of material to work with.

A Book For Tomoko

A couple of years ago our friend Bob compiled a book for his Japanese wife Tomoko made up of stories & photographs his friends had sent him on the subject 'what makes Britain Great' to help him persuade her to move to England.  It worked!  She now lives with him in St Albans.

He was kind enough to include a few of my pics and used my sheep photo on the cover of the book.

Clare wrote this poem for the book.  You can see more of her poetry, cooking and crafty things at her blog Cakes & Monsters.

Martin Parr

Looking forward to seeing the Martin Parr exhibition at the M-Shed.

Berberian Sound Studio

I recently finished work on the film Berberian Sound Studio.  It's a Warp Films production directed by Peter Strickland.  This is Peter's second feature following his highly acclaimed, self-funded debut Katalin Varga, winner of a Silver Bear at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival for sound design.

The film stars Toby Jones as a sound mixer from Dorking who finds himself working at an Italian sound studio on a sleazy, low budget horror flick.  I can't say much about it at this stage but I look forward to posting more about the film once it's released especially an experimental, multi-layered sequence I cut inspired by the work of Peter Tscherkassky.

Leni Riefenstahl

Another post inspired by The Story of Film.

This is a clip from Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl's stunning document of the 1936 Berlin Olympic games.  Many of the groundbreaking techniques she used to record the athletes have since become standard, eg: putting the camera on tracks and having it travel down the running track with the sprinters.  Some of the sequences were sublimely edited such as this one of the divers, using interesting camera angles, repeated footage and retimes to heighten the poetic motion.

 Olympia Diving Sequence

Riefenstahl struggled to make any films after WWII due to her association with Hitler and the Third Reich.  She lost most of the negatives from her finished films and all production materials relating to her unfinished projects during the war and had her editing equipment confiscated by the French government.

Buster Keaton

I've been enjoying Mark Cousins 15 part series The Story of Film currently showing on More4.  It's packed full of wonderful clips including this one from the 1924 Buster Keaton film Sherlock Jr. that uses editing to create a world within a world and make a link between films and dreams 86 years before Christopher Nolan's Inception.

Keaton's projectionist falls asleep and dreams that he climbs into the film he's showing.  Matching body posture and camera placement in each shot Keaton gives the impression that the film is cutting around him landing him in a series of compromising situations; stepping off a cliff, crossing a busy road, diving into the sea etc.

Sherlock Jr.

Pirates!

I spent a couple of weeks at the start of the month working on Aardman's new stop motion feature; Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists. It's not out until next year so still got a way to go but already looks amazing. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Check out the trailer here.

Totterdown Arts Trail 2010

Last week we opened our house to the public for the Totterdown Arts trail. I exhibited a series of photographs entitled 'Little Bristol'. I gave the pictures a tilt-shift look with selective focus to make Bristol appear in miniature.

Two of the photos were selected for the Totterdown Lights Exhibition and could be seen in the week leading up to the Art Trail in the Bocabar at the Paintworks.

The full series can be seen here:

Little Bristol

Its been a while...

It's been a while since I published any posts on here, over a year in fact! There are 2 very good reasons for that called Thomas Arthur & Samuel Sebastian, born Nov 28th 2009. It's been an amazing year - the hardest, most stressful but also most rewarding of my life. As we approach their first birthday and life, although still pretty hectic, starts to get back to normal I thought it was time I got back into blogging.

These pics of the boys were taken in France over the summer by a photographer friend Joe Turp.

New Mexico 05/06/09 - 29/07/09

I've been in New Mexico for the last 2 months working on a film called Paul. I was based in Santa Fe but managed to get around & see a big chunk of the state. It's great for photography - all sweeping vistas & crazy skies.

Here are a selection of my pix:

new mexico: 05/06/09 - 29/07/09

The Soloist

The Soloist was recently released in the US (after having it's release date put back 5 months) so I can finally talk about the work I did on the Synaesthesia Sequence last summer.

Directed by Joe Wright, the BAFTA winning director of Atonement, the film is about the relationship between LA journalist Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jnr) and a mentally disturbed but musically gifted vagrant Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) who he finds living on skid row.

When Steve takes Nathaniel to see a rehearsal by the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Walt Disney Concert Hall we travel inside Nathaniel's head and see Beethoven's music transformed into ever changing patterns of light & colour, suggesting the character has the condition known as Synaesthesia - seeing music as colour.

Joe wanted it to be as bold & colourful as possible and for the shapes and edits to be a perfect match for the music. Double Negative's VFX Supervisor John Moffat shot a variety of coloured lights, crystals and glass in a dark tent to use for the piece. The original intention was to create a rough assembly from these elements that would then be supplemented by additional CG sprites but as the raw elements worked so well on their own it became clear that it should be left as a pure edited piece with no added VFX.

The film has had mixed reviews in the US (it's not released in the UK until September). Here are a couple of quotes from film blogs that mention the Synaesthesia Sequence:

If Nathaniel's love for classical musical goes unexplained it is just as well, since all of our own respective loves are not so easily summarized. Director Wright almost achieves a wordless answer in a minute-plus set-piece where Nathaniel closes his eyes and listens to Beethoven as a fantasia of colors overtake the darkened screen. It is a bold cinematic choice, and one that pays off. (themovieboy.com)

The Soloist is as much about the power of music to transform as it is about friendship. Wright films Ayers’ street solos as symphonies for an entire city, his music the soundtrack to the director’s sweeping L.A. vistas. In the movie’s most beautiful moment, as Ayers and Lopez watch the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the film illuminates the phantasmagoric collage of colors playing in Ayers’ head – a jolt of pure cinema that provides a subjective peek into the disturbed prodigy’s mind. (orlandoweekly.com)

Corniche Pictures

Corniche Pictures 

This is a 14 second ident I cut last month for Corniche Pictures in collaboration with VFX facility One of Us. To give the piece an organic feel it was assembled without the use of any Visual Effects from raw 16mm smoke & laser elements based around the shape of the existing Corniche Pictures logo.

The ident first screened at this year's Cannes film festival in front of Los Bastardos, a film by Amat Escalante.

Super 8mm, 1969

Super 8mm, 1969 

I stumbled across this old footage the other day. It's from a roll of super 8 that I picked up in a charity shop while I was at university (back in '98). It's holiday footage from a middle-aged couple's round the world trip in 1969 where they visited, amongst others, Australia, New Zealand, India, Thailand & Singapore.

I used this section at uni as part of a title sequence I designed for 'The Real Holiday Show'. This is an extended version of that cut with some FX I've slapped on to make it sound like it's being projected at a party.

Performance

'Memo From Turner' - Performance

This is an extract from the 1970 film Performance directed by Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg and starring James Fox & Mick Jagger in his first acting role. The film was extremely controversial for it's time with it's graphic depiction of sex, violence & drug taking and still looks fresh 40 years after it's release. The way it was edited had a massive influence on modern cinema & the 'Memo From Turner' sequence shown here is considered by many to be the first music video - The song is played in it's entirety as part of Chas' hallucinations with Jagger lip synching directly to camera.

In a way the innovative editing style of Performance was arrived at by accident. Nic Roeg had already left the project & was setting up in Australia for Walkabout when Donald Cammell and uncredited editor Frank Mazzola spent months recutting the wieldy preview cut that Warner Bros had deemed overlong and too incoherent for release. In re-editing what was already there, mixing up some scenes (like the opening montage of violent sex intercut with a travelling limousine) and adding faster cuts and fractured montages the film was given renewed energy and power.

It's a shame that these days it's considered indulgent to allow an entire song to play out within a film (unless it's part of a front or end title sequence) and great music often gets cut short to avoid a drop in pace or risk hindering the narrative thrust.

Other famous film scenes that use tracks in their entirety include 'Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head' from Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid and 'The Sounds of Silence/ April Come She Will' from The Graduate (two Simon & Garfunkel songs played back to back during a montage).

Tony Hill

 Downside Up (extract)

This is an extract from an experimental film by Tony Hill made in 1984.

Much of Tony's work explores the relationship between the viewpoint of the camera and the ground using purpose built equipment, in this case a rotating camera mount. The commercial appeal of his films was realized and he has since had success directing pop promos and commercials.

The simple yet hypnotic idea behind Downside Up would also transfer well to use within a feature film, maybe as an interesting way to transition between scenes. Quite often I find that the most interesting parts of films are the indulgent bits that don't necessarily move the story forward but allow the audience a moment of reflection and give the film room to breathe - like the sequence I cut last summer for The Soloist. Sadly these are often the first scenes to be cut when a studio is putting the pressure on a director to get the running time down.

One of the best films of last year Steve McQueen's Hunger shows how powerful it can be to leave in those artful moments.

India 31/12/08 - 07/01/09

In January Clare & I took part in a Rickshaw Rally in India. We traveled 1300km in 7 days driving an auto-rickshaw across Tamil Nadu from Chennai to Kanyakumari, rasing £1500 for the schools we visited along the way. It was pretty hairy at times but lots of fun!

india 31/12/08 - 07/01/09

and there's a little montage of the footage we shot here

South Coast 24/08/08

We spent the bank holiday weekend camping down on the south coast. Here are a selection of pictures taken in Eastbourne, Bexhill & Hastings.

south coast 24/08/08

Walkabout

Walkabout (1971) is one of the great early films of Nicolas Roeg, his first as sole director. As with the films that would follow; Don't Look Now & The Man Who Fell to Earth, the film language of Walkabout is ambiguous & elliptical and the film driven by it's fractured editing and extensive inter-cutting.

The first clip is the opening montage that sets up the tone of the film and the editing style, cutting between the girl & the boy and their parents with very little dialogue as we transition between the city & the outback.

The second clip shows an example of Roeg's use of the match cut, juxtaposing shots of the Aborigine cutting up and eating a kangaroo with an urban butcher.

This is an obvious example of a match cut, a technique that is used throughout the films of Nicolas Roeg often in a more abstract and seamless way. Many of his cuts match either movement, shape or colour and particular attention is always paid to 'eye-trance' (the 4th priority on Walter Murch's list of what makes a cut work), a famous example being the red paint on the slide intercut with the drowning girl's red mac at the start of Don't Look Now.

Both clips 2 & 3 show interesting ways of using still images, clip 3 using them to freeze the action and create added drama. It also shows the documentary feel of the film with it's stunning wildlife photography shot by Roeg himself.

Walkabout - clip 1

Walkabout - clip 2

Walkabout - clip 3

The Elephant Man

I recently re-watched David Lynch's 'The Elephant Man' after reading a Time Out review of the Special Edition DVD. Here's an extract that discusses the film's more experimental sequences:

Revisiting the film two decades on, it's extraordinary how extreme, pervasive and bewitching Lynch's approach to the material actually is. From the suggested bestial rape which opens the film to the crippling emotional crescendo of Merrick's death scene, the film consistently utilises oblique and disturbing images and howling, thunderous non-diegetic sound. It's a testament to Lynch's skill that such elements never overpower or distract from the narrative - rather, they enhance it, creating an unpredictable and all encompassing dream landscape for Merrick's tragic journey. It's hard to name another film which marries the experimental and the expected in such a seamless, overwhelming fashion, certainly not one as publicly embraced as 'The Elephant Man'.

Here are the experimental sections of the film in full, the opening & closing montages and the terrifying dream sequence. Easily Lynch's most accessible film, these typically 'Lynchian' inserts are rendered even more powerful by the straightforward narrative that surround them and provide the stylistic link to Lynch's previous feature Eraserhead.

The Elephant Man - clip 1

The Elephant Man - clip 2

The Elephant Man - clip 3

Soy Cuba

Who needs editing anyway.

Here are a couple of bravado camera moves from the 1964 film Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba), directed by Mikhail Kalatozov.

Clip 1 - A single shot that lasts over 3 minutes sees the camera travel through a rooftop beauty contest, down the side of the building & end up in the swimming pool.

Paul Thomas Anderson paid homage to this shot in Boogie Nights.

Clip 2 - This time the camera moves up from a funeral procession in the street through the window of a 2nd floor cigar factory and then out over the top of the procession.

Soy Cuba - clip 1

Soy Cuba - clip 2

Walter Murch

It's difficult to put into words what makes a good cut. Most editors cut instinctively and know when the edit works because it feels right. Here's an extract from Walter Murch's essay on film editing 'In The Blink Of An Eye' listing the priorities he gives to each factor that determines whether a cut works.

An ideal cut (for me) is the one that satisfies all the following criteria at once: 1) it is true to the emotion of the moment; 2) it advances the story; 3) it occurs at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and "right"; 4) it acknowledges what you might call "eye-trace" - the concern with the location and movement of the audience's focus of interest within the frame; 5) it respects "planarity" - the grammar of three dimensions transposed by photography to two (the questions of stage-line etc.); 6) and it respects the three-dimensional continuity of the actual space (where people are in the room and in relation to one another).

1) Emotion (51%)
2) Story (23%)
3) Rhythm (10%)
4) Eye-trace (7%)
5) Two-dimensional plane of screen (5%)
6) Three-dimensional plane of screen (4%)

Emotion, at the top of the list, is the thing that you should try to preserve at all costs. If you find you have to sacrifice certain of those six things to make a cut, sacrifice your way up, item by item, from the bottom.

London 28/07/08

I spent monday pretending to be a tourist, taking in a tour of London's most iconic landmarks.

Here are a selection of the pictures I took.

London 28/07/08

Dead Bird

 Dead Bird Extract

Dead Bird is a short film I cut in 2006 directed by Brek Taylor & Clare Tinsley for tailormade productions.

It's an experimental piece with a simple story showing how four characters (a fisherman, a dog, a girl & her grandmother) react to the discovery of a dead bird.

The film was presented in three different ways; once as individual character studies, once as a splitscreen edit showing all characters stories at the same time & once as a more conventional short mixing the stories together.

This extract is the dog's story from the individual edit which I feel is the most successful of the three. For a look that evokes a dog's POV I used the 'Russian Kamera' Final Cut Pro filter from River Rock Studios.

The music/ sound design is by Scanner.

Zabriskie Point

 Zabriskie Point - Michelangelo Antonioni (1970)

This is my favourite film ending of all time.

An imagined explosion to symbolize the end of Capitalism is repeated from a number of angles before giving way to a sublime slow motion sequence showing various consumer goods imploding to the sound of Pink Floyd.

Some of the explosion elements were later reused by Ridley Scott in Bladerunner.

Man With A Movie Camera

Man With A Movie Camera is an experimental 'city symphony' style montage made in 1929 by Dziga Vertov documenting soviet urban life. Without sets, actors or story it is left to the heroic cinematography and the rhythmic power of the editing to keep the viewer transfixed. Vertov makes his intentions clear at the start of the film with titles that state:

This experimental work aims at creating a truly international absolute language of Cinema based on its total separation from the language of Theatre and Literature.

He credits himself as the film's Author-Supervisor of the Experiment.

Clip 1 shows the relationship between the Film & the Editor as the action freezes and we cut to the film strip hanging in the cutting room as the Editor (Vertov's wife Elizabveta Svilova) pieces it together.

Clip 2 shows off some of Svilova's virtuoso editing with a dizzying sequence that intercuts an extreme close up of an eye with various POV shots using single frame edits; something rarely seen in the days before digital editing systems.

Clip 3 is the last 3 minutes of the film. As an audience watch the same film we are watching the images build to a crescendo. Again the editor is seen in the cutting room, the movement of the crowds, trams & trains intercut with her eyes as the film flows through the steenbeck. This sequence shows a few examples of the pioneering use of optical FX used throughout the film; split screens, dissolves, superimpositions & retimes.

Man With a Movie Camera - clip 1

Man With a Movie Camera - clip 2

Man With a Movie Camera - clip 3

These clips are taken from a version of the film released in 2008 with a new score by Michael Nyman.

Japan 01/02

Here are some old pieces of work that I still quite like. These were produced 4 years ago when I stumbled across some high-8 footage I had shot when visiting Japan in 2000. Both pieces are made from a limited amount of original footage; just a few minutes worth for each looped & mashed up.

I've uploaded them to blip.tv as youtube was struggling with the single frame cuts.

Japan 01

Japan 02