Does anyone read this? Well if you do, I recommend you venture to the Kazimier on Wednesday night for A Small Cinema. I’m showing the FUTURE SHORTS programme, plus some stuff by local film-makers. I’m really looking forward to it. It’s the first time I’ve not had to take the red velvet chairs anywhere.
Wednesday 25th January 2012 8pm, Kazimier Club, Liverpool tickets £3 on the door
It’s also a bit of a jump back to the origins of A Small Cinema – no creating new spaces or social research – simply a platform for good short films. We got knocked back for funding from the Creative England film culture fund, so this will be a good test as to what can be done on a budget of nothing, and whether that will be sustainable over the next year. I hope so.
Below is a fantastic design for a special screenprint poster created by illustrator / designer and LJMU graduate William Daw. He is a grand chap and a great artist and I can’t wait to see the final posters. More posts after the event.
Just before Christmas I became addicted to buying second-hand video equipment off ebay – video mixers, titlers, ‘enhancers’, and camcorders. This was justified to myself as necessary research and hardware for a piece of work I’m hoping to develop over the next 6 weeks, exploring video titling and the composite signal. It’s a bit of an experiment, but I’m going to be plugging these things into each other and working with Nathan and Mark to create new texts in a live situation.
With this in mind, last week I began to test my wares, and document the process on my other blog. Having conducted this painstaking research I can now conclude the following:
Ebay is (largely) full of rubbish.
The late 80s and early 90s were a strange time for technonoloty
VHS-C camcorders are nifty bits of kit even now (in my opinion)
A good titler with a keyboard interface is a simple pleasure
I’ve posted some images of my adventures below, as well as a cracking video from my favourites, Camlink.
Tomorrow I head to St Helens town centre to collect dreams as part of the LIBRARY OF DREAMS project. Every shop needs a front, so I spent a couple of hours yesterday cutting out vinyl to go on a portable stand. Chris Rodenhurst did the designs and I just laid them out for our trusty Robo-cutter to do it’s magic. The weeding was epic but to be honest I enjoyed it. I need slow repetative tasks at the moment to ease me into this new year.
Another ongoing project this last two years has been my work assisting artist Gina Czarnecki. She’s been developing a series of works exploring the possibilities and ethics around using body tissue from living, consenting donors, in order to create new art works. These works, along with several older video works and one new work (Quarantine) are now part of Gina’s solo show at the Bluecoat. The show runs from Dec 9th 2011 to Feb 19th 2012.
This has been a busy year, and it’s only now that I’m able to get a few posts up covering some really important projects that culminated recently. The first of these is a Re-Dock project exploring the history of ‘Sailortown’.
We developed ‘Mapping Memory’ in partnership with Liverpool University and the Merseyside Maritime Museum and have been working on it since 2009. Finally the project is finished, and we have a couple of fantastic outputs to show off – a 40 minute documentary exploring the central waterfront today, and an online google map of video interviews and archive images and film.
This evening I met with local writer / promoter / man of the people, Sean Greeves, to discuss CINEMA in Liverpool, and the Small Cinema project. Sean has been researching into existing cinemas and events whilst looking into current state of former cinema buildings, for an article for Waxxx magazine. Sean has also been getting his hands dirty, volunteering at the Plaza Cinema in Waterloo, somewhere I am also very familiar with.
I enjoy nothing better than a good old whiteboard session, so we got our pens out and began to map out the terrain, of ‘proper’ cinemas but also film screening events and spaces… Read the rest of this entry »
A birthday message created in isadora using the Live Writing patch I developed for Nathan Jones. My niece Aggy was 11 years old and I wanted to send her something more fun than a plain old card.
The Live Writing 2.0 patch incorporates a whole new host of video effects that, when layered, produce some gorgeous animated textures. More experiments to follow…
Last year I got made up by Davey Jones of Make Up SFX, which was the realisation of a childhood dream. I just don’t think I can top it this year. Davey and his crew are very skilled in making all kinds of super realistic body modifications. One day, all kids will be able to become monsters. Read the rest of this entry »
