Video of me testing a piece I have developed in Isadora for the DIY Music Day tomorrow. I will be able to calibrate it a bit better once I’m in the space, but for now its look good and should work really well once its displayed 10ft wide.
Here is the video for ‘Volcano‘ by Liverpool mod-rockers The Universal. A thumping rock love song with catchy riffs if I ever heard one. I filmed the band last Friday at Liverpool Sound City and am really pleased with the outcome. More pleased than usual, as this was the second attempt at filming the band.
The first attempt was a month before at FAC251 in Manchester and the sound from the desk was awful. My filming wasn’t great either to be honest. Good sound can often sometimes carry a poor music video, but a great video can do little with poor sound. It bothered me to leave it at that so I was glad to get another crack of the whip. This time the girl on the desk was great and the band sounded brilliant and I got good audio as a result ( a mix of clean desk and the camera mic). I also knew the songs inside out, which was helpful as I was approaching this as a single-take so could anticipate changes.
Anyway, hope you enjoy the band and the video. It’s fairly energetic. I tend to dance around a lot when I film bands. If I can’t get in the swing, it just aint rock n roll.
At the beginning of April I went down to London again to film the next installment of Mercy’s ‘Wave If You’re Really There’ production in St Leonard’s church. This was the 6th in the series and this event took the theme of Baptism. Cue lots of fantastic watery projections on the church ceiling and also some bizarre performances devised by Karen Mcleod. This video has a bit of behind the scenes chat with the artists involved. You can also check out a trailer for the evening here.
Last week I presented a AV set with Tom Rea Smith as for the opening night of MOVES10 at the Bluecoat. Most of my set was created using dynamic patches in Isadora, mixing live camera and video feedback, but for this section I decided instead to plunder an old project, The Model City, for material and give myself a breather in the set. The track ‘Lines of Bees’ is presented simply with the Liverpool One section of the film.
An Easter treat. Filmed Easter 2008. Screened for the first time easter 2009. Blogged easter 2010.
I’ve been waiting patiently for the press launch before I could put this one up. Here is the trailer I made for Moves 2010 International Festival of Movement On Screen. The theme of the festival is ‘Framing Motion’. The logo is by Smiling Wolf. And the festival takes place from 21st – 25th April in Liverpool and across the UK.
I was asked to create a piece of “artwork”, and whilst ultimately this is a just simple sting for a festival, the openness of that brief allowed me to explore my practice of using live layered feedback to create much more organic forms and movements. It may not look so slick, but its an achievement for me personally as I’m not a motion graphics designer. Instead of using After Effects or Motion (which scare me I’m ashamed to admit) I used the tools I do know: live camera feedback and Isadora.
The theme of Framing Motion was an interesting one for me to play with, as it is about the context in which movement occurs. With this video i tried to merge the movement and its context through the use of a feedback loop, in which the ‘frame’ of the image is a central visual element rather than a peripheral one.
This is not a straight forward feedback loop either – I was able to isolate changes in the image (‘difference’) and re-inject these back into the animation, but with changing tints. So what we see are essentially the movements between frames, rather than the direct content of the frames. The things we see are the things we can’t see. Apologies I’m babbling.
The sound, a track called ‘Palindromes’, was by my good friend and sonic structuralist Amos. As the name implies, the track is structured so it sounds the same forwards as backwards. This encouraged me to make both an intro and an outro video sting, but I’ve only put the intro one up here.
Anyway, cheers to Gala at Moves for giving me a stab at this. Thankyou to Tom for the excellent music. Will hopefully be creating some live VJ mixes during the festival alongside Tristan “TV Lux” Brady-Jacobs. Be sure to come and enjoy!
A visual mix of selected video works over the last five years. I decided to take stock of my work as part of an application for a residency at the North West Film Archive as part of AND. Fingers crossed.
Featured works:
0. Intro
1. Insane Mind
2. Human Grace
3. Electronica / Experiments in the revival of organisms
4. Angry boy
5. Noise Clouds
6. A Long Journey
7. LOVE
8. Symphony of Bells
9. The Model City
10. The Huge Entity
All material used is either produced by myself or taken from archive.org and used under the Creative Commons license.
‘Kinetic Fallacy – Audiovision’ – music by Kinetic Fallacy (Hannah Peel and Emma Welsby)
tracks:
‘Insane Mind’ – footage from ‘Nosferatu’
‘Human Grace’ – Footage from ‘Olympia’.
‘Electronica / Experiments in the revival of organisms’ footage from ‘Experiments in the revival of organisms’
‘AngryBoy’ – footage from ‘Emotions of Everyday Living’ and ‘Angry Boy’
‘Noise Clouds’ – video by Steve Clarkson.
A Long Journey – Sounds by Amos. Videos by Sam Meech / Pete Bamford. Mix by Sam Meech
‘Love’ – recordings and colours by Sam Meech, sounds by Amos.
‘Symphony of Bells’ – filmed by Tim Brunsden, Steve Clarkson, Markus Soukup, Sam Meech. Edited by steve Clarkson.
‘The Model City’ – sounds by Amos.
‘The Huge Entity’ – sounds by Amos.
Some highlights from the last ‘Wave If You’re Really There’ event.
The more time has past, the more fond I have grown of this piece, and so finally putting this online. It was amos’ idea, and its power comes from the sincere words and the intense score, but I am pleased with the role of the video in expressing these ideas.
I showed it in Apocalypse at Red Wire in August, and I’ve just submitted it to AV Fest, so fingers crossed. Made as part of ‘The Winter Will Not Last Forever’, a series of soundworks developed by composer Amos on the theme of ‘hope’, and performed at HIVE. This piece is a live stream mix from Isadora and combines video samples from myself and the late great Pete Bamford.
A voice reads out a letter telling of his personal struggle amidst bereavement and addiction. A red glow pulses behind a growing storm of grit and noise. As the storm becomes ever harsher, the glow becomes stronger. The glow and the storm begin to feedback on themselves, becoming enmeshed and amplified towards and inevitable end. Created using simple samples pushed through a state of live video feedback, organically re-incorporated and remixed.
Text by Warwick Ward
Images by Pete Bamford and Sam Meech
Sounds by Amos