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Sydney Film Festival 2008

Persepolis, a gorgeous and uniquely styled black and white film about a girl growing up in Iran, is definitely an animation that’d be worth checking out on the big screen ( Jun 21, 8pm, state theatre). Alongside that, graphic designer and renowned film title creator Saul Bass has a little known directed feature, Phase IV,( Jun 22, 6.45, State Theatre) a dark humoured sci-fi piece which shows an ant colony taking over SouthWest USA ( prescient, considering the recent ‘invasion’ of electronics-eating ants in Texas : truly! ) ( See also Star Wars credits if done by Saul Bass..)

Already passed by? Man on Wire – a documentary structured like a heist movie, about French high-wire walker, Philippe Petit, walking between the twin trade towers of the World Trade Centre building ( remember that? ) in 1974 ( footage at the time shot by Australian director of the oz-doco-classic, Cane Toads, Mark Lewis ). Oh those groovy times. Strong strand of Iraq war docos, including notably,
‘Standard Operating Procedure‘ by Errol Morris, who is probably the documentary makers documentary maker.

Still to come? The Last Continent, a film about the land of ice we still have at the moment ( Jun 19, 10am, State Theatre). And more. ( sydneyfilmfestival.org Jun 4-22 )

by Sean Healy, June 13, 2008 0 comments

Melbourne International Animation Festival 2008

charles burns
Like clockwork, the arrival of winter in Melbourne brings with it a range of depraved and delightful animations on the big screen, this year’s regional focus being on the tick-tock friendly Switzerland. Aside from buckets of Swisstacular, we also gets 6 or 7 compilations worth within the ‘International Panorama’ section, Australian animations, ‘Late night Bizarre’, a digital selection and a puppet animation section, and two particularly attractive compilations : Fears of the Dark and visual music.

Visual Music Marathon
These are the culled highlights from a festival held in and curated by Jean Detheux (in Boston 2007) . Which is to say fans of Len Lye’s marvellously freestyling hand painted and scratch films, fans of abstract generative software visualisations and those who enjoy intensely integrated audio and video will be filling the seats at these sessions, so get in while u can ( tickets @ miaf.net )

Semiconductor – a UK duo to be filed under the category ( amongst others ) of visualists who write custom software to provide for their pixel needs, offer one of the standout selections, the end result of this particular coding process, being a stunning kind of hyper-animated handdrawn 3D origami beast, that gets mercilessly tweaked and prodded by industrial machines with faulty electrics. Elsewhere can be found muchos rotoscoped crazy drawing per frame madness, visualisation of throat singing.. spooky xylophones represented by organic decaying dancing squares, industrial drones given a suitably flickering and textured visualisation and Runa’s Spell – a gorgeous play with abstract organic shapes, mostly restrained colour palettes and blurry shapes that emerge from that long, darkened hallway of your David Lynch nightmares. Turns out to be a hallway leading to a New Zealand dairy farm, or where-ever it is that people make relaxy super dubbed out bass chai tent music these days. It gets prettier in other words. Both a strength and occasional weakness when it veers to more well known visual paths. Plenty more visual abstraction to follow, including Mugenkei ( also worth mentioning because the imagery is curator Jean Detheux’s response to Willfried Jentsch’s soundscape ).
Screening : Jun 20, 8pm, ACMI. Introduced by Jean Detheux.

Fears of The Dark
( fearsofthedark-themovie.com + celluloid-dreams.com )
Comic books tend to dismissed in the wider cultural sphere ( hence the popularity for comic artists to reframe them as ‘graphic novels’ ) , but an animation festival is one place they can crawl out from under the bed safely, ready to pollute the minds of the innocent. This feature length compilation draws together Blutch, Marie Caillou, Richard McGuire and a host of other gifted storytellers I hadn’t heard of, but will be keeping an eye out for now, and an artist destined for a compilation based on fear : Charles Burns.
The Burns piece is every bit as disturbing, engrossing and under the skin as fans of his Black Hole comics ( soon to be made into a feature!! ) would be hoping for within a Burns animation. Who knows what kind of erotic weird biology experiences inform or inspire the Burns imagination, but he sure keeps fanning the flames within the deep woods of outer suburban North America, a place where sexualised insects and aliens are prospering well, transmitting themselves through whatever human vessels they can find. It’s a credit to the compilation that the rest of it holds up so well to this piece. Full list @ miaf.net ( Screening : Jun 19, 8.45pm, Jun 21, 7.45pm, ACMI ) Recommendo.
charles burns

by Sean Healy, June 13, 2008 0 comments

Chopper Art

chopper
Surely one of the weirder news stories of late, but the first world champion chess player to ever be defeated by a computer ( the ‘Deep Blue’ machine, 1997), Russia’s Gary Kasparov, recently found himself in range of bizarre headlines after being attacked by a remote control ‘helicopter penis’. The youngest ever World Chess Champion in 1985, and ranked world no.1 almost continuously from 1986 until his retirement in 2005, Gary has been using his chess profile lately to promote the ideas of The Other Russia, a coalition opposing the administration of Vladimir Putin. He must’ve been as surprised as anyone to find a recent speech interrupted by a “large phallus-shaped helicopter started buzzing around the room.” The ‘protest’ seems related to a Second Life prank a few years ago, when a CNET interview was interrupted by a series of flying, animated penises. The Tube’d have more, keyword search at your own risk.

Likely amused by it all, is comic artist Chester Brown, who has published a range of graphic novels over the years, often detailing his attempts to grapple with his sexuality, and in one particular short story from ‘The Little Man: Short Strips 1980-1995‘, he brags to another schoolmate about how he escaped from school one day by swinging his penis around really fast and using it as a helicopter blade to jump from a rooftop. Chester is also famous however for a character being chased by cannibalistic pygmies and having the tip of his penis replaced by the head of a miniature Ronald Reagan from another universe. That’d be all for today.

(And late shout-outs to C.H.U.N.K. 666 – ain’t a welded bicycle gang with choppers meaner than theirs .. )

by Sean Healy, June 5, 2008 0 comments

The U-Toob Juggernaut

With over 200 video uploading sites available, including plenty offering better resolution ( eg vimeo.com ), better interfaces ( eg veoh.com ), better payment for people whose clips have been viewed ( eg blip.tv ), the ability to stream live video from your phone to the web ( qik.tv ), and even a capacity to remix files via a browser when uploaded ( eg jumpcut.com ), there’s lots of reasons to avoid youtube. And yet.

Despite it’s crappy resolution, and significant other failings, youtube has become something of an extended audiovisual memorybank. Childhood television rarities, esoteric film snippets, weird slices of history, all viewable in our own time, not when (or what) the networks schedule. Sample clips bookmarked recently at youtube.com/user/jeanpoole :

– Darth Vader edited to be shown removing his helmet to play a harmonica for a disturbed Luke Skywalker, and elsewhere having his voice overdubbed by the brutal Daniel Day Lewis character in There Will Be Blood.. ( maps surprisingly effectively ).
– Saudi Arabian guys on a freeway, holding onto their doors and kind of ice-skating on the ground as the car speeds along…
– Astronaut Buzz Aldrin punching a conspiracy theorist reporter in the face who keeps inferring humans have never been on the moon..
– Turkish E.T.
– La Jetee ( Chris Marker’s legendary sixties short film which regularly finds itself on best film-ever lists )
– William Shatner at a scif-fi awards night singing about the the problems of being a rocketman, being high as a kite up there and all.. complete with deliciously cheesy 70’s styled re-composited versions of himself.
– Footage of the last Tasmanian tiger.. which died in Hobart zoo in the 1930s… the last sighted specimen, it’s tragedy compounded by dying from a human error – a zoo attendant forgetting to put it indoors overnight during one night in the Tassie winter. ( Reviving the tasmanian tiger from a museum DNA sample has been the subject of much scientific work, recently getting a boost when scientists managed to resurrect the gene responsible for the development of cartilage and bone by expressing it within a mouse embryo, but stating that the full reincarnation of a full tassie tiger was a long way off. )
– Still undecided on the merits of his recent epic, Inland Empire? Try this David Lynch double-bill instead :
1 – David Lynch eating panties.
2 – David Lynch deflating Tom Cruise’s Scientology bubble.

by Sean Healy, June 1, 2008 1 Comment

Shadow Chemistry : Josh Cardenas

Visualist and 3D animator Josh Cardenas gigged 6 times in 7 days for the recent ‘Hard Sell’ tour with DJ Shadow + Cut Chemist, yet still had enough pixel gadget stamina to hook-up later with VJs in most cities too. And so..

What Went Through The Customs X-Ray Machine
2 x Edirol V4 video mixers,
1 x Pioneer SVM-1000 AV mixer for final mixing – “It was cool cause it handled both video and audio – as we had some pre-recorded animated ‘intro’ to the show that had a voice over track. With the mixer I could control the audio levels from my feed. Also, it had a nifty touch-screen to add some super effects! i used this a bit, but sparingly as they are pretty heavy handed. = ))”
2 x DVDJs ( VJs can scratch too )
Laptops ( Who’d have thought?)
Midi controllers.
Cable spaghetti, and inevitable sprawl of AV and international power adaptors.
Portable Battery the Size-Of-A-Laptop which supplies 8 hours of power.
Various tools and tech problem-solvers.

Oh – and 4 x ‘robocams’ which could be remotely controlled by midi, for panning and tilting on the dual DJ action, 1x DJ wristcam for the trainspotters and 2 x cams on mic stands.

Getting It Together
Josh met up with a few Melbourne visualists at Horse Bazaar, where we showed him the resident panoramic screen and the Dataton Watchout software which stitches together the 6 screen wide panoramics, and then he whipped out one of the robots for us ( after cycling through a range of power adaptors before settling on his ‘back-up’ 8 hours of power Size-Of-A-Laptop battery… ). Soon enough, with impressively fluid arcs of movement, the camera was swooping around via controls on the computer. Josh built the hardware himself, mounting each cam on some movable parts ( see MAKE / createdigitalmotion / instructables etc for DIY midi, motors + electronics ), then connecting that up with some patch based software ( eg VVVV, processing / max-msp / quartz composer ) which allows midi signals to control the movements.

Once the software was launched, camera movement was a simple task, gliding the mouse this way or that way to swing the camera’s focus around the room. More impressively, software based control also allows a range of audio analysis or sine wave oscillators to steer the camera movement – eg letting the bass levels control the tilt of the camera, or setting an oscillator to swing the pan back and forth at a preferred speed or frequency. Save a few of these movements as presets, map these to be triggered a midi controller, multiply by 9 cameras, and Dr.Versatile is in.the.house. Kinda handy when VJing for highly improvisational DJs. Josh showed the setlist which featured extensive cues where he was supposed to trigger various video clips, but said inevitably the shows were different each night as the DJs extended out various sections on a whim, keeping Josh on his toes at all times. And with his 3D background, Josh has plenty of ideas for spatial exploration with camera rigs, expect to hear more in the future.

Hollywood Bowling
For those who missed the show, it’s already a disc on the shelf of indie DVD distributors, microcinema.com. Whereas the “Freeze” and “Product Placement” shows were also recorded for DVD, the Bowl setting inspired a less spartan treatment for this disc – with a full behind-the-scenes story of how the show came to be, the live performance, visuals, a gazillion camera angles, more interviews and a 40-page booklet.

(( + hat-tip to Jaymis from CDM + Plug N Play Brisbane for hooking up Josh with the Melb video peeps.. anddddd UPDATE: vidi-yo interview just posted by Jaymis over at the CDM Brisvegas ranch))

by Sean Healy, May 27, 2008 0 comments