Ok, ENESS – you had me at ‘projection mapped kinetic sculpture’. The Creation Cinema – seen above, is now installed at the Melbourne Museum as part of First Peoples, an exhibition celebrating ‘the history, culture, achievements and survival of Victoria’s Aboriginal people.’ It’s a gorgeous installation, located inside a circular room, which is in turn enclosed by intricate layers of wood. Once inside – the sublime smoothness and grace of motion immediately captivates. It’s something that animators strive for with onscreen movements, but is so much more satisfying to witness with moving physical parts. Within that darkened egg of a room, the sounds, video and slow relentless movements of the wing fragments all add up to quite sublime effect. Fantastic installation, and viewable for the next 10 years!
The slow fade out of Melbourne’s summer = an opportune time to re-spark the skynoise engines. It’s also likely I just miss writing things longer than 140 characters. Especially since I’m just about to finish reading a 3000 page novel ( The Baroque Cycle, Yo!). Regardless of the roots….. expect some fruits.. scattered across the next few months – riffs about visual culture, and likely some weirder tangents too. That’s what ma bones are saying. And sooner than that – some long overdue reviews:
Millumin (interesting timeline based visual performance software)
Below – the summer that kept skynoise drooling on its pillow:
Dec 2012: Stereosonic – Touchscreen video booth installations for an energy drink tent. (photos got animated, projected and sent online.) Sampology at Falls Festival Dec 30 ( Marion Bay ) + Dec 31 ( Lorne ) ( Mixing camera sources with Sampology’s live video).
Jan 2013:
MONA FOMA Projections on a 4 storey fire escape stairwell, and custom animations for the FAUX MO cinema. Fun was had. Some keywords to throw in a blender: Chicks on Speed, No Zu, Digital Primate, Soda Jerk, a sequined ninja, MONA, David Byrne’s reflections about MONA, and Richard Flanagan’s New Yorker article about MONA founder, David Walsh – the professional gambler responsible for “building a private art museum in Tasmania dedicated to sex and death”. MONA museum is also famous for ‘The O‘ – “the mobile device given to all visitors who walk through Mona’s doors… there are no labels to be found anywhere on the walls of the museum.. these devices provided access to information about the art.”
Feb 2013:
Developed an audiovisual performance with The Swiss Conspiracy ( Moses Iten from The Cumbia Cosmonauts, and Christoph H. Müller from Gotan Project ) , which was performed at The Swiss Festival. The show ended up featuring footage shot at Alpenrail, the largest Swiss Alps railway model replica in the Southern hemisphere ( gopro train tunnels! ) and goats from a Swiss goat cheese farm SW of Hobart.
Rebirth of A Firebird – Helped out with some live projections for a couple of sequences for a ‘hip-hop sci-fi’ short film being made by Alan Nguyen (aka 2 Pants Rotation – in his giant monster rapping mode).
Mar 2013:
At the Adelaide Festival – did live video for The Cumbia Cosmonauts at the fun pop-up venue, Barrio. The theme for the night was ‘Animal House’ – which meant there was a camel, piglets and geese nearby, as well as dog masseur doing live demonstrations on a table.
And Then It Was Now:
– Developing an audiovisual performance for Wide Open Spaces, a wonderful desert festival held out near Alice Springs in May. Longtime collaborator Suckafish P Jonez is back from Barcelona, and we’re excited to be exploring AV again. Weekly rehearsals!
– Am co-hosting a studio elective at RMIT within the design faculty, looking at video production, projection and installation – from an interior design perspective (which tends to include a lot more materials and building related research / development). It’s a fun studio, which uses mapping processes, and comic / graphic novel storytelling techniques to help inform video installations.
– Am slowly rolling out a series of updates to the skynoise.net/projects page, finally uploading documentation from a range of projects… including the snippets below, developed for 360 last year.
Elsewhere: I PREFER VIMEO: ((Better quality encoding/resolution/interface/community comments etc)) OTHERS PREFER YOUTUBE: ((More eyeballs. And clients sometimes want it here.))
FACE IS THE PLACE : ((Finally succumbed – click facebook.com/JeanP00LE – for all your Zuckerborgian messaging / subscribing / liking needs)).
Above : more proof that Space Is The Place…. at least when it comes to Mexi-Australian tropical bass genres.
That’s the fruits of a few quick projection and filming sessions with the Cumbia Cosmonauts, featuring custom graphics made by the CC VJ – Martin Hadley (I especially liked his spaceship control deck!). I’d like to think if there’s ever a Mexi-Australian space program, that it looks something like this… ie has that Ed Wood in space vibe about it, maybe with styling by Lee Scratch Perry & Sun Ra.
The Cumbia Cosmonauts are a Melbourne band who are celebrated around the world with their take on Mexico’s cumbia music, and so fittingly, they release their new album, Tropical Bass Station, on the Berlin label, Chusma records, on Nov 23, 2012. The track ‘Our Journey To The Moon (And Back)’ comes from that album.
4 days later, and am still buzzing from the Elefant Traks vs Dr Seuss show at the Sydney Opera House.
Developed and performed for the Graphic Festival – it was an audacious project – inside a tiny time frame, create 18 songs and animations to reinterpret or remix the books of Dr.Seuss for the stage. It never felt like enough time – and yet, the amazing zoo / crew at Elefant Traks pulled it together and nailed a dynamic audiovisual smorgasbord (that apparently had some of the Seuss publishing folk moved to tears!).
My role was to develop and live trigger the animations for the show, which was akin to developing a feature film in 6 or so weeks.. while liasing with around 20 different musicians… “hey man, I’ve got this new idea for a beat / I’ll get you those lyrics soon.. etc etc” – so I wasn’t surprised to find myself still rendering out clips on stage, right up to the last minute.
I’m going to put up some more animation info later, over at skynoise.net/projects, but for now, while still floating, I wanted to put out a huge thank you to:
– Jono ‘Dropbear‘ Chong + Darin Bendall, who did an amazing job, animating half of the tracks between them.
– Urthboy – who oversaw the crazy production, as well as performed throughout the show
– Unkle Ho, who helped tie together the visual production, and developed his own flash-based interactive visuals for the show, AV jamming on a wii-board to Green Eggs & Ham, with Jim from Sietta + Angus from Hermitude.
– Luke Snarl Dearnley, who did a stellar job as technical producer, keeping the whole show smooth as butter.
– Owen Field, who covered all the logistics with grace and calm…
And that list could go on and on – there were endless Elefants who who were such a pleasure to collaborate with…
Some Elefant clips:
X-Continental, a clip I did for the Herd back in 2001. Urthboy, Ozi Batla, Solo, The Tongue and L-FRESH: Cipher at the Opera House
and below, Dropbear’s fantastic animation for ‘And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry st’, which was performed as the first track of the show, by Urthboy, Jane Tyrrell + Angus from Hermitude. Ozi Batla had just given his show-intro in an aviator costume, and hooded Urthboy came on to do a quick rap about Dr Seuss, before pulling back the hood as the lights came up, the decks started up, and MCs roamed the stage with this as backdrop:
I cried last night, upon reading that John Wrake, aka Run Wrake, has passed away.
I’d first learned of his cancer diagnosis a few months ago, after wandering once again to his youtube page, and noticing a short and simple message underneath his most recent short film:
Down With The Dawn, is Run Wrake’s usual virtuosic animation, but knowing that this 8 minute short film was his response to being diagnosed with cancer, made it quite confrontational viewing. I was shocked then, but somehow presumed he was turning things around, he was on the slow path to recovery, that although tragic, everything would be okay.
“It is with incredible sadness that I have to let you know that our darling Run passed away very suddenly at 5am on Sunday morning as an end result of his cancer. He had spent a beautiful Saturday with his two children Florence and Joe, his sister Fiona and myself. We left him at 7pm doing what he loved best- drawing and animating with peg bar and paper.
I was with him for his last moments. We love you Run.
Lisa Wrake.”
Above, hard-drive snapshot of some of my favourite RunWrake animations.
I first learned of Run Wrake around 10 years ag0, through his compilation Gas DVD, “Dinnertime”. Somehow it had laid unwatched in a pile of media for a few months, until late one evening I spied it again and lazily inserted, then pressed play. What followed was dizzying and overwhelming – that mix of exhilaration and exhaustion when discovering an artist so consistently good, so relentlessly inventive, and so utterly prolific that you’re left wondering if they exist under different laws of time and space.
Where did ‘Run Wrake’ come from?
Actually a nickname earned whilst keeping wicket particularly badly during a game of cricket aged 11. A friend was sent in for sarcastically shouting ”Run”, as the ball went thru’ my legs for four.
With so much animation under your belt, what has it taught you?
It’s taught me that I’m very lucky to have the desire and ability to scrape a living doing what I enjoy, and that you will never make a piece of work with which you are entirely satisfied.
To what extent do you storyboard your clips? Or how do you approach narrative?
”Rabbit” is the first film that I have rigorously boarded, with a view to telling a story, and I thoroughly enjoyed the discipline.
Any desire for feature films, or longer works?
Absolutely, watch this space*.
(*As of 2012: Wrake was developing an animated feature, The Way to a Whole New You, with writer Neil Jaworski for BBC Films.)
One of my questions was whether Run Wrake had ever animated a skateboarder, and Run Wrake was kind enough to add a note at the end saying that he’d done an ad featuring a skater, and that he’d attached a little quicktime movie of it for me. One of those wow moments – a favourite artist sending me something they’d made?? Below, a screenshot sequence from it, which demonstrates one of his trademark ‘perpetual zoom outs’…
A glimpse at his biography (have you seen a more delightful online CV?), showed some of how this was all possible. Run Wrake had gone through the Chelsea College of Art and Design, and the Royal College of Art, before achieving a breakthrough with his 1990 student film Anyway on MTV’s Liquid Television. With Anyway, several strengths were already evident – an eagerness to playfully deconstruct form, an ability to adapt and incorporate many kinds of media and animation styles, and an incredible capacity for fluid transitions – smoothly morphing into wildly different scenarios or character transformations.
The DVD documents the development of all those strengths, as well as introducing others – a highly attuned sense of animation rhythm and pacing, and a flair for visualising sound and loops. That kinship with music was partially nurtured over time with his job as an illustrator for NME magazine, (the DVD includes a virtual gallery of these illustrations, narrated by a flying turtle-armed boy.), but is most evident across his trajectory of music videos, most notably those with long-time collaborator, Howie B.
How he plays with loops, one minute into Music for Babies by Howie B. (At time of writing, vimeo had just made the clip a ‘staff-pick’, in honour of Run Wrake’s passing.)
The intro sequence to ‘Jukebox’ – no, actually, just all of it…
The ‘Buttmeat‘ clip for Howie B. (All those liquid visual transitions!)
Music video directed by Run Wrake for Spacer’s 2001 single ‘The Beamer‘. (Love the scene transitions, and the disregard for time/space conventions).
“my first job, commissioned by an Elvis suited Jonathan Ross to make a title sequence…making Jukebox, my first animate! commission, a two year slog…meeting and working with Howie B, initially on a short film to accompany the release of his album Music For Babies, and subsequently on a series of freeform promos…presenting storyboards to Roy Lichtenstein in his New York studio for U2′s Popmart Tour visuals…and the critical acclaim for Rabbit, a short film completed in 2005.”
Less easy to understand is why Run Wrake wasn’t better known, even amongst animators. Even though he worked on U2 tours, and Rabbit won plenty of awards, it still felt that there was an animation giant walking amongst us, and not enough recognition of how much terrain his work covered. That was at least partially remedied, earlier this year, with a Run Wrake Retrospective at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, with the title referencing one of his favourite characters:
