These appeared on the web recently, no one seems to know whether they are original 80’s posters or more recent versions. Fascinating nevertheless.
Film
DJ Food – The Crow Animated from Tom Webb on Vimeo.
Tom Webb contacted me with this film he made as part of his 3rd year Illustration Minor project. It’s the first half of the DJ Food track ‘The Crow‘, written by PC, from our ‘Kaleidoscope‘ LP. Here are his comments about the making of it;
“I set myself the task of trying to illustrate the DJ Food album Kaleidoscope. Initially, I was trying to produce stand alone images but eventually decided to dive into the world of animation for the first time. I created a sequence for the first half of The Crow. I was hoping to animate to the whole track, I storyboarded a lot of it but the deadline got the better of me.”
“The images were created as spontaneous responses to the sounds and atmospheres I was hearing inside some of the tracks. I started investigating ‘Full Bleed’, ‘Cookin’, ‘The Riff’, ‘The Crow’ and both the ‘Sleep Dyad‘s’ a lot because of their particular energies.
The idea was to finish making the image before the track finished, so I started painting with my hands to help speed things up and build a small library of personal reactions in texture. I then scanned the images at hi-res and chopped out suitable macro sections which were then imported into the animation. There was a lot of trial and error involved. It’s also the first time I’ve had a go at animating so I had to learn the program from scratch as well.”
I personally love the syncopation he’s got and the movements from dark to light corresponding to the moods of the track. You can see more of Tom’s work on his blog calamridropkick.com
Posted this on Facebook last night but don’t want it to get lost in the ether. Apart from being a car ad that isn’t generic and instantly forgettable this perfectly shows what it’s all about for a 5 year old. It’s also one of the rare occasions you don’t want to wring George Lucas’ over-sized neck for whoring the Star Wars franchise to death.
I got sent the new Reso ‘Valken’ EP yesterday and was so taken with the lead track – ‘War Machine’ – I decided to make a video for it using animation from Vexille, Appleseed and the end titles of the first Iron Man film. If you like your music heavy, intricate and indestructible and your robots the same then this is for you.
The EP is out on Civil Music on February the 21st and contains four tracks.
[youtube width=”640″ height=”480″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZWX4hMZpdg[/youtube]
Yet another late 80’s coincidence: I saw this film in late ’89 or early ’90 on UK terrestrial TV as filler between programs. I’ve wanted to see it again for over 20 years and I finally found it on YouTube. It’s an animation by Danish director Lejf Marcussen called ‘Den Offentlige Rost’ (The Public Voice, 1988) and it’s a simple idea executed fantastically. It starts out pretty simply but starts getting interesting around the 2.40 mark and it’s all done by hand, no computer graphic trickery apparently – stunning. I can only keep searching for a better copy now.
I seem to be on a late 80’s kick at the moment and one of my favourite bands as the the 80’s turned into the 90’s was Fishbone. I saw them at least twice but missed their legendary Astoria gig where Angelo jumped off the balcony because my girlfriend at the time decided to dump me that day. One of life’s big regrets. Seems they’ve been around for 25 years now and, even though their recorded output fell off by the mid 90’s, they still hold a place in my heart.
[youtube width=”640″ height=”480″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChXk4R0mGNw[/youtube]
A new documentary is doing the rounds called ‘Everyday Sunshine’ – named after possibly their biggest hit – and you can see how influential they were at the time by the names cropping up to pay homage. Chuck D, Flea, Ice T, Perry Farrell, George Clinton, Les Claypool and, er… Tim Robbins and Gwen Stefani (!). Fair enough on Gwen, No Doubt were a ska band before they hit the big time. Anyway, the trailer looks very promising, Larry Fishburne narrates (nice touch) and let’s hope they get the dues they deserve after all these years. There’s a full website devoted to the doc and the DVD should be out late summer.
Also, does anyone remember an early 90’s TV show with David Rappaport called ‘Beyond the Groove’? I think it only ran for one series and it was a music show fashioned as a road movie of sorts. David would drive around and meet people or find himself in different situations and bands or artists would appear and do their thing. Fishbone once featured at the end of one episode when David drove into a deserted outdoor film lot, the screen flickers into life and you see the band doing a live version of ‘Behaviour Control Technician’ from their (at that time unreleased) ‘Reality of My Surroundings’ LP. I had it on videotape for years and tried to find it recently but it had been taped over! Nothing on YouTube, in fact very little about the show at all, if someone has a copy of it, I’d love to see it, likewise their performance of ‘Fishbone Is Red Hot’ on the Big World Café programme.
And here’s the ‘Beyond the Groove‘ clip courtesy of Matt Davies (see comments below), thanks so much – the power of the internet!.
[youtube width=”640″ height=”480″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qeYUOf4s8g[/youtube]
New 1 hour video mix by my DJ sparring partner DK. Catch us tomorrow at Videocrash alongside Hexstatic, DJ Cheeba and Digitonal at the Electrowerkz in London for some of this and more.
[vimeo width=”640″ height=”480″]http://www.vimeo.com/19005861[/vimeo]
This is new to me but about 6 months old, love Cut Chemist’s stuff, one of my favourite DJs.
[vimeo width=”640″ height=”480″]http://vimeo.com/13404672[/vimeo]
[flickrvideo width=”636″ height=”480″]http://www.flickr.com/photos/strictly-kev/5334664470/[/flickrvideo]
and you can hear the performance in full here…
Sculpture Live at the London Short Film Festival 2011 by tapebox
This is one of the most beautiful vinyl records I’ve bought all year, Sculpture’s ‘Rotary Signal Emitter’ which doubles as a zoetrope when spun and filmed.
Check out the film they made of it, their site is here and they’ll be performing in London at the ICA on Jan 7th.
Demonstration Reel from Sculpture on Vimeo.
Further to the Star Wars fan posters post earlier I felt I should dedicate a post to Olly Moss’s work. He has such a simple angle on things, great colour sense and a clean, unfussy presentation. Able to merge different genre styles and bring a touch of the classics to everyday pop culture. For examples see his Penguin Classic book covers illustrating video games or his film poster updates via his site (click on Design > Rolling Roadshow or Videogame classics).
Tron:Legacy is the big Xmas movie to see as I type and these just popped up on Deviant Art by iamclu – beautiful.
Following on from the fan posters post there are a couple of lovely Tron ones by Eric Tan for the first and second film that go together beautifully. They had glow in the dark inks and were available from Sideshow Collectibles earlier this month but are now gone, maybe eBay?
Fan versions of film posters are nothing new but there seem to be more and more of them around with every major release these days. They can be a deviation from the norm for working artists in other practices or virtually launch careers of unknowns posting on their blogs or deviant art page (see the Tron post). Of course the most popular films will get multiple versions and inspire hitherto unseen levels of love and creativity, far outshining the original film’s posters themselves. The best example is probably the original Star Wars trilogy (I’m yet to see ANY fan posters for the second trilogy) and the recent smash and grab success of Olly Moss’ set on the Mondo site show that there is plenty of mileage in those old images as he brings a fresh look to all three films with gorgeous colour combinations.
Earlier this year Andy Helms got into hot water with Lucasfilm after he posted his take on the trilogy on his site and offered them for sale. His reward was a cease and desist letter, which is fair enough if you don’t have permission, but a shame as the posters are excellent.
A couple of years ago the ridiculously talented Tom Whalen did his take on Star Wars and Empire but never did one for Return of the Jedi. Wanting copies of the posters I even contacted him asking why he didn’t make a 3rd but it seems time didn’t make it a reality. Now he’s finished the trilogy to complete a beautiful set (also check out his Godzilla posters). There are many more Star Wars-themed posters out there if you google, a lot not even attempting to portray each film but taking obscure references and imagining situations or alternate versions. I’m sure these won’t be the last.
A bit of a special one this: Videocrash and Solid Steel team up for a XXmas knees-up at the Electrowerkz in an Audio Visual rave up this Saturday. Hexstatic will be presenting a ‘Trailer Trax’ special, Cheeba will no doubt be previewing some tidy new pieces and DK and I will round out the year with a final showcase of our own Ninja Tune XX AV mix before packing it up and putting it to bed. Joining us will be Digitonal showing their new ‘Deep Space’ a/v set – an hour long set constructed around a voyage that starts with Earth. moves past the Moon and planets, and into the infinite…
Not only that but Graffiti artist, stenciller and sticker-er (?) supreme, SNUB23 from Brighton will be joining us and painting an original piece live from 11pm. This will later be auctioned off in aid of the MacMillan Cancer Support charity after being signed by all present. He might also bring some stencils for custom T shirts too (see below). It all starts at 8pm and will probably end messily at 4am, this is a final farewell to a great year for Ninja and the 20th celebrations before we break for Xmas.
This is pretty excellent, another take on the YouTube-clip-makes-a-song idea, managed to produce some lovely tracks very quickly and easily. Click to image to be taken to the site.
A short film of the Ninja festivities in Bristol last weekend
(left) The speakers either side of the stage at Motion were like rocket engines. (right) Matt Black rocks the spot. Great set of pics from Emma (Miss Kerf) Gutteridge here
Nice little film from backstage of the recent Ninja Tune XX party in London, put together by Zane Lowe’s people. Meant to post is weeks back but the embed code kept messing up.
Amazing work all round by Mutate Britain, Hit + Run and Chu with contributions from myself and Doc Vek
[vimeo width=”650″ height=”485″]http://www.vimeo.com/15564959[/vimeo]
Keen listeners of DJ Food material will have picked up that the late Dudley Moore’s fantastic score to the 1967 film ‘Bedazzled’ (NOT the recent remake!) is a big favourite. I’ve sampled it a couple of times now (both licensed too) and the record has been long out of print. Several dodgy bootlegs have surfaced over the years, mainly on the Harkit label and Jonny Trunk has long been trying to reissue it with little success as the Moore estate seems zipped up tighter than a nun’s habit.
But even they seem to have cottoned on to the fact that it’s a great score that’s in demand as I stumbled across this last week – a legit reissue, from the Moore estate, remastered from the original tapes, with two alternate versions of the ‘single’ from the album too! Sadly it’s CD only and how far into the stores it’s going to make it is unknown but it’s available from the official Dudley Moore site along with several other releases.