Funki Porcini – 6 Minutes In Manchester

Funki Porcini aka James Braddell (disclosure: very good friend of mine, I’ve designed several of his record sleeves over the years) is putting out some sublime music right now through his own channels. His Bandcamp page is seeing regular updates of new tracks and there are some real gems emerging, the latest being his ‘Six Minutes In Manchester’ single, complete with 9 Lazy 9 remix. Also check out another recent track ‘The Devil Drives’ below

[youtube width=”640″ height=”480″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3zoRYoNw1M[/youtube]

 

Posted in Film, Music. | 3 Comments |

The Light Surgeons at the National Maritime Museum

So excited to finally be able to see this, I’ve been privy to some of the workings of this for the past year now (my wife works for them) and it opens this week in London at the National Maritime Museum. Part of a major new exhibition, although this will be a permanent installation, content-heavy video mapping based around the moon’s relationship to the sea, this is just a tiny part of it.

[vimeo width=”640″ height=”360″]http://vimeo.com/26328656[/vimeo]

 

Posted in Art, Design, Event, Film. | No Comments |

People Like Us album(s) and exhibition

I’m currently enjoying People Like Us’ (aka Vicki Bennett) new album ‘Welcome Abroad’, it’s a frequently hilarious mixture of cut and pastry based around her time stuck abroad due to the recent volcanic eruptions in Iceland. You can listen to the whole album on her Soundcloud page or buy it here. She also has her first solo exhibition, ‘The Doors of Perspection’, opening at the end of July in London at the Vitrine Gallery, previewing new films she has made by extending panning shots from existing films into widescreen format (if i’ve understood the press release correctly).

Also a few months back I received a lovely box set from the Edinburgh Printmakers‘Prints of Darkness’ exhibition, which includes a gatefold sleeve housing a poster and 12″ picture disc by Vicki entitled ‘This Is Light Music’. This 10 track mini album heavily cross references some of the music on ‘Welcome Abroad’ too and can still be bought here although it is limited to 250 copies.

PS: I actually think this is even more wonderful than ‘Welcome Abroad’, I’ll never be able to hear certain well known classics the same way again.

Posted in Event, Film, Music, Records. | No Comments |

Greenpeace’s ‘Join The Rebellion’ campaign

Remember the VW ad featuring a kid dressed as Darth Vader trying to use the Force to move things I posted a while back? Now there’s a follow up…[quicktime width=”636″ height=”400″]http://www.djfood.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/GreenpeaceNordic-Video-Player.mp4[/quicktime]

As you can see at the end, it’s not VW behind this sequel, but Greenpeace, in what has to be one of the most interesting campaigns in recent years. Taking off where VW left they’ve taken the side of the Rebellion and created a whole website devoted to getting VW to change their stance on CO2 emissions and fuel efficiency standards.

They’ve also set up an ingenious way to get people to spread their message through signing up and going through ‘Jedi Training’ to gain points to unlock further levels by referring others to the page. Each click earns you a point and each person who signs up because of it earns you 5 points.

One question begs asking though: Is there anyone who George Lucas WON’T license his franchise out to?

 

 

Posted in Film, Star Wars. | 1 Comment |

Transformers 3

I don’t know where to start, I really don’t. I don’t usually do film reviews and was never particularly into Transformers as a kid so there’s no ‘Michael Bay raped my childhood’ angle here but I thought I’d try and put something down about the film I’ve just seen.

Early reviews suggested that it was ‘epic’, ‘long’, ‘laughably acted’ and ‘better than the second one’. It’s all that but it’s only just better than the second one, that not being difficult because that episode was the most confused, disjointed, stupid, insult to the intelligence since Charlies Angels 2. To start with some positives: it has possibly the best cgi work I’ve ever seen, just amazing stuff, tens of robots and ships in some scenes, all believable, fitting right into the enviroment. The sound design is amazing too, really noticeable as it was in 7.1 where I saw it. The robot design is still as intricate and fussy as you like but they’ve discovered weathering finally, especially on a battle damaged Megatron, who is back with half his head missing after the battle in TF2.

Right, that’s got the plus’s out of the way, on to the negatives. Where to begin? Acting: bad all round but everyone looks like an ageing thespian next to the wooden-ness that is Rosie whatshername, the underwear model who looks like a Barbie and somehow got a leading role in the summer blockbuster without an ounce of charisma. I was wondering why she didn’t speak in any of the trailers and now we know why, every time she opens her mouth it’s like we’re transported from a blockbuster Hollywood film to a school play. It doesn’t help that she has some of the lamest dialogue as well as one line that should go down in history as one of the worst ever in film.

Plot: why does everything have to be so complicated? Why does Sam always somehow get involved in these situations through seemingly random occurrences? Lightning might strike once, maybe twice, but three times? So many scenes and characters could have been edited out of this film and none would have been missed, the story would have gone on it’s merry way. Sam doesn’t need to be in it, Barbie doesn’t, she just provides a reason for him to do stuff amongst the robots, we certainly don’t need his parents or another autobot comedy duo either. We don’t really need the army troops on the ground, as they generally run about completely ineffectually or scout things out until Optimus arrives. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, no one goes to see Transformers for the humans, they go for the robots, they’re the stars. The sooner someone realises this and takes people out of the equation the better, the cgi robots can out-act half the cast anyway. But Optimus, ah Optimus, the most righteous, downright dull robot ever, there he goes again with one of his speeches about ‘freedom’ – yawn. At one point a soldier comments. “Why do the Decepticons get all the good shit?”, when some fighter or rocket ship bursts overhead, and you do find yourself rooting for them over the good guys as they at least have some personality.

Where was I? The plot: space race, autobot moon crash, dark secret, space gate, cannisters, Sentinel Prime, military hiding stuff, Optimus pissed off, Sam needs a job, parents visit, girlfriend’s boss has the hots for her, John Malcovich, strange japanese guy knows about Sam, Japanese guy gets killed by a Decepticon, Chernoybl, earthworm Decepticon, CIA, Africa, Sam and hotty have a bust up, cue comedy ex CIA guy and his butler to get involved, chase on a freeway, army, hotty gets kidnapped by her boss who’s in with the bad guys, space gate opens, Decepticons invade, fighting, shouting, comedy autobots, Sam and parents have a chat, ex CIA agent goes to Russian bar, Sam HAS to go into an alien invasion war zone to find his girlfriend and the army help him because ‘they killed one of my buddies’, soldiers jump out of a plane, soldiers run up a building that’s falling down, building falls down, they have to get to a bridge, find camera in the rubble, Barbie and Sam have a hot link to the CIA and tell them what’s happening, soldiers run up another building so they can parachute out again, Optimus battles then gets caught up in some rope, cannisters bring Cybertron to earth, more shouting, Barbie has a chat with Megatron, Sam fights Starscream but can barely kick Barbie’s boss’ arse, Optimus gets free and has a big battle, Sam and Barbie love each other in the middle of a warzone and have a little joke.

But getting back to the plot – there really isn’t one, everything is so rapidfire that you barely have time to register a flippant remark about ‘we’ve got three marks on the screen, closing fast’ before you’re plunged into some fight or chase scene with a random bot who you can’t recognise unless he’s Bumblebee (Yellow and Black) or Optimus (Red and Blue). Every scene seems to be either an action sequence or a lame attempt at comedy with the occasional line of dialogue threading it all together. At one stage there’s a scene of Optimus and Sentinel Prime talking in what looks like the outback of Africa, then we’re back to Chicago. Bay rams the pedal down and cranks the volume up to 11 from the off and it’s all you can do to keep up. There is no dynamic at all, no soft and slow to balance the fast and loud, just a massive race from one set piece to the next with zero tension. The film is the equivalent of an audio track that’s been compressed and brickwall-limited into an oblong waveform.

I found it so hard to enjoy the good stuff simply because I was reeling from either a jump cut from elsewhere or some useless scene that need never have been in the film in the first place. Watching it is like being repeatedly punched, spun round, amazed and assaulted whilst having lame jokes thrust upon you for 2/3 hours. The 3D is nothing to write home about, in fact the film has some of the worst ghosting in parts that I’ve ever seen, really shoddy compositing. So much is happening in each scene, as well as rapid edits, you never get a chance to focus on the 3D much. Another thing was the beginning, where they included original 60’s news footage to show Kennedy implementing the space race. Intercut with restaged, retro-styled footage, both artificially grained and clean, the artificial grain looked cheap and nasty and didn’t match the original footage at all, more like a cheap Final Cut Pro filter, the whole thing just didn’t work.

All in all a massive let down but marginally better than the second, which isn’t saying much. Here’s a short film on the sound design of it all to end on a positive.

Posted in Film, Robots. | 4 Comments |

Moonbug trailer

[vimeo width=”640″ height=”480″]http://vimeo.com/18267299[/vimeo]

Documentary Feature 83 mins
A film by Nichola Bruce
Music by Matt Johnson
Bitten by the ‘Moonbug‘, photographer Steve Pyke sets out on a journey across America in his search to meet and photograph the men who walked on the moon.

Moonbugthefilm.com

Posted in Film, Music. | 1 Comment |

May the 4th Be With You

I’ve been waiting all year to post this… The original Star Wars trilogy, in Lego, in two minutes, told in shorthand, by a child. Lots more Lego Star Wars films on the official site.

[flv width=”636″ height=”375″]http://www.djfood.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/May-the-4th-be-with-you.flv[/flv]

 

Posted in Film, Toys. | No Comments |

The Thief and the Cobbler by Richard Williams

This entry was originally posted 28th October 2008 on my old Myspace blog, before this site existed.

ThiefTitleslightblur

I have been obsessed with this film since I saw a couple of clips in a documentary called ‘I Drew Roger Rabbit’ back in the late 80’s. It is / was the life’s work of the legendary Richard Williams, who most people will know for his animation on Roger Rabbit. For those that don’t know of it, it’s no big surprise, it’s history is long, complicated and it is still unfinished in the form it’s creator intended. There is an DVD in existence but this is a pale shadow of it’s intended groundbreaking form which Williams has disowned.

Nasrudin

A short history of the production: it was begun in the sixties and loosely based on both Aladdin and the Sufi stories of the character Mulla Nasrudin, some of which Williams illustrated in early editions. It was his intention that it would compare to the early Disney greats and feature some of the most jaw dropping animated sequences ever made, all hand drawn, no computer imagery involved. And it does, from the footage I’ve seen, it delivers several scenes of breathtaking brilliance that have to be watched repeatedly just to pick up just how much detail is in them.

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Williams worked in advertising primarily and headed one of the leading animation studios in the UK. He was responsible for lots of adverts you would have seen as a child (if you live in the UK) such as Frosties’ Tony The Tiger, the Listerine Dragon or the Pink Panther selling TDK video cassettes. But all the while he was churning out work that paid the rent he was chipping away at his big project. He used actors such as Vincent Price, Anthony Quayle, Sean Connery and Kenneth Williams, constantly revisiting them over the years to re-voice parts as the story changed. By the time Roger Rabbit hit he was an industry legend and finally the larger public also knew his name – it was time to seize the moment and finish his masterpiece. A deal with Warner Brothers meant he worked full time on it for a number of years but financial troubles and missed deadlines bought bankruptcy and the film was taken from him.

Warners finished the film without him, cut it to bits, added and deleted characters and released it as ‘The Princess & The Cobbler’, a thoroughly bastardised version of the original and miles away from Williams’ original vision. The film was later recut again and released as ‘Arabian Knight’ for the US market which ended up wrecking it even further. Even the release of a DVD was so poor it garnered an award for the worst standard edition DVD of 2006. Williams wasn’t involved with any of these versions, having disowned the project when it fell out of his control.

P&T_King_and_zigzag

All was not lost though, with the internet, and like anything that promised so much but fell at the last hurdle, (think Brian Wilson’s ‘Smile’ LP) the cult of the Cobbler has grown over the years. Starting in 2004, a fan and industry insider, Garrett Gilchrist, collected all the best sources he could find, including a copy of an original workprint of the almost finished film. He then assembled a ‘Recobbled Cut’ of the film as Williams would have had it and made it available on the web. When I found this I couldn’t believe it even existed, this was too good to be true, a film I never thought I’d see and now someone had gone to the trouble to assemble all the finished parts into a semi-coherent form.

But there was more, a new blog was started last year simply called The Thief by some of the original animators and staff on the project. They post anecdotes, line tests and technical details behind various scenes along with with in-house memorabilia and countless other things privy only to those involved in such a production. This is also one of the reasons I’m writing this blog now, they have recently initiated a poll in an attempt to drum up an official DVD release of the surviving parts of Williams’ version. Finishing the actual film seems out of the question (Williams rarely wishes to discuss it) but there is a wealth of material finished that ranks amongst some of the best animation ever produced. Various restoration projects have been started over the years and here is another attempt to set the wheels in motion to give it some form of dignified release to the public.

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This film is a legend in animation circles and it slowly seems to be coming to light via the web (it already has a lengthy Wikipedia entry). I urge you to check out Garrett’s website for more info on a copy and see it, marvel at it’s contents and then tell someone else. Maybe check out the Thief blog for more of the background behind it or add your vote to the poll to have a DVD released by the studio that holds the footage. Whatever you do, try and make time to see it in some way as it is a superhuman feat in a medium that has become dominated by computers – they simply don’t make them like this anymore.

Posted in Art, Film. | 1 Comment |