Happy New Year! What better way to celebrate than a week’s worth of optimistic posts to get you in the mood for ’09?
To kick off is the video for Tom Vek’s 2005’s track ‘Nothing But Green Lights’ directed by Adam Bartley. An interestingly stark take on an uplifting track.
There’s always a frenzy of opinions around the Oscars, as Michael Hogan Tweeted this morning: “It’s all happening over on the #oscars hashtag, if you’re interested in people who can’t type properly quacking on about film awards.” But amid all the polarised bickering and the dress-sense-rating bitchiness, it’s nice to remember the sheer amount of skill and craft that went into all the nominated films. Crane.tv has produced an interesting series which focuses on the lesser-appreciated talents who make the movie industry what it is, the most impressive of which focuses on the Whiplash sound mixer Thomas Curley. He got the nod from the Academy this year and it’s super interesting to hear him talk about the challenges of working on a film which is all about drumming, and so sound is critically important to the overall artistic effect.
We’re always interested in what Los Angeles-based artist and illustrator Geoff McFetridge has been up to. A video of him talking about making a bike sounded especially promising, but a video of him talking about making a “totally absurd” ocean-going bike? Swoon.
Good lord, I haven’t OMGd this hard since…possibly since anything this big and Blur-related happened last time, maybe with the release of Under the Westway, maybe when I sweatily, heart-in-mouthedly (be cool Gosling!) met Damon Albarn in a Foyles book shop. As anyone who’s been on any form of social media in the last hour will know, during a lovely long live Facebook chat with Zane Lowe this morning it was announced that Blur have recorded a new album, called The Magic Whip (their first full-length release in 12 years) revealing the very cool artwork in The Sun of all places this morning.
From LSD, Michael Paul Smith learned that he “didn’t have to go to foreign lands to meet foreign people.” This realisation informed what he went on to dedicate his life to – creating tiny, perfect model depictions of the 20th Century, mapped out in his miniature town Elgin Park.
Portland-based archaeologist Cameron Smith has a dream; a dream that has little to do with his chosen career path. Unable to join NASA because of his poor eyesight, Cameron’s dedicated the past few years of his life to engineering an affordable space suit that’ll enable the wearer to venture outside Earth’s atmosphere for the tiny sum of $5,000. He and his crack team of amateurs and enthusiasts are working tirelessly to get their project off the ground and into the cosmos. Why, you ask? Because they’re rebels – simple as!
“My name is Matthew Frost and I make hilarious short films about famous people mostly.” So begins this excellent video profile of the brilliant British filmmaker but we’d go even further – his name’s Matthew Frost and he makes hilarious short films about famous people better than anyone else out there (from Kirsten Dunst and Lizzie Caplan to Jessica Chastain and Cate Blanchett).
Maybe it’s because I spent all day Saturday watching Beatles documentaries, or maybe it’s because I’m feeling emotional and loving after a big lunch, but this is great. If you had told anyone five years ago that Rihanna, Kanye and Paul would team up with fashion photography powerhouse Inez and Vinoodh to create a music video, no one would have believed you. But, it’s happened. Sure Brandon Stosuy from Pitchfork just referred to it on Twitter as a GAP commercial, but I think maybe it’s stronger than that. When the collaboration was first announced I expected them to accompany it with a mindbendingly expensive blockbuster video à la Justin Timberlake’s What Goes Around…Comes Around complete with a car chase. But no, it’s stripped back, fashionable, kinda soppy and watchable. Well done Inez and Vinoodh, you’ve made this almost farcical musical trio somewhat more believable.
Promoting a city or area is a tricky thing to get right. Too earnest, and you look boring; too edgy and you risk alienating families, and those of a sensitive disposition. How about going for just downright peculiar then? And a surreal cast of wooden figures?
Today is one of those weird dates in the calendar that means a lot to some people, and almost nothing to everybody else. Transfer Deadline Day is the final 24 hours that football clubs are allowed to buy players before the summer, and over recent years a weird mania has built up every time it rolls around (culminating last year in the bizarre spectacle of a Sky Sports News reporter having a purple sex toy waggled in his ear).
If you’re prone to being envious of impossibly beautiful creative people living dreamy lives in perpetually sunny places, I would advise you to look away now. We already knew Petra Collins was a dab hand at documenting the pleasures and perils of teenage life through her photography, but as this new film commissioned by COS and picked up on by Dazed Digital aptly demonstrates, she’s not bad at filmmaking either. Drive Time sees Petra douse life in Los Angeles with the same compelling potion that her photographs do, as she films her friends Cherry Glazerr front woman Clementine Creevy, photographer Autumn de Wilde and her daughter Arrow, artists Erin and Sam Falls and producer Asma Maroof wandering dreamily around the city, musing sweetly on the art scene there. It’s hazy and sun-soaked and plays into the hands of all the best cliches Hollywood entertains. Which, from time to time, is precisely what you need.
“I think an artist is never happy with their work. Occasionally you make a mark that you like but that’s a good thing because you’re still aiming higher than you can physically attain.” This lovely line comes from the latest One Minute Wonder video profile, featuring the inimitable Sir Peter Blake. The short-but-sweet snapshots from Dutch agency Present Plus are among the best creative films out there, managing to pack enough insight into 60 seconds to give you a great introduction to the subject but also leave you hungry for more. I hadn’t actually been to the site for a while but I was delighted to find a raft of great new profiles, including Sam Bompas, Lucy McRae, Matilda Tristram and Craig Ward.
John Nolan may have the coolest job title on earth, described as he is as “a designer and creator of robots.” An animatronics expert who’s worked on a whole heap of blockbusters (from Harry Potter and Hellboy to Where The Wild Things Are and Clash Of The Titans), John was the go-to guy when Poke and directorial team The Theory wanted to do something pretty special to promote Here East, a new maker space on the site of the Olympic Park in east London.
Coronus, The Terminator is the latest single from Flying Lotus, taken from the album You’re Dead! As the album title suggests, it’s a moody, atmospheric tune, backed up by an equally heavyweight video. The five minute epic comes courtesy of Young Replicant and Pulse films and follows a dying man through his last minutes on Earth, hovering between conscious and unconscious worlds, battling the demons of his past before he moves into the next world.
