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.
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.
There are a lot of people talking about this documentary. It’s something of a whirlwind 12 minutes in which Guardian writer Kieran Yates and director Marcus Plowright immerse themselves in one of London, or perhaps the world’s most intriguing, exciting countercultures: Muslim drag queens. Through east London bedrooms and the back seats of taxis we are led into the world of men whose lives revolve around transforming into women and performing in increasingly packed-out drag clubs across the country. Kieran, who originally pitched this idea to The Guardian, kindly allowed us to ask her some questions on what is a small but phenomenally informative and powerful short.
For all the fashion world’s beauty and prestige – both in the clothes and those who wear them – it really can be a little daft sometimes. In fashion films in particular the seriousness, the peculiar facial expressions and the melodrama are rife for a gentle, affectionate ribbing: a route that director Danny Sangra took in his refreshing and brilliant Fashion Creatives film for Mercedes-Benz, A Fistful of Wolves.
“Each film is a roll of the dice. You don’t know what you’re going to get,” says Fred Wiseman, director of the brilliant new film National Gallery rather philosophically, chatting to The Telegraph’s Mark Hudson at the film’s screening in its titular home last week.
Simon Porte Jacquemus is a Paris-based, self-taught designer who started his label at 19. He cites “off” taste and juvenile humour as inspiration for his clothes, and each collection has a narrative through not only the fabrics and colour-ways but a sense of identity, place and character. Simon works with filmmaker and photographer Bertrand le Pluard on the films and lookbooks.
Self-taught artist Jesse Kanda makes dystopian, macabre films made up of distorted images of alien car crashes, dancing dead babies and everything in between. You’ll no doubt have seen his work on the brilliant and now ubiquitous cover for FKA Twigs’ LP1.
Whether in the art world or in the tabloids, the Turner Prize has no small amount of artistic baggage to schlep about from year to year. As such, creating designs around the awards ceremony itself is something not to be treated either too flippantly or with too much deference to its heritage, a bridge crossed very deftly indeed in the promotional video by Why Not Associates for this year’s Channel Four Turner Prize broadcast.
Scott Carthy only graduated from Kingston University’s Graphic Design course last summer, but the 22-year-old Irish creative looks like he has a very big 2015 in front of him if the first week is anything to go by. Uploaded just seven days ago, Scott’s new film Litefeet has racked up thousands of views and been featured on many of the leading creative blogs around. The film – which follows New York subway dancers against the backdrop of a city-wide crackdown on their activities – is the follow-up to 1050.6© Scott’s first look at the same issue which we featured back in May.
Ever wondered what your furniture gets up to when you’re out the house? All sorts of naughtiness, if the video for Dan Deacon’s Feel the Lightning is to be believed. Directed by Andrew Jeffrey Wright, we see a pair of mischievous armchairs get up to no good; defacing pictures, knocking sweeties all over the shop and learning about sex, then practising it. The party might be over for most of us, but not for these sneaky seats, who are joined in their revelry by a book about colours and shapes, which apparently parps the contents of his pages into being, resulting in a glorious carnival of dancing and brightly-hued frivolity. And like only the most meticulously planned (and lucky) teenage house parties, everything is perfectly back in order once the master of the house returns home. Almost…
Lernert & Sander’s brilliance lies in their ability to see a brief from a point of view that manages to be both really obvious and completely novel at the same time. So when the Dutch artists and directors were commissioned by 3.1 Phillip Lim to promote their new shoe range, they went back to basics and realised that footwear, in essence, is all about feet. They then tracked down and interviewed four of the world’s leading foot models, pedicured professionals who have stood in for the likes of Brad Pitt, Sarah Jessica Parker and Madonna in the past.
