The Eagleman Stag

The Eagleman Stag is a BAFTA award winning short stop motion film by Mikey Please. It was suggested to me by Chris Paul Daniels from the Unravel film, who is a classmate of his. The film is a dark comedy about a man's obsession with the quickening perception of time that faces us as we age and his attempts to counter these effects. What i found most interesting were the dark tones achieved through filming in black and white that made the film stand out from the works of Svankmajer and the Quay brothers while still being inspired by them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvXEXNIYaAE
(Trailer for The Eagleman Stag)

Unravel film

The Unravel film is an epic project, in which Chris Paul Daniels and Maria Anastassiou are aiming to create the longest piece of hand painted film in Britain. The film correlates in length with the 874 miles between John O'Groats and Land's End, taking each metre between them as a ratio to equal one frame of 16mm film.
They visited our college on the 16th February for a workshop, I found their work and what they had to say very inspiring, mainly because of the extreme attention to detail and perseverance with their project.
http://unravelfilm.blogspot.com/

The link above will take you to their blog where you will find more information on their project and the day they visited our college.

Philip Glass- Koyaanisqatsi score

The score for Koyaanisqatsi has influenced me in 2 ways. The actually music itself is an influence because of it's minimalistic qualities and repeating patterns that match the feel and meaning of the images on screen. How it was conceived also inspires me, unlike typical scores in which the music is created after the shots have been taken, Philip Glass would approach Godfrey Reggio the director with a piece he had composed and then Reggio would shoot with that music in mind.
The music in the link demonstrates the ambient and minimalistic nature of the score.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOEDsZbR6jE

Experimenting with Garage Band

Experiment with Garage Band by 92sampowell

This is the before mentioned experiment with Garage Band. At first I wasn't a fan mostly because it took a while to get everything in time however after persevering, adding extra instruments and editing sounds I am very happy with the short piece i have created. Im particularly fond of the use of the odd time signature 5/4 that when played after a bar of 4/4 throws the listener off. I think this compliments a piece of experimental film quite well.

Episode IV: A New Project

Its finnaly time to move on to a new project, not sure entirely what this film will be about. I've got some ideas in mind but nothing concrete yet or worth blogging about, it will be stop motion though and most likely continue on with the theme of surrealism. Also I plan to write the soundtrack for this one, yesterday I tried experimenting on garage band and had a go at writing something with the apple sequence from my last film in mind. I think the result was pretty good, quite rough at the moment and didnt get a chance to try any bass or guitar on it. Hopefully sometime next week I can get what I did up on here though.

Charley Harper

Charley Harper was a Cincinnati-based American Modernist artist. He is best known for his wildlife prints, posters and book illustrations. He describes his unique style as "minimal realism" in which he tries to capture the essence and behavior of his subjects with the fewest possible visual elements. On the style of his simplified forms Harper notes, "I don't think there was much resistance to the way I simplified things. Some people liked it and others didn't care for it. There's some who what to count all the feathers in the wings and then others who never think about counting the feathers, like me."
This minimalistic style and approach to capturing a subject on the page has been a big influence on me as can be seen in the artwork for my film.    

Kenneth Anger-Fireworks

Kenneth Anger's controversial film fireworks was a landmark in avant garde and surrealist film making. It explored many personal feelings that Anger had, particularly homosexualism and sado-masochism, it was these issues that lead to Anger's arrest following the release of Fireworks.