This video is brilliant to watch because of the journey that you get to see a glimpse of as the background to this guy’s walk across China. But the reason I like this video so much -given that the self portrait timelapse video has been done many times before, the best one by Noah which was even parodied on The Simpsons- is that it uses video and not camera, and so each shot that makes up the timelapse has a little movement in it. Not always, but occasionally. From just a blink of the eye, through hair blowing in the gail force winds, to a brother or lover dancing around in the background. It gives the whole concept a new texture which I haven’t seen before, and I love it.
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo. This is absolutely brilliant! I actually recommend you go watch it on Vimeo (click the player above) because Vimeo is a beautifully designed website which has High Definition (larger) video players on it.
I seem to be only posting video these days… I’m not quite sure why except that I keep coming across good stuff! So what I suggest is that you watch this video while you have the Four Eyed Monsters video I posted about below/before loading in another tab. This Tunng video is wonderful and hilarious. The bundle of stuff floating through space somehow seems to sum up Tunng’s music, and the way it is animated to the sound fits perfectly. I love Becky’s leg movements sticking out of the planet of Tunng, in fact, all of the various Tunng members are sticking out of the planet in some way or another… brilliant! Best of Haines’ Tunng videos so far, I’d say.
I just watched this fantastic feature-length film on You Tube called Four Eyed Monsters. It is essentially a true love story made by two artists who met over the internet and then decided to make a film about their lives. The film is partly real-life footage (one of them is a filmmaker and video documents his life) and partly animations of drawings (the other draws/paints and documents her life in this medium) as well as specially shot scenes.
It might sound like a narcissistic endeavour, but I think it captures the way all our lives are saturated with online activity and digital documentation, and so watching the film on You Tube seems to make sense. Although a video sharing website is an appropriate context, this film is not limited by or to the internet – it has been shown at film festivals and at screenings around the world, and I am tempted to buy a DVD of it in order to enjoy a richer, higher definition visual experience.
Shot mainly in New York, the film includes some beautiful shots of the city, time-lapse and also video collage – a few times, they present video clips of other people speaking about their love lives, framed in the little thumbnail profile boxes of a myspace page. It is all very familiar territory, but interestingly, they met in a pre-Myspace time, when online networking/dating wasn’t something you talked about – so the appeal of this film grew as they worked on it and the online social networking phenomena really took off.
I like the way the film ends – at some point it switches into pure documentary mode and you start to get a glimpse of how and where it was fabricated. But at the same time as you are wondering if it was all just a grand fiction, you see the same two characters again, documented ‘behind the scenes’ making the story we’ve just been watching. Turns out the drama of their relationship is no less intense or real, in fact it is intensified (and nearly ruined) by this self-reflexive film making process [no kidding!]. They even edited in scenes of them receiving the acceptance call for the Slamdance film festival, so those first viewers almost saw themselves on the screen.
And so their story continues…
Watch the video above (you’ll have to wait some time while it loads) or find out more here: www.foureyedmonsters.com
I heard these three Kiwi comedians called Tripod singing this song on BBC Radio 7’s coverage of the Edinburgh Festival recently. It completely took me by surprise and really had me laughing out loud. Enjoy!
This is a web-only sitcom, the plot is decided by the audience via their wiki and the story starts in London and then travels around Europe. It is a mockumentary style comedy, owing a lot to The Office, and you really don’t need to know anymore but just that you must go and watch it now! It’s bloody brilliant!