Spirit's Child Shoot

Spirit's Child Shoot, originally uploaded by Roger Whitham.

Another pic from the shoot - this one encapsulating Igor Drozdov's energetic approach to focus pulling - amazing work from an amazing Director of Photography. Igor Rocks.

Making my first Music Video

Spirit's Child Shoot, originally uploaded by Roger Whitham.

So this is why I've been quiet on the blog-front of late... I've been working with best friend and my creative partner Michael Watts on a music video for Tina Mali.

A long day with a 5am start and 4am finish; shooting in a 2000year old Yew forest down on the south coast, near Portsmouth. We assembled a team of 12, with 3 dancers, 2 lead actors, Tina herself and then Igor Drozdov and his assistant Max: possibly the greatest DOP/focus puller team I've had the pleasure to work with so far. Check out Roger Whitham's outstanding documentary photos of the day and I'll post an update soon as we take this baby into edit at the weekend...

Vote for Tina Mali to play at Green Man Festival

Vote For Tina Mali To Open At Green Man Festival 2009!!!

As some of you know, I'm currently in pre-production on a Music Video for Tina Mali. We're doing a video for the spirits child track found on her myspace here.

The video is going to be set in a 1500 year old Yew forest that looks like this:

Fear and Loathing Board Game

Thanks @Palmer for sending me this great new boardgame on the theme of Fear and Loathing....

"Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

-excerpt from "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" by Hunter S Thomson

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In the Red Live

Another favorite from Sunday night....

In the Red Live Live

In the Red Live Live, originally uploaded by donshades.

I've been taking photos of small time rock bands for a while now. Yes, I could say that they all start to look the same, but there's something about the energy and power, and focus and ostentatious nature of rock and roll that I love capturing on film.

cable porn pre Z4 AR shoot

cable porn pre Z4 AR shoot, originally uploaded by Flo Heiss.

Flo took this photo of our bonkers set-up for Dare's renegade BMW Z4 -vs- London shoot. Qbranch eat your heart out!

These Roots go Deep

kingly vale yews, originally uploaded by donshades.

I did a location recon mission at the weekend for this pop promo I'm working on. We found an awesome location down at Kingly Vale yew forest. Now I just need to find an awesome DOP who'd be willing to shoot this for peanuts.

We made a Film the old skool way.

We went back to how we used to make things in the old days with this bit of work for BMW:



Augmented reality signs, a video camera and a laptop. More photos from the shoot are here.

For me the day we spent making this completely refreshed me. Up at 5 and meeting like a load of underground graffiti artists on a london street corner at 6am. Crewing up with a laptop plugged into a video camera plugged into a DV clam shell plugged into another camera. We were a stripped down crew and we didn't have a license to shoot in town. We shot the shit out of it anyway and I think the result is kinda cute...

Twitter Bioinformatics

Very cool.



The dude explains what it's about, I've pasted it below:

"I was discussing H1N1 with a bioinformatics friend of mine last weekend, and we ended up talking about ways that epidemiologists model transmission of disease. I wondered how some of the information that is shared voluntarily on social networks might be used to build useful models of various kinds.

I'm also interested in visualizing information that isn't implicitly shared - but instead is inferred or suggested.

This piece looks for tweets containing the phrases 'just landed in...' or 'just arrived in...'. Locations from these tweets are located using MetaCarta's Location Finder API. The home location for the traveling users are scraped from their Twitter pages. The system then plots these voyages over time.

I'm not entirely sure where this will end up going, but I am reasonably happy with the results so far."

- blrpint from Vimeo