Silflay (Mandrake) by Rael Jones

Here’s a video I edited which was filmed by Ashley Jones of The Chaos Engineers and myself, (he filmed the strings, I filmed the guitar).

This is the first of several videos for Rael Jones’ ‘Mandrake‘ album which you can pre order here.

White Lie – Solo piano performance by Rael Jones.

Here’s a short clip I filmed and edited of Rael Jones performing music he wrote for the upcoming film White Lie.

‘Wheezyboy’ by Thumpermonkey.

Here’s the video to Wheezyboy, from Thumpermonkey’s new album ‘Sleep Furiously‘. I filmed this with help from Anthony Carpendale, (who put me in touch with the excellent actors) and Ashley Jones of The Chaos Engineers,

Lets Meet Jesus – ‘I am Bayonets’ and ‘Buckwheats’ live at Malcfest 2012

Here’s a couple of video clips of Let’s Meet Jesus, live at Malcfest. Filmed by me on a Canon 550d, and by Ben Wren of Thumpermonkey on a Samsung Galaxy S2 mobile phone(!), plus audio from Cassie Wierzbicki of Kooba Radio.

Get Well Soon EPK (film to be released 13th June 2012).

Here’s the electronic press kit for the short I wrote ‘Get Well Soon’.

The film will be on-line on 13th June, 2012:

Eat Your Robot!

A sinister new immersion composition supergroup featuring:

Mike Woodman (Thumpermonkey),
John Mackenzie (Godzilla Black / The Legion Of Doom),
Pablo Tato (Tinnitia, Psicotropia, Pillarcat),
Mike Hutchinson (Thumpermonkey / Olid / Todger).

I am lucky enough to have convinced this excellent group of musicians to learn and play a load of songs that I deliberately wrote very, very quickly. Imagine my surprise when they all said, “Yeah, that sounds alright, lets just play it as it is”.

The only failure here lies in the fact that I tried to write pop songs, but apparently 3 minute songs with a verse / chorus structure aren’t pop if the time signature keeps changing and the lyrics are all about goblins. I hope this tells you everything you need to know.

You can listen to a shonky bedroom demo of ‘Pickaxe’ here:
http://www.listn.to/eatyourrobot

You can find out all about our first gig at the White Lion, Streatham here.

Pre-Order new Caretaker EP, (feat me on vox).

I recently had the pleasure of recording vocals for a new track, ‘The Inexorable March’, on the upcoming Caretaker / Undersmile split EP. Pre-Order this at the Blindsight Records website.

Making Get Well Soon – Part 14

When Ian and I sat down to watch what was practically the final edit, it was a relief,  although I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get any distance and objectivity for some time. I’d watched it so many times in different forms over the previous year.

The final task was to get Laura Howard and Gresby Nash back in for half a day to re-record some dialogue. There was also some foley / sound design to be done before the final mix. We were very fortunate to have this all handled by Steve Browell, who has worked on projects as wide-ranging as Alice in Wonderland, Fantastic Mr Fox, Generation Kill, Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix,  and Children of Men.

Steve’s final mix was very interesting to listen to – he had added everything from ambient street noise outside the house, to the noise of an individual bubble of blood erupting through a severed artery. He had also complimented some of the more jarring edits with ugly digital noise – but also added some very subtle touches, (including some ‘sweeping’ noises as a gigantic eyeball in close up moves left and right, that really remind me of some of the sound design on Psoriatic Scott Walker’s The Drift).

The final stage was festival submissions. I’ve recently been working through a long list of festivals on Withoutabox, which is an online festival delivery tool that is linked into roughly 6000 festivals. The difficulty here, of course, is how to discriminate. Apart from the obvious large festivals, it’s sometimes hard to tell which of the festivals are highly regarded, and which are run using a data projector in somebody’s garage. The process is aided by the online qualification process – once the film’s details are added in minute detail, Withoutabox then checks it automatically against all the entry criteria; an excellent time-saving tool.

So there we have it – festival submissions now underway. All that’s left to do is figure out some screenings as well, so if you haven’t already, please join the Get Well Soon Facebook Group, where you can get updates of screening dates and locations.

Thumpermonkey Lives – ‘If It Works For The Cast Of LA Law, It’s Going To Work For Me’

Video for the song ‘If It Works For The Cast Of LA Law, It’s Going To Work For Me’ taken from the Thumpermonkey Lives! album ‘We Bake Our Bread Beneath Her Holy Fire’, released on Genin Records,

Download this song from http://thumpermonkey.bandcamp.com/

Video made entirely out of string by me. Thanks to Sven Gier for the use of his fractal renders. See more of his work at http://www.sgeier.net/fractals.

Making “Get Well Soon” – Part 11

By early June, Ian’s son was home. Things had gradually returned to some sense of normalcy, and Ian had begun working on a shorter cut of the 30 minute assembly. Another 10 minutes of footage were shed. At that early stage, a part of me honestly thought that it couldn’t get any shorter.

This cut included additional macro footage Rory had filmed; water droplets splashing from taps, dripping on to aspirin, running over rust and startling high-definition textures. In a sense, I wanted the film to be the bleakest music video in the world. I had no perspective on the pacing, no perspective on the necessity to whittle down all the beautiful images to only what was necessary. I was so in awe of the way the footage looked that I didn’t want Ian to remove a thing.

Unsurprisingly, Gregory from BRAG felt that the 20 minute version still looked like an ‘assembly’ rather than a ‘cut’, so between mid and late June, the film went through another 6 cuts. The running time gradually shrank each time, leaving us with a 14 minute version. Gregory also felt it might be useful to screen what we had in front of some industry professionals in order to get an outside perspective.

We also began thinking about how the sound would be treated. There was a problem with the radio mics that we’d used on the first weekend of filming, as well as several shots where things happened in the distance. Gregory advised that we would want to consider a half/full day of ADR recording and a half day of Foley recording, (as well as some time back at Jack’s house recording silence so that any added noise could be placed in context).

There was also the matter of the trailer; it was difficult to know how to pitch the tone of this. The 14 minute version was neither quite a horror, or a thriller, or a sad love story, but a combination of all three. How could you pitch that tone in a 30 second trailer, and still make it digestible?

Around this time, Rory referred back to an earlier piece of film Ian had worked on called ‘Inside Out God’; this featured a rather abstract use of meat, (for want of a better description).

Vodpod videos no longer available.

This clip had stayed with Rory, and he was keen to work on something similar to make ‘Get Well Soon’ a bit more nightmarish. So – Ian and Rory arranged to meet Ian’s friend and band-mate in Hag – a chef by trade, who could get his hands on some brains and lungs…