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My Secret Heart – Excerpts

4 Jul

My Secret Heart is a music and film installation & performance commissioned by Streetwise Opera with music composed by Mira Calix and sound design by David Sheppard. Working with video artists Flat-e, we created a film to accompany the 48 minute performance, as well as versions for an installation and short film.

Streetwise Opera are a charity who use music as a tool to help people who have experienced homelessness move forward in their lives. They run a weekly music programme, resident in 10 homeless centres around the country – and also stage an annual production which gives their performers the chance to star in quality shows where there are high-expectations, no compromise and no patronising. The voices you hear in the music, and people you see in the film, are from Streetwise workshops around the UK. 100+ Streetwise performers also sang at the My Secret Heart premiere at the Royal Festival Hall in December 2008. My Secret Heart is about their story.

The film has an abstract narrative derived from individual conversations with each of the Streetwise performers. It is a direct emotional response to their stories combined with the haunting beauty of Mira Calix’s composition. Instead of focusing on a specific plot, the film embarks on a complex journey through various states of emotion, starting from pre-birth through birth, curiosity, exploration, excitement, playfulness; through to fear, anxiety and isolation. While it maintains a relatively dark and eerie mood overall, intertwined with the feelings of desperation are strong elements of hope.

The visuals were created primarily with custom software written with C++/openFrameworks, with some Quartz Composer elements, rendered AfterEffects sequences and live action footage. The custom C++ app is audio-reactive and user-interactive, allowing the visuals to be ‘performed’ live with full control over the behaviour of the virtual inhabitants of the cylindrical aquarium-like rig.

Tour information can be followed from myspace.com/mysecretheartuk

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The Incredible Shadoks

27 Jun

The Shadoks are kind of outer-space bird-like creatures designed and created by the French experimental animator Jacques Rouxel in the late sixties, in the spirit of newspapers comic strips like “Peanuts”. The Shadoks divided the French nation as much as the political debate about the future of democracy.
The Shadoks live on the shadok planet where everything is going wrong, and their efforts to escape to Earth are constantly foiled by rivals from another planet.
shadok cover These silly creatures with their own brand of logic first appeared on TV in 1968 and quickly became a cult. Their main mission was educative: criticism of the French society with absurd humor. The animated cartoon, revoiced by Kenneth Robinson (who replaced the French comedian Claude Piéplu), intrigued many a British child! Actually, the Shadoks used rules like:
* The more you fail, the more you have a chance that it will work in the end.
* Better to pump even if nothing happens than to risk something worse happening by not pumping.
* If you have 999 chances in 1000 that the thing will fail, so hurry to do the 999 first tests, because the 1000th will probably be the right one.
* Why do simple when one can do complicated?
* In order for there to be the fewest discontent, one only has to always hit on the same ones…
* If there is no solution, it’s because there is no problem.

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Pacific Vibrations

20 Jun

Easily one of the all time classics of surf films. Made by film maker, artist and Surfer Magazine founder John Severson. A Classic!
http://www.PacificVibrations.com

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Gandahar

13 Jun

Gandahar (René Laloux), is a French animated science fiction and fantasy film released in 1988 in the U.S. It is based on Jean-Pierre Andrevon’s novel Les Hommes-machines contre Gandahar (The Machine-Men versus Gandahar).

The peaceful people of Gandahar are suddenly attacked by an army of automatons known as the Men of Metal, who march through the villages and petrify their victims with lasers. The resulting statues are then collected and transferred to their base. At the capital city of Jasper, the Council of Women orders Sylvain to investigate. On his journey, he encounters the Deformed, a race of mutant beings who were accidentally created via genetic experimentation by Gandahar’s scientists. Despite their resentment, they are also threatened by the Men of Metal and offer to help Sylvain.

A European DVD release of Gandahar, in French with English subtitles, was released in October 2007[2] by Eureka!’s Masters of Cinema label.

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Erich Lesovsky – Regenmacher / SVT065 /

6 Jun

 

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OTT // Blumenkraft – Smoked

30 May

Very good psychill music, and an interesting vjay stuff !

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The psychedelic festival of lanterns in Taiwan

23 May

Held on the first full-moon night of the lunar year, the Lantern Festival is commonly regarded as one of the most important and romantic festivals in Taiwan. The festival is celebrated with lantern making, lantern riddle games, and displays of glittering decorative lanterns.

The origin of the festival lies in the festive activities of an agricultural people celebrating the lengthening of daylight hours and the coming of spring after the New Year. Other legends have it that the festival was actually started by an emperor of the Han dynasty (206 B.C. – 220 A.D.), who was a devout Buddhist and who ordered his people to display lights on the fifteenth night of the first month of the lunar year to pay respects to Buddha. According to the same legend, holding torches or lanterns on this night makes it easier to see deities descending from heaven to give blessings to the earth. Yet another legend has it that in the Tang dynasty, the emperors would celebrate the festival by ordering hundreds of beautiful women to sing and dance with lanterns in the brightly lit plaza. These festive activities gradually spread to the common people and developed into the most popular festival in the year after Chinese New Year. The festival is also called the Little New Year. In the old days, these festivities, together with the celebrations for the Chinese New Year, would last for as long as forty-five days. Nowadays the festival lasts for a week.

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The Fountain // Darren Aronofsky

16 May

This is one of my favorite movie !

it’s full of beautiful soundtracks (by Clint Mansell) and really nice visual scenes.

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Inception // how to build dreams

9 May

In the great movie “Inception” (Christopher Nolan), Leonardo DiCaprio teaches how to build dreams and evolve inside it.

Enjoy the great rendered effects pointing a way to play with reality, illusion, and evolve in the “Maya” (just in the between of reality and illusion), and now, try to understand what we live in the real life, as quantum physics could explain it !

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Enter the void // DMT experience

2 May

Gaspard Noé is a famous but contested movie director.
In his last movie “Enter the void”, he starts with a greatly rendered DMT experience, psychedelic travel and visualizations…

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