A blissful evening as the tide comes in a Bullock Harbour, near Dalkey, south of Dublin. An idyllic place to spend a few hours watching the world go by.
time-lapse: Grand Canal Plaza
Another time-lapse from New Dublin at the Grand Canal Plaza. I like this part of the city at night time especially when the light show can be seen at its best, designed by Martha Schwarz. Actually, having moaned at length about the horribleness of what’s happening on the far side of the river beyond George’s Dock, I think this place is very cool. And it will be lent a certain theatrical credibility when the new Daniel Libeskind designed theatre opens here later in 2008.
time-lapse photography: Timeless
Here is a short filmette of time-lapse material shot in and around Dublin over the last few months. These images were used in a project we’re currently finishing off at The Farm for South Dublin County Council, an exhibition space housed in Tallaght. The technique used is to basically plonk the camera down in some place with a visually interesting view, stick it on a tripod, set your shot and squeeze off a frame every minute or so. Then import the resulting images into FCP and what you see here is the result. The handy thing about this technique is that the images are pretty big to start with, so the sequences could be used at all resolutions up to 2k film if you’re careful. Enjoy!
editing: Ethiopia 08
This beautiful young woman was the hostess in a coffee ceremony I witnessed in a region called Sodo in southern Ethiopia. I made the trip to Ethiopia during Easter as part of a film crew, the crew was there to film a documentary about a young Irish girl who is hoping to make a difference to the lives of Ethiopian woman with an invention she devised.
There’s an account of the documentary and trip in a the works available soon
In the meantime, please drop by and have a look at my Ethiopian pictures on flickr.
[flickr-gallery mode=”photoset” photoset=”72157604234627285″]
Thanks.
cool blonde
This is Sarah, who is responsible for the props on the film Spacemen Three which I’ve been editing with Hugh O’Conor these last few weeks. Sarah has made intergalactic sand, batteries and other props for the movie, as well as being extremely photogenic. Her contribution is subtle, a bit like editing, in that if you’re too aware of it then something is wrong.
Spacemen Three is a short film about an unlikely odyssey into space with three astronauts and annoying toy, ready for the Galway Film Fleadh this summer. Written by John Butler and superbly acted by Michael McElhatton, Peter McDonald and Pat Shortt. Hopefully you’ll get to see it during the summer.
3-rok
I’m almost reluctant to post this for fear of incurring the cavil of my fellow walkers, but it’s too good an event to pass up.
This morning, myself and two friends – crack jackson jr & thelozenge – found ourselves at the foot of Three Rock Mountain at 5.30 am. Not by chance mind you, it was prearranged with the sole purpose of scaling the hill before sunrise to photograph the city awakening for a current project. The Three Rock grandstands over Dublin and has great views for the early riser. Or anyone else who goes up the hill at any time (except for motocrossers, I reserve special hate for them)
A few people eccentrically prefer to write their names with no capital letters at all, such as the poet e. e. cummings and the singer k. d. lang. These strange usages should be respected.
Larry Trask
Sussex University
So up we went, blind to the night with our cityboy swaggers and bad shoes, full of faint courage and complaining lungs, trudging and sweating over bad ground with heavy loads, wheezing and rheumy to the top. Where we worked in darkness punctuated by torch-light to set up our equipment.
The intention was to shoot a poor man’s timelapse of the approaching dawn, and although I got the locus of the sunrise completely wrong, we had some spectacular results. There were four stills cameras tripod-mounted between us and a loose arrangement to fire off a shot every once in a while. We wondered if our timings should be a bit more militarily precise, but in the end there was too much to talk about and the ensuing looseness I think adds to the charm of the animation. Nothing like standing around watching the dawn to get the blood up. Covering Dublin from west to east, we’ve captured in our own way the city coming awake.
future work
A friend of ours, crack jackson jr has just got the €€€s to make a movie he and the lozenge have written, to be shot sometime next January and to be edited at The Farm by me and post produced by the team, involving a load of CGI, green screen work and the like. A space comedy of sorts. Looking forward to it a lot, should be fun…
I’m not being deliberately obscure about the names, these guys may want a degree of anonymity and those are their aliases out there on Web 2.0.
I know their real names.
Photo Booth brings out the kid in all of us
On any given day I might come home to find the kids messing round with Photo Booth, and not only my kids, but any others who happen to be knocking round the house. Personally I think it’s fantastic that the two older kids will sit down and, well, just create. There’s no adult choreographing here, it’s just kids posing, experimenting, showing off, gurning, pulling faces and losing inhibitions. Even the odd adult finds their way in.
Enjoy …
If you’re having trouble viewing this mpeg, you can always view it here on YouTube at lower resolution
Music is by Tin Hat Trio
“The Clandestine Adventures Of Ms. Merz”
Book of Silk
For those of you who don’t like kids you can always watch something else.
shoe love: a male perspective
The world of shoes is one that confuses me hugely, mostly because I just don’t understand shoes in the way that women do. Or more specifically my wife and her friends. In the linked piece, for me the extreme slowmo and reverse movement somehow gives license to the outlandishness of the footwear. Along with the unusual music by Susumu Yokota.
Shoe mechanics are complicated, but not as complicated as shoe aesthetics. The height of the heel is inversely proportional to the perceived broadness at the hip. The higher the heel, the longer the perceived leg, the narrower at the hip and the tighter the buns. What do I know? High shoes make your ass look smaller? All I know is that that amount of mass being concentrated through a tiny area in the guise of a high heel is enough to mark any floor. Regardless of the gazelle-like qualities of the wearer.
Maybe we have evolved to the state where the more outrageous and unsuitable the garment, the more we’re trying to emphasise our devil-may-care attitude about life in general. Look at us, look how we don’t need to be able to walk with stealth through forests – we’re too affluent and over-fed to do that, look how much we don’t need to run to escape – we don’t need to worry about the basics of life like finding food or a mate or somewhere warm to sleep; maybe the shoe is an outward manifestation of our material insouciance. Which in turn is a development of civilisation. And entropy.
I don’t need no stinking food, I need me a pair of Manolo’s.
Which reminds me of an evening spent at the Taste of Dublin a few months back in the Iveagh Gardens, when the weather was wet. Really wet. Regardless of the weather, there was a contingent of shoeistas out there persevering in the muck, their elevated footwear no match for the inclement conditions. Sinking shank deep in the ancient old mud, knocking back the sweetbreads and Prosecco. Enjoying their grub mind you, but with the distraction of a damp insole and tarnished uppers.
Suffice to say, shoes are a constant source of bewilderment to me and amusement/love for my wife and her sisters and friends.
I suppose on the other hand (foot?), a corollary as it were, I have the facility to drone on about music, film, politics and football, topics I actually know very little about in real terms but will insist on doing anyway. Last time I played football I broke my leg – wrong footwear, Readers, leather-soled brogues and dry grass don’t mix. And just wait till the Rugby World Cup starts up in a few days time, I’ll be spouting knowledgeably about tactics and form, physique and stamina even though more than half my life has elapsed since I actually played it. (In my own defence though I refuse to use the nicknames – absolutely no Dricos or Rogs for me).
This from someone who has spent a large part of their teens and twenties (and on into the thirties & 40s but we don’t talk about that) wearing such delights as Docs and other multiple-holed booties in accordance with the punk and new wave ethic at the time; functional and stout to be sure, but on mature reflection maybe not the most sartorially elegant shoe a man could wear. However I never wore ox-blood and I never shaved my head. And I don’t know 33 ways to lace a boot. But that’s another matter entirely …
Stunning film noir image above courtesy of Julie O’Donnell. Click on the image for a full size version on flickr.
film: Coppola on Apocalypse Now
I just watched the excellent Hearts of Darkness tonight, a documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now. I loved this observation from Coppola on his state of mind during the filming of Apocalypse Now.
A film director is kinda one of the last truly dictatorial posts left in a world getting more and more democratic. So, y’know, that plus being in a distant oriental country, the fact that, uh, pretty much it was my own money and that I was making it on the crest of the acclaim of the Godfather films, y’know and I was wealthy … did contribute to a state of mind that was like Kurtz.
For some reason best known to the makers of the documentary and its distributors, a DVD version has never been released to my knowledge. Which is a terrible shame because both the subject matter and the documentary-making are really gripping and a must-see for any fan of the movie.