Short film: The Black Hole

Award-winning short film with clever CGI. Very dark and twisty.

Epic frozen cops and robbers scene

Just rediscovered this gem. Astonishing CGI, atmospheric SFX, very clever plot twist. Watch it, watch it now.

Amazing water/ink drawings with a powerful message

Water ink _ BDDP Unlimited and Solidarités International - UK from BDDP Unlimited on Vimeo.

Secret Diary of a Call Girl

*Cough* lose all cutesy preconceptions of Piper as Rose Tyler.

All right, all right. This one's a bit of a guilty pleasure. But Secret Diary of a Call Girl is one my all-time favourite TV programmes. Starring Billie Piper, the series follows the exciting escapades of a London call girl known as Hannah by day, and Belle by night.

It's clever, sexy, sarcastic and actually not as fictitious as you might think, because believe it or not it's based on a true story. Dr. Brooke Magnanti, the real Belle de Jour who revealed herself to the press in 2009, wrote the two autobiographical books that inspired the television series.

Contrary to the vicious slighting the show got for 'glamorising' prostitution, I feel that this interview between Piper and Magnanti really clears things up. Both of them call themselves feminists and have some interesting counter-arguments. Go girls! More power to ya!

You can watch all four series of Secret Diary of a Call Girl here, and you can check out Brooke Magnanti's blog here.

Satirical Illustrations

Saw a bunch of satirical illustrations over on Demilked and decided to post some here - they're just ingenious. Go check out more here.

Time-lapse Landscapes/Skies

Here are a couple of breathtaking, high-definition time-lapse shorts. Watch at 4am with Rainy Mood and/or an Alan Watts / Carl Segan talk in the background and you've got one indulgently philosophical evening on your hands. Prepare yourself for an existential crisis.


The Mountain from TSO Photography on Vimeo.


Landscapes: Volume Two from Dustin Farrell on Vimeo.

Demilked

"Demilked is a design milking magazine. We milk the world's most creative minds and make you tasty inspiration cocktails by mixing industrial design, technology, concepts, advertising and a little bit of web design. Don't be afraid to take a sip - the drinks are on us!"

Demilked.com is absolutely brilliant. Whereas with many art and design blogs you have to tediously trawl through long catalogues of unoriginal, uninteresting content to get to the juicy bits, Demilked is chock-full of intelligent, pristine, aesthetically pleasing designs, concepts and products as well as snapshots of artists' work. Here are just a few of my recent finds:

   

Carved book landscapes by Guy Laramee

Mesmerising gourd lamps by Calabarte

Amazing book waterfall sculptures by Alicia Martin

Non-classical portraits of classical musicians

20,000 flowers installed at an abandoned mental institution by Anna Shuleit

Underwater ink photography by Alberto Seveso

Video Art: Echo, Dynamic Blooms, Forest

Here are some of the latest pieces of video art I've found, this time focussing on bodies and metamorphosis...


Echo from bart hess on Vimeo


Dynamic Blooms from Tell No One on Vimeo


Forest from Tell No One on Vimeo.

Animation: Topo Glassato Al Cioccolato (Frosted Chocolate Mouse)

Here's some really sinister animation I found over on Vimeo. Incredibly dark but very beautiful stuff. Something I admire about these kind of animated sketches is that there are no boundaries - a human being can suddenly explode into ten or so hummingbirds. Limitless fun with metamorphosis.


TOPO GLASSATO AL CIOCCOLATO by milkyeyes (shortfilm) from MILKYEYES - donato sansone on Vimeo.

Somebody That I Used to Know (Gotye) cover

Everyone's heard Gotye's Somebody That I Used to Know, right? And everyone's heard that amazing cover by Walk Off the Earth with five people playing one guitar? I didn't think any Gotye cover would be able to compete with that, but look what this guy's done...



Pretty freaking sweet, no? This man is beautiful. Check out his YouTube channel.

La Queue de la Souris

This short film employs a very unique style of animation, using what looks like a jumble of cut-out shapes (weirdly like South Park) as silhouettes. I love how the lion grows out of the landscape and is completely black apart from its threatening eyes, claws and teeth.


La Queue de la Souris from Reineke on Vimeo.

Video Art: Gravity

Finding a lot of goodies on Vimeo lately. This physics-defying short film is really cleverly done...


GRAVITY // UN RÊVE DE DEMAIN from Filip Piskorzynski on Vimeo.

Video Art: Drone and Drone II

Been doing some more visual research re: video editing. Check out these beautiful videos! Really need to look into how they were made as they're stunning.


Drone from A. N. F. on Vimeo.


Drone II from A. N. F. on Vimeo.

Famous Paintings Improved by Cats

Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, plus cat

I know, I know, everyone on the internet is obsessed with cats, and I'll admit it: I'm no different. But sometimes you'll stumble across something cat-related that is so achingly genius that it simply has to be shared.

Here are a whole bunch of them: http://www.sadanduseless.com/2012/01/famous-paintings-improved-by-cats/

My personal favourite is the rework of Kazimir Malevich's Red Square:

"Straight is the New Gay"

SO TRUE IT HURTS. A good friend of mine sent me this. Absolutely weak with laughter at this brilliant observational comedian from down under, Steve Hughes. Very topical at the moment as the debate about whether or not to legalise gay marriage is at the forefront of political and public discussion in the UK at the mo. Watch it. Watch it now.

And speaking of satire to combat homophobia, go read this brilliant article on theSprout (an online magazine/what's on and advice site for young people, by young people in my hometown of Cardiff). And make sure you read it to the end. It's deeply clever:

http://www.thesprout.co.uk/en/news/gay-marriagep-un-british/08677.html

Black Books

Possibly one of the most brilliant pieces of comedy writing on television is Black Books. Starring comic geniuses Dylan Moran, Bill Bailey and Tamsin Greig, the TV show is follows the lives of a hostile, nihilistic, drunken Irish bookshop owner named Bernard, his assistant Manny and their eccentric friend Fran.

I really won't be able to do it justice just writing about it, so here's a clip:

You can watch all of the series here on 4OD.

38 Degrees

Just to give you some context: there is a law in the UK that states that if a petition reaches 100,000 signatures it has to be discussed in parliament.

So there's this website set up called 38 Degrees, whose sole purpose is to host petitions so that the government will pay attention to the kind of issues that are important to the people of Britain at this time.

I found out about 38 Degrees a couple of years ago when I found out that Radio 6 Music was going to be scrapped during budget cuts. I joined thousands of other campaigners in signing an online petition to stop this from happening, and lo and behold, it worked! 38 Degrees have had numerous other successes, such as:

• the scrapping of plans to sell-off our national forests to private firms
• a ban on circus animal cruelty
• the government signing an EU directive on Human Trafficking
• tighter rules for legal loan sharks

And many more! These are just some of their recent achievements. Go check out their website for more info and see what kind of petitions are running at the moment...

http://www.38degrees.org.uk/

The Cinematic Orchestra

If you're not into classical music, this band would be a good stepping stone into the genre. It's very minimalist in the sense that you begin to understand the significance of each instrument and how they work together to paint different soundscapes. I struggle with classical music (a sweeping statement I know, but bear with me) because I've always felt that there was no space for my own interpretation of the pieces (especially when you're looking at virtuosos like Vivaldi and Bach, the works of whom have been studied and analysed for centuries). The instruments are so flawless and the refrains so grand that it's almost as if they were trying to control my emotions.

But The Cinematic Orchestra really got me wanting to understand more about classical music. If you aren't already familiar with this lot, you really should be. Their music is beguiling. There's a reason they call themselves 'cinematic' - every time I hear their songs, my life flashes before my eyes...





Go listen to their album 'Ma Fleur' - every track is just as beautiful. Listen to it on Spotify here.

They also gone done the soundtrack to this revolutionary silent documentary film, The Man with the Movie Camera, which you can watch for free on YouTube here.

Grandma's House

The majority of decent British comedy programmes are snatched up by Channel 4 these days, but I must say Grandma's House is one of the best pieces of comedy writing not just on the BBC but on the whole of telly in a long time.

The series is a pseudo-biopic (/massive pisstake) of the comic Simon Amstell's life and his bizarre family, co-written by and starring Amstell himself. The writing is witty, clever and incredibly natural and believable, bouncing athletically from dry satire to total hysteria and back again.

You can watch all the series so far here.

Japanese advert - huge wooden xylophone

The lengths to which people will go...



...to make something seriously cool.

The Thick of It

For anyone who wants to know anything about the inner workings of British government and how it's really run, go watch The Thick of It. This BBC political satire makes me absolutely weak with laughter, mostly because it seems so bitterly accurate.

It follows the office lives of a bunch of civil servants working for the fictitious Department for Social Affairs, and how they cope with a continuous battle with the media as well as the pressure from those higher up in Number 10. Often this ends in, as you might expect, absolute hysteria... and a LOT of superb swearing from Peter Capaldi, who plays a the best overly-aggressive Scotsman the world has ever seen! Observe:

There was also a spin-off feature film made called In The Loop, which you can watch here.

And as if this wasn't enough good news, they're currently filming a fourth series which is due to air in autumn this year!

But in the meantime, watch all the past series here.

Le Roi et l'oiseau (The King and the Mocking Bird)

I had no idea what I was in for when a friend of mine introduced to me this French animation movie. It is one of the most enchanting pieces of film I have seen in a long while.

Explaining the plot in too much detail would probably ruin it, particularly because it has quite a few subplots, but it's basically a sort of dark interpretation of a fairystory about a nefarious and self-absorbed king, and what happens when he starts to lose control over the running of his castle.

Le Roi et l'oiseau also has an interesting backstory: the film's production originally began in 1948, but the animation team ran out of money; it was eventually finished over thirty years later in 1980. Consequently the film has a curious combination of Disney-esque cartoon characters set against the grand, ornately painted backdrop of a lofty castle and citadel in the middle of a vast desert.

You kind of have to watch it at least twice though, because the first time I saw it I was so hypnotised by the beauty of the drawings and the use of the French language that I failed to see how deeply political and allegorical the film actually is (well, it started being made in 1948 - what do you expect!) It is a charming and captivating movie, which I thoroughly recommend.

Here's the film's IMDB page, and you can watch the whole thing for free on YouTube with English subtitles here.

Other spellbinding animations you should really check out:

Mary and Max

Belleville Rendez-vous

Spirited Away

and of course, The Emperor's New Groove (for a bit of fun).

Interesting video-editing techniques

I intend to explore video editing a great deal more. Above is something I made recently using a combination of relief and kaleidoscope fx in Final Cut Pro on some footage I took of the Redentore Festival fireworks show in Venice last summer.

















This guy (Mitchell Davis) has been an inspiration to me for a long time, in particular his art videos. I love the simplicity of the things he creates, and how clean, symmetrical and aesthetically pleasing his style is.



Here are a few other examples of his work:
The Inner
Pursuit of New York
The Birds Have Gone Beyond
Datamoshing Test Sequence #1
Eye No Hot Air

And here are a few other videos I've collected from browsing on Vimeo. If you like the look of them, I recommend you take a gander around the Vimeo website. It's like YouTube but the content is mainly video-art and short films.

Wood Smoke - Cool wheel-type editing technique.
Spectre - Bit frightening but very clever.
Iki Kanat / Two Wings / 2012 Remastered - Amazing dark/light contrasts and striking colours with a split screen.
Amateur - Weird and interesting editing, looks like a cross between a wave formation and a curtain rippling in the wind.

Kimbra

I'm guessing you guys know who Kimbra is - that lady singer from Gotye's infamous song Somebody that I Used to Know. But if you haven't already checked out her solo stuff, DO IT NOW DO IT NOW DO IT NOW. I'd particularly recommend the tracks Settle Down, Good Intent, Plain Gold Ring and Somebody Please. I seriously cannot get over how sassy and hexing her music is. And as if that wasn't enough, she's also ridiculously attractive.

Here are a couple of live performances she did for Sing Sing Studios sessions, where she makes excellent use of a loop pedal. Gwaaan Kimbra.

Shappi Khorsandi

Shappi Khorsandi is an Iranian female comic living in London, and she's absolutely hilarious. Every single video of her performing stand-up on YouTube is phenomenal and always has me in stitches. I have a great deal of respect for her for being one of the only popular comedians in Britain that can create original and intellegent material that really does dispel gender and racial barriers. Along with her wickedly deadpan style, her stand-up is filled with painfully accurate observations about society. I'd really recommend checking her out.



I've also just purchased her book A Beginner's Guide to Acting English off Amazon. Watch this space for a review.

Interesting underwater photography

I love underwater photography. It's got a really mystifying element to it, like the subject is almost glowing.

It reminds me of the first time I ever went snorkelling, off the coast of Cuba in 2011. It was one of the most amazing experiences I've ever had. All the chaotic thoughts that usually race around my head were suddenly gone, and all I could think about was how peaceful all the fish looked and what beautiful shapes the coral grew in. There's a kind of blissful solitude to the whole experience because the only thing you can hear is your own breathing, but at the same time feeling all that water press against you and hold you afloat makes you feel strangely at one with the world around you.

Neat Beats

You seriously need to check this guy out. He's one of the reasons I began to love hip-hop beat tracks and remixes, and makes them so much more interesting by mixing in clips of piano, acoustic guitar, cello and speeches from old and/or famous films, or, in this case, a commentary from a space-rocket launch. This music is utterly beautiful.

http://neatbeats.bandcamp.com/

Tone Matrix

A beautiful plinky plonky instrument to play with, you can get something similar in real life (I once saw the comedian Bill Bailey playing one on one of his tours). Don't click the link below if you have something important to do. It will not get done for the next hour.

http://tonematrix.audiotool.com/

Try drawing a swastika into it and see how ironically lovely it sounds!

Mitchell and Webb

If you haven't already watched every single episode of David Mitchell and Robert Webb's comedy baby that is Peep Show, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? This is awkward British humour at its most exquisite! You can watch it all here on 4OD.

But yes, That Mitchell and Webb Look is also hilarious. Observe:



David Mitchell also has his own comedy panel TV show called Would I Lie to You? and a hilarious Radio 4 gameshow called The Unbelievable Truth. Go listen!

Some good old philosophy

These talks really put things into perspective...

Spider web trees

Found this via StumbleUpon a few days ago...

“An unexpected side-effect of the 2010 flooding in parts of Sindh, Pakistan, was that millions of spiders climbed up into the trees to escape the rising flood waters; because of the scale of the flooding and the fact that the water took so long to recede, many trees became cocooned in spiders webs.”