Vanish

This is the first film that I've made which I co-directed. It was an interesting experience, although if I were to co-direct again I would have to get to know the person first and make sure that we both worked on the same wavelength, because the person I was working with was a bit of an idiot.

He was very arrogant and was making that actors do take after take when they didn't even need to. The whole reason for doing another take is that you want the actors to do something different, because you need to re-do the camera movement as it wasn't smooth enough, or because something else went wrong.

However, each of the takes that this guy did was exactly the same so I started to get slightly annoyed with him as he was just waisting time, and the actors were getting annoyed with having to do the same thing again and again when then didn't even need to.

My directing was much better I felt and I got on much better with the actors which I think is an essential thing when working with actors. Anyway here is the film.

Built & Crushed

A 30 second animation that I made in the space of about 10 minutes.



Not much to be said about this really other than I made it in college whilst we were looking at animations. I can definitely say now though that I don't think I'll be going into animation simply because, even though the animation was fun to make, I'm more of a live action person myself. I'll leave animation to the likes of Nick Park. Although I have been thinking a lot about motion capture film recently. I'm not sure I'll be making motion capture films until I'm an established director though because of the availability of the technology. But who knows, experimental motion capture shorts could be just around the corner. I doubt it though!

The Making Of Juno Judo

This is just a brief 'making of' video which just lets you see a little bit about what went on during the shooting stage of Juno Judo.

The Making Of Juno Judo


I got the idea to make this half way through shooting Juno Judo. Although like all of my other videos so far this too is just an experiment, and so for a 'making of' video it is pretty shit. But I learnt from it which is the main thing.

Juno Judo

My next film Juno Judo was a real big step for me as it was when I made the jump from using one camera to directing two cameras. I found this quite challenging, but it was also very rewarding and I was quite pleased with the end product. Now my opinion has changed and whilst I still am pleased with it I do feel that there is still a lot I could do to improve it.



Originally this was intended as a music video but I don't think that the video really did the music enough justice. (The music is a track called Conga Fury by Juno Reactor.)

I still quite like the first 2:15 because all of this was choreographed. The fight was choreographed by myself and the two fighters, whilst the camera work was choreographed by myself. It was all very much like a big ballet of some sorts. (Although a rather ugly ballet!) However, from 2:15 the fight is all improvised up until when one of the fighters loses, which was what we knew before we started that we wanted to end with.And whilst the camera movements weren't choreographed from 2:15 I still gave instructions to the other camera man.

Sadly you can hear some of my instructions in the video. The idea was that I would cut out all the diegetic sound when it came to edit, but it just didn't work when they were thrown and there was no bang. Although when I came to edit it I did think that I had managed to get rid of all the talking in the background. Tip for the future, if you know you've captured some sound of the crew talking even by accident then listen back to your video with some good headphones because they make such a difference and are so much better than crappy speakers.

I'm still quite fond of the first couple of minutes of this video, but it is a shame the rest of it is rather shit. I think that a completely choreographed fight would have looked better, but I always knew that 8 minutes of fight footage would be hard to keep going with the limited fight knowledge that I have. I probably would have been better shortening the track that I used.

Waltz Of The Flowers

The next video I made was simply sparked by my need to film something. My western idea wasn't making any progress and after I'd gotten a taste for filming I just wanted to film something. It didn't matter what it was I just needed to film something.

So after watching the New Year's Day Concert In Vienna, I wanted to have a go at filming some flowers. It would have been nice to have filmed a live orchestra as well but since I didn't have one of those I just stuck with the flowers.

Anyway I think this is very simple an yet very effective.



I really tried to edit the images to the music with this. You might notice if you look at the camera movements. They speed up and slow down as well as drift in or out and side to side. This is most noticeable where there are the critical changes in the music.

You might have noticed, but I'll bet that you didn't, that the music to this is actually about 6 and a half minutes long. However, I managed to chop out a section of the music when it came to editing. I would only notice it very slightly when I used to watch it back though and to be honest now I don't notice it at all.

I've actually managed to get loads of views of this video on YouTube, but I must admit that it is all down to the music I chose. Otherwise it definitely wouldn't have as many views. One advantage I've found to this video having loads more views then my other videos is that I've used it to advertise my latest video Captive by means of a video response. This is the reason behind most of the views which I have got for Captive because when I put it up people just weren't looking for it and therefore no one was watching it. But by putting it as a video response has enabled me to get Captive out there.