I’ve been posting this on diaspora, twitter and facebook yesterday, but it deserved a blog entry, so here we go:
Off book is a series of short documentaries of specific topics, which further understanding and analyses our culture at a very current state. The two videos I’d like to show here, are about the power of videogames and also hacking culture.
Off Book: Video Games
This video shows very greatly, that video games undeniably are culture. The variety and the ways you can interact with them are unique and outstanding.
Off Book: Hacking Art & Culture with F.A.T. Lab
This one is about how F.A.T. Lab has been trying to come up with projects that ride the wave of todays media making processes and how to question monopolies.
There are some more videos on PBS arts vimeo channel and I can also recommend them, because they are interesting peeks into other worlds.
In this post I want to present my personal favourites of the NoMA film festival fall 2011. All of the participants deserve a hand for their production and they got it the night of the show. I just want to point a couple of videos out that struck me the most. All videos can be viewed on the NoMA film festival youtube channel. The order of the videos is random and I’d like to recommend every reader to go to the youtube channel and see all of them.
Uldis Janpavlis: Regress
You know the feeling when everything seems to move into the wrong direction? Me too.
Grétar Gunnarson: For the love of music
The quality of this video, combined with the great timing to the music struck me. It’s a nice portrait of the main character and the love for music is very believable for me.
Eduards Balodis: Dream Believe Achieve
In this I primarily want to point out the effects and the concept. It just works. The timing, the perfect coexistence of video footage and visual effects.
Ilze Freifalte: Spirit of green grass
This video won the spirit award and also for me it’s some kind of pure positive energy. Creative, barefoot, lighthearted, without worries.
Morten Juul Møller: Nobody gets me
This is the video that personally made me laugh the most. It may seem a little more strange, when you don’t know the main characters affinity to hard electronic music.
Rasmus Jennings: Problems?
First world problems? There are websites about them, internet memes and everybody is kind of fed up with people whining about nothing, right? This video puts exactly that on the stage and reminds us, that it’s not so bad after all.
Max Nyby: We
A humorous approach on a shizophrenic main character and his daily struggle with the voice in his head. The back and forth between the two is very interesting and I could not help laughing about the incredible voiceover.
Thanks to everybody who was in this with us. Everybody made this possible.
You know when they say there is nothing more important than experience? That’s so true. Trying to shoot video with three very inexperienced people is a lot of fun and I think in the end our bloopers folder is going to be a lot bigger than the actual footage that is going to be used. That’s not a big deal, considering the video is going to be 30-60 seconds and we shot for several hours. Well, preparation, white-balance and similar practical elements of the shoot were consuming more time than the actual filming, because I went for a very fast cutting style. Luckily Trond with his keen eye and Kenneth with his endless pragmatic mindset were there to accompany me, watch me fail and gather some footage.
The other video shoots were not going that smoothly, but delivered good footage in the end and they also were a lot of fun.
The most advanced light setup had Kenneth, with a silhouette flashing lamp, a dark room that first gets lit up when the second actor enters the room. For the lamps used a bunch of thanks to Ragno/Mette from MeRox Studio.
To sum up the shoots I was involved in:
- jumped into one that lasted half the night with very experimental lightning and from these hours only a time-lapse of by passing cars was used.
- played the evil nature polluting guy, wearing my top hat + voice over in Adinas video
- handled lightning and camera angles at Kenneths primary shoot
- played the shizophrenic guy in Tronds video
- played a freezing guy and a guy that gets stroked and scratched in Tanitas video
Thanks to my girlfriend without whom this project would not have risen at all, also thanks to everybody who supported me, gave me input and tought me about the used software, without this had never been possible.
Finally yesterday the NoMA film festival was hosted and I want to thank everybody who made it possible, helped out, made print-material and helped others to finish their videos. It was a blast.
