Broken Pixel: Sennen

The new BxP video for Sennen. A series experimental scenes using glass bowl, water, chalk dust, ink, lino, wood and clay with animated charcoal projects. Created, shot and edited over 5 days with a Canon 550D and Final Cut Pro 6.0

The song 'Vultures' is a about the current economic crisis, but no one wanted to depict that explicitly. Luckily, I had recently visited my friend, Nick Jepson, who is writing a Phd on political economics. He had a whiteboard in his house with some intriguingly complex diagrams scrawled across it. The words Kondratiev Long Wave Sequence were scrawled across the top, along with even more exciting phrases like Super Cycle and Resource Curse. I decided to use this theory as a basis for the video.

I discovered that Nikolai Kondratiev was a Russian economist who proposed a theory that Western capitalist economies have long term cycles of boom followed by depression. These business cycles are now called "Kondratiev waves".His model predicted the rise, peak and decline of several major industries including Cotton, Rail, Electrical Engineering and Petrochemical. The current wave indicates that our current economies are in serious and lengthy decline.

Nikolai Kondratiev was executed by firing squad in 1938.

Taking this on board, we (initially myself, my dad and Emily Brooke-Davis of Awkward Animations) experimented with underwater building materials and effects. I wanted to build a pylon out of chocolate then melt it in hot water, creating a swirling, viscous scene of degradation. However, I discovered that the clear fat from the chocolate melts first and the opaque remains just crumble into a horrible goo.

Dishwasher tablets were also disappointingly ineffectual.

Fortunately, on the second day our experiments were more successful and we created some wonderfully textural underwater scenes. Emily made the cotton mill and the gasometer whilst I put the train crash scene together (I had plenty of experience!). The other half of Awkward, Leanda Johnson created the pylon and Matt Molson was responsible for the camera work.

The projections of the horses started life as the classic Muybridge sequence, traced and rendered in charcoal by Emily. The pecking vultures came out of my brain.

Mum and Dad were yet again on hand to make the production run smoothly and I'd like to thank Ken and everyone at East Street Arts for projector loans and not minding us blocking sinks and corridors with our inky wet mess.

Thanks also to Dom and Sennen for providing us with an awesome tune and an open brief for us to play around with.