Broken Pixel

Sennen - Vultures

2012-01-24T06:18:00.000-08:00

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.

DIRECTOR

Ashley Dean

MODELS

Emily Brooke-Davies

Leanda Johnson

CAMERAS

Mathew Molson

John Dean

THANKS

Dom Brownlow

Nick Jepson

Janet Dean

Carl Alport

East Street Arts

A Christmas Message

2011-12-22T05:15:00.000-08:00

Hello! Here's a (decidedly unfestive) festive message from all at Broken Pixel...

The Green Man Treasure Hunt 2011

2011-10-21T05:01:00.000-07:00

In 2011 Broken Pixel returned to the Green Man festival to concoct another devious Treasure Hunt to confound and excite the adventurous festival goers.

We took the ancient Welsh book of folk tales, the 'Mabinogion' as inspiration and created a diverse range of clues and events for the hunt. The following short film was made to give Green Man ticket holders a taste of what was to come.

The hunt was a delight to set up. Our team (My lovely wife Lydia, my trusty parents, John and Janet, the intrepid interns, Emily, Josh and Leanda and the irepressable Mr Kevin Roper) conviened in the Brecon Beacons a few days before the festival opened. The weather was merciful and I wore short trousers for the first and last time this year.

The comunity of people who have made Green Man a success over the years made us very welcome on site. Blake and everyone behind the scenes on the main stage helped get our visuals running and looking great on the big screens.

The Decor department were instrumental in helping us hide and secure our clues for the Hunt, and Chad, Ben, Nush and everyone in the office were infinitely patient in solving our multiple problems and requests with setting everything up.

The Crafternoon Teaparty was a lot of fun and a great success. After an announcement on the big screens that there would be a Treasure Hunt clue at the event, we had a massive rush which cleared out all of our pieces for people to sew. Luckily we had a reserve plan, and everyone had a go at embroidering a scene or letter from the Mabinogion.

The tapestry is currently being assembled by busy hands will be proudly displayed at the festival next year.

Our intrepid interns didn't get chance to stop after the hunt was set up... They were tasked with becoming living clues and wandering about the festival in costume and doling out stamps for the Treasure Hunters.

The costumes were kindly lent to us by the Theatre Royal in York and were originally made for the legendary York Mystery Plays!

We had some great feedback from the treasure hunters and we got the impression that a good time was had by all. The following film is a hectic trail through the answers to the hunt, led by the winner of last year's hunt, Rod Buchanan-Dunlop, set to the awesome Laura J Martin song 'Spy'

Project Hedwig

2011-09-19T07:41:00.000-07:00

Project Hedwig is a film made by students of the Graphic Arts and Design BA at Leeds Metropolitan University. The subject matter was randomly generated by finding the 10th word on the 10th page of the 10th book brought to a seminar.
The subsequent film was a mesmerisingly dark exploration into a Silesian legend intertwined with lots of owls!

The generated word was 'Hedwig' (from the book Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), so we spent a few hours exploring what this word could mean in different cultures and contexts...

We discovered the legend of St.Hedwig, a Silesian Princess who could turn water into wine. And of course, our thoughts turned to owls through the link to the Harry Potter series. Everyone loves owls.

We experimented with animating glass and light as a starting point to the visuals, and the group produced some beautiful results.

Then several students went away to produce different elements of the finished film. owl sanctuaries were visited for research and foley acquisition, a haiku was written, a wonderful paper owl was created and a giant, terrifying owl head was constructed.

We then spent a day animating all of the elements together in a dark and tiny room.

Students experimented with their own edits...

Before we settled on this final version...

15 Letters - Start to Finish

2010-08-31T10:00:00.000-07:00

15 Letters by Lone Wolf

Planning

It’s not often you get the chance to immerse yourself in a project for half a year, but the journey that ’15 Letters’ has taken me on has lasted precisely that. I started to plan the treatment after I completed the video for Lone Wolf’s ‘Keep Your Eyes on the Road’

My main aim was to make 15 Letters more engrossing and impressive than the previous film, which was a remake and homage to the classic Peter Gabriel video for ‘Sledgehammer’. The result involved making the most complex and detailed stop-motion film of my career to date, and referencing another classic piece of media from my childhood; Kit Williams' ‘Masquerade’...

The picture book fascinated me as I grew up, the illustrations were eerie in their detail and the mystery hidden within the pages of the book intrigued and baffled me for years. I decided to fashion my own treasure hunt and hide it in the fabric of Lone Wolf's new video, with the hope that a dedicated group of followers would spend years trying to decipher the answer.

I set to work plotting the hunt. Using my adopted city of York as a starting point, I devised a series of 15 letter long clues (which doesn't allow for a particularly flexible word count) which would lead the treasure hunters to a spot not too far from my house. The position was perfect - it was close enough from home so that I could go out in the dead of night and bury the prize and then keep an eye on it over the months that followed - and it was the mid point of 4 pieces of architecture that I love and wanted to showcase. A serendipitous number of trees on the street cemented the decision for me.

The prize we put together was unique and really exciting. Paul Marshall (a.k.a Lone Wolf) would write a song specifically for the competition and get a single vinyl copy pressed. No one else in world will have a copy of this recording! Then Bella Union offered a further prize of an IOU entitling the winner to an entire 12 months of free releases from the label. I agreed to give away the model of Paul I would make for the animation and we planned to put it all in a handcrafted chest and bury it in the ground.

Now I just had to make the film and hide all the letters in the sets and the post-production...

Manufacture

The lyrical content of 15 Letters is so vivid and dense that it was an easy task to design the sets for this treatment. The problem was that, although I am accustomed to making small, detailed sets and characters, in designing 11 different locations for the 2 and half minute song to occupy, I had set us a ludicrously difficult task. Me and my team (Kev Roper, John Dean and Janet Dean) worked for almost two months building and dressing the sets, then hiding all of the letters for the puzzle in the tiny props and backgrounds and characters of the video.
We built mountains and valleys, underground burial chambers and the surface of the moon. The hospital and what was dubbed ‘The Hall of Heads’ were particularly detailed and tricky to get right, but I was pleased with all of our results... Kev once again wore out his eyes and fingertips in the pursuit of tailoring all of the exquisite costumes the characters wore. I really enjoy working on this scale, but I think Kev will wring my neck if I ask him to put together another 4” long pair of trousers. My dad, John, did more stirling work behind the scenes. The frames he built to form the foundations of each set were strong enough to withstand a calamitous incident that could have wrecked several weeks of work. Thankfully, when the churchyard fell through the roof of the hospital, only a small section of floor and the Nurse’s forehead had to be rebuilt...
My mum, Janet, did a fantastic job of making props and landscapes. She made cupboards and charts and swords and mountains, anything I could task her to do, she did with enthusiasm and care.

The sheer number of different elements that had to be designed and built for this video was staggering. Every day threw up a new challenge, but with innovation and perseverance we eventually got the sets ready for the animation phase of production.

Animation

One of the new challenges I faced with this project was the amount of lip syncing that the characters had to do. I built full teeth and tongue structures into the inch high heads of the principal cast, but after a few lines of dialogue I realised that there was no way of effectively animating that level of detail without ripping the heads off each character for every other frame. I found a neat compromise in small lip movements that conveyed a sense of singing, but I’ll be going back to the drawing board with my next set of puppets on this scale...

My confidence using wires to hold up the characters grew on this project. It is a time consuming process (but what isn’t in animation!) to take them out in post production (and even more fiddly if the camera moves at the same time), but I find it a much more relaxed process than trying to stabilise a puppet from below in each scene. The spinning Letter / Planets at the end however, were a lesson in how not to prepare a scene for post production. I cursed myself for hours as I erased posts and grips from thousands of photos that would have been much easier to hide in real life... However, my dad and I spent 8 solid hours shuffling those sets around in sub-millimeter increments, so any more time spent in that infernal circle might have pushed us over the edge. (Thanks to Marcus Rapley yet again for his wonderful space and light..!)

The shoot took place amid a very busy and important time in my life. I got married on the 29th April so I took a week off from the production for our Honeymoon (apart from a stormy day when i animated the Flash stars and rain... sorry Lydia xxx), and then went on my cousin’s Stag Do the weekend after. My own stag to Barcelona had been diverted back to York by Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokul volcano the month before (I tried to drink the name of it as an exorcism, but only made it to ‘o’ before the night ran out), so it’s shouldn’t have been a big shock that we were affected for Andrew’s Dublin based adventure.
To my horror on the Sunday morning as we queued for our flight, the ash clouds swooped in and made our flight untenable. We quickly tried to book a ferry and held our breath, there were a lot of other people in the same position, but we were giddy with relief as our confirmation came through. We celebrated with another day of Guinness fueled antics then made our way (a little too) causally to the ferry terminal. We were mini bused to the door of the boat, but with only 20 meters to go, a voice crackled on the radio and said ‘The Captain thinks we’ve made a mistake...’ We discovered the ferry was overbooked and after a fruitless debate, we trudged over to the only other ferry sailing that night, which was for cars only... we didn’t hold our breath.

My nerves were shot by this point. I was due on set of another shoot in Leeds at 7am the next day (this ferry was due in at 4am in Holyhead), and that evening Paul and his dad, Peter Marshall, were coming to my studio to shoot the Red Father scene...
So it was with massive delight that a man called Kevin said he would not only give us a lift onto the boat, but he was happy to drop us off in Leeds as well. He was a truly great man and I think I would have imploded without his help. By the time I shot the scene that evening I was a husk (I’d had 2 hours sleep in the last 30) but through the patience of Paul and Peter, we managed to record a scene of quality animation.

Puzzle

It was towards the end of the post-production trawl (erasing wires, putting stars in the sky, inserting Flash animated smoke, breath and rain) that a decision was made that the puzzle was too hard. Paul had been concerned for some time, then Simon Raymonde of Bella Union asked me if it would be possible transplant the whole thing to Green Man Festival. At first I was highly skeptical; the puzzle is very site specific, depending on the winner finding the central point between four towers on the York skyline. But as I thought it through, I realised that this was a fantastic opportunity and with a bit of lateral thinking, the puzzle could be transplanted to the Welsh countryside...

Again, my parents were fantastic help with making and implementing this stage of the project. We spent a week or so making physical representations of the clues for people to discover on the Green Man site. The video was released through Green Man and was promoted marvellously through their mailing list and website. Because there was only now a month for people to solve the puzzle, instead of the several years I had originally designed it for, I had to send a out a few pointers through the Green Man forum. It was really exciting to hear of people trying to solve a puzzle I had spent such a long time devising and implementing.

The best way to reveal where the letters are hidden was to simply make them pop out of the screen... please take a look at this video if you have tried to solve the puzzle but are missing a few letters...

We then had great time going down to the Green Man site and installing the clues. It was wonderful to have free rein of the site, thanks to Greg and Ben, and we soon devised a placement of clues that would lead the treasure hunters to the prize. The main clues were scattered right across the park, and the four York towers were placed so their centre met at an ivy covered wall in the Green Man pub area. The four towers were represented in different ways, so Clifford’s Tower (or ‘Cumberland’s Earl’, which referred to Henry Clifford, the last Earl of Cumberland, who the tower is named after) was a postcard behind the bar of the Green Man pub, York Minster (which is often seen as an architectural relative to Cologne's haunting black cathedral...) was a cheap souvenir, attached to a railing in a tower that was walked past by hundreds of festival goers every hour. The Old Terry’s Chocolate factory was a simple wooden construction placed at the foot of a lighting pole, and Scarcroft school, a magnificent victorian building which stands at the end of my street in York (Dale Street), was rendered in silhouette on a T-Shirt and revealed by Lone Wolf on the Far Out Stage as he played his set on the Sunday afternoon of the festival.

Nestled in the ivy was a brass number 15 and a small iron gate (actually made from doweling and balsa wood), with an instruction to take the number to the Rough Trade tent and type in the code which clues 11 to 14 referred to. The three numbers that had to be multiplied together were depicted by a still from the 15 Letters video (‘The Mirror Shards’, of which there were 15), an illustration of the road in York where the prize was to be originally buried (again, with 15 trees to count), and a T-Shirt which hung in the Rough Trade Shop that referred back to the lyrics of the song that started of this whole adventure; 15 Letters.

So the code required to open the padlock on the box was 15 x 15 x 15 = 3375, but would anyone be able to work it out?

Discovery

By the time Lone Wolf came on stage and announced that the final clue was on stage with him, there was a quite an air of expectation... Paul dropped a final hint that sent half a dozen people rushing out of the tent towards the ivy wall. There were cries of ‘Take him out’ and ‘grab his legs’ as several younger puzzle solvers tried to get an advantage over the older ones rushing down the hill.
But the wall was longer than they all expected, so a frantic rummage ensued, with heads buried in the ivy and leaves and twigs flying backwards from the eager hunters. Then a cry went out! A group had plucked the Gate, the Fifteen and, in their enthusiasm, the disclaimer that told people what to do if the Fifteen had already been found..!
The party rushed off to the Rough Trade Shop, but were sadly unprepared for the code and were unable to open the box. They rushed off to see if they could find the clues for the code, but there was already a number of people milling at the shop ready to have a go at opening the lock...

The eventual winner was Rod Buchanan-Dunlop, an avid puzzle solving 31 year old from London. He was delighted that hours of watching the animation and deciphering a lot of the clues beforehand had paid off.

The two runners up who found the fifteen in the first place were called Stan and Cam, and are in a band called the Ladykillers

( www.myspace.com/theladykillersliverpool ).

They were gracious in defeat and seemed really happy to meet Paul and have their runners up T-Shirt (The End of Dale Street) signed.

In the chaos of the final race for the prize, the T-Shirt for the 14th clue was given away as another runners prize. Thank you to whoever you were for were for taking part in the hunt, and to everyone who took an interest during the Green Man weekend. And thanks to everyone that attempted to solve the puzzle in its original for before the festival started. The task was huge, but it sounds like you had fun trying to work it all out!

My thanks again to Paul Marshall, Ben and Greg at Green Man and Simon Raymonde of Bella Union for making all this possible. It was an epic project, and one with memories that will live with me forever.

Lot more photos of the making of this project are available on Flickr :

www.flickr.com/photos/brokenpixelpictures/sets/72157624845935028

Broken Pixel Methods

2008-07-27T19:04:00.000-07:00

Hello,

To the left are several posts featuring anecdotes and methodology surrounding some of my most significant projects. There are also some short stories hidden away in there too.

I hope they are useful and / or entertaining for some people.

I am currently working on...

New England by Her Name is Calla (post-production)
The Winter League (Various elements)

The Christmas Tree Ships (part one)

2008-07-26T16:21:00.000-07:00

The diver sinks deep into the darkening lake. The lead around her waist is balanced against her mass so that her decent is slow and calm. She can feel the cold waters of this vast lake undulate around her, she can judge it's movement through the dance of algae in front of her face. The cage of glass and bronze around her head feels hard but vulnerable against mounting pressure from water above and around.
The light at her breast does little to piece the gloom, but she is fascinated by the playful swirl microscopic life, that her presence has woken. Like dust in the morning light, these thousands of lives wheel and pirouette in an impossibly complex dance. The diver plays with their tempo with her leather gloved hands.
And then suddenly she stops. Her feet touch the lake bottom in a cloud of churned up detritus that has been untouched for thousands of years. Her vision is filled with ancient waste, yellow mud from an age of decay. And then it clears, and the diver continues her journey.
She strides in slow motion through this new land, small crustaceans scuttle with infinite ease around her monstrously heavy metal boots. At times she has to clamber over rocky outcrops and through swaying weeds hiding unholy creatures of the deep. She thinks she sees the fangs of a giant eel, her mind plays tricks in the heavy murk.
She finds herself in further dark, and a force more solid than the pressurised lake blocks her path. She reaches forward and brushes her hand against a stiff, prickly tendril, which seems to be attached to more just like it. As she edges further towards this new obstacle her chest light reveals an unlikely underwater form; a fir tree, no, a coppice of fir trees stands in his path.
She is delighted.
Her thoughts and dreams of the last 20 years have been realised, she has reached her lifelong goal, she has found the wreck of her Fathers ship.
She franticly pushes the branches aside and delves into the mass of trees infront of her, spines and needles threaten to tear her precious suit to shreds, but she cares not, she is focused and excited, like an anxious school girl, desperate to get home...
The terrain beneath her steepens and she has to catch hold of a branch to stop herself from falling off a great ridge carved into the sea floor. But when she steadies herself she sees a vista so beautiful she almost lets go again. The wrecks of four ships lay peacefully on the lake floor, surrounded by a forest of fir trees, all lit with a thousand tiny lights of every conceivable colour. She notices now on the trees near her, beautiful ornaments and baubles and electric light bulbs powered by some unseen underwater power. The diver bounds down the edge of this magical vale towards the central ship, The Rouse Simmons.
To her alarm and delight she finds a table in the middle of the carcass of the ship, it bears a freshly laid feast of turkeys and roast potatoes and squash and cranberries and she turns around to see several figures approaching from cabins of the ships.
Her initial reaction is abject fear; the men in torn wax overcoats and battered hats have grey, decaying faces, and they move through the waters with a sedate ease. They are all around from every angle except above so she tries to loosen the straps on her weighted belt, but fumbles in the panic and they surround her.
But now they are close, she can see though her steamed-up porthole that the men have a sad kindness in their eyes, and they are offering clumsily wrapped gifts to her. As one is thrust into her hands the paper disintegrates in the water to reveal a roughly carved wooden pony, another gift is offered this time, an approximation of a mermaid, clumsily, but lovingly bent into form from pieces of rusted tin.
Through the commotion the diver sees that one of these decrepit sailors has held back from the throng, he stands watching, trembling, with a parcel in his hands...

The Town of the Acursed Kin

2008-04-26T16:44:00.000-07:00

This is a tentative treatment for the Video for Her Name is Calla's New England...

The film is set in 2 parts. The first section is of an old man telling his grandchildren the story of the cursed town in which they live.

He says (in silhouette against a window, battered by a stormy night)

'On the very same night, in the dead of winter and once every 25 years, this town is visited by a demonic presence. As we townsfolk tremble behind our shuttered windows and bolted doors, a decaying figure in a tall top hat and battered cloak, stalks our rain soddened streets.
He wails an anguished elegy...

'I came to find the son I thought I'd lost'
'I speared my hands and knees upon the rocks'
'And my wife's tears will drown all of England'
'I came to find the son I thought I'd lost.'

Some of the townspeople believe the man to be an ancient resident, cast out by their ancestors for committing a foul and unspeakable crime. Others argue it was the Townsfolk who wronged the man and he returns on this night to reap his revenge on the descendants of his persecutors. Members of the congregation are convinced his presence is the Work of the Lord, sent down from the Heavens to rid each generation of it's sinners and heretics.

Yet for all our sins and in spite of our collective fears, a man emerges from each generation to save the town. This heroic man, this legend is born into each generation to sacrifice himself for the good of those who persecute him. For this man is a bastard child, an outcast from the day he is born. He will live his life, oblivious to his task, but on the day of his 25th birthday he will be called. A primeval clock shall strike within him and he shall know. He will meet his destiny, meet the spectre on The Black Hill on the edge of town and fight him to the death.

No one from the town dare watch this battle, but each quarter-century we know what must be done. Our saviour will never return from that hill, but neither will the spectre, not for another 25 years, in which time, we shall be ready for him again...'

The second part of the film will be the story coming true and continuing on top of the hill...

A shot of the grandchildren looking distraught.

'I'm sorry children, it's only a ghost story, there's no need to be alarmed'

At which point lightening flashes at the window, briefly revealing the silhouette of the old spectre-man. The lightening flashes again and he is gone.
The song is recited once more, floating down from the stoic hills...

'I came to find the son I thought I'd lost'
'I speared my eyes and ears upon the rocks'
'And my wife's tears will drown all of England'
'I came to find the son I thought I'd lost.'

Cut to a young man in a darkened barn, in the dim light we can see the walls are covered in tools of many natures, most are rusty and brutal. The man is angle grinding a sickle and as the sparks fly, his determined, rugged face is illuminated in the brilliant, dying light.
A door opens at the other side of the barn, casting a long shadow of a heavily pregnant woman.
'He is here' she says.
'I know' he replies.
Cut to him striding trough the rain drenched streets, sickle in hand, marching toward the edge of town and The Black Hill.
'Don't!' The pregnant girl calls after him,
'I will return' are his final words to her.
She falls to her knees in the mud and wraps her arms around their imminent child.

Cut to the top of The Black Hill. The man stands alone for a time, then from behind the hill rises the ancient man, clad in tattered rags and a tall, proud stove-pipe hat. He has a deep scar across his face and is wielding a sickle, similar to the man's, but weathered by 75 years worth of frequent use.
A lightening bolt sets the scene as they face off, then in an instant they cross blades. The old man is surprisingly agile and clearly a grand master at wielding such an unwieldily weapon, But the young man is hungry and strong; they are evenly matched. The battle plays out, back and forth they lunge and counter and after a time they find their weapons locked together, their faces close to each other, equals in fatigue and respect.
The old man says 'Do you know who i am?'
The young man frowns and replies 'An evil old crone who is staring death in the face.'
The old man says 'True, but I am also your Great Grandfather'
The young man is still breathing heavily, exhausted from the battle. He is eyeball to eyeball with his great-grandfather.
'Liar!' he screams, breaks the deadlock and slashes at the old man, who instinctively moves his head away from the blade. They stand, poised for the next bout, the wind whipping at their ragged clothes, silhouetted across the brooding storm.

And then another man wearing a slightly smaller stove-pipe hat appears slowly over the hill, followed on his left by a man with a thick shock of hair being ravaged by the wind. The two figures stand a little way back from the two combatants, poised motionless and taught like runners on their blocks. The older man speaks.
'Your Great Grandfather speaks the truth, as do i when i tell you that i am your Grandfather.'
The young man narrows his eyes but does not look away from his original opponent.
'And' begins the hatless man 'I am...'
'...next' finishes the young man, whirling around to attack the two new men. They produce their own sickles and an almighty battle ensues. The young man slashes in every direction, possessed by revelation, denial, confusion. The ballet of blades, glinting in the moonlight, reaches a crescendo when the young man belts the new stove-pipe hatted man in the face with his sickle, blood streaming everywhere and gouging a fresh recreation of the eldest man's scar in the face of his son.

At this point we cut to a shot of a hospital room, the girl from before is in the later stages of labour. An unprofessional looking doctor and his midwife preside eagerly over the woman's heaving body.
Back to the hill and the young man has the upper hand, one assailant is on the floor, clotting his broken face with a handkerchief and the eldest man is reeling from the viciousness of the blows laid upon him.
Another flash cut to expectant mother then...
Die! The young man decapitates his Great-Grandfather with a flourish,
'It's a boy' The eager Doctor proclaims, raising the gore smeared child to the heavens,
The young man watches as his foe drops limply to his knees, in the same moment he is coshed to the back of the head by his Father and follows his great grandfather to the floor.

There is a sequence of shots showing 5 generations of cursed family before we see the young man's father pick up the tall stove-pipe hat that has fallen from his grandfather's separated head, hand it to his injured father then he dusts off his father's smaller hat and puts it on his own head. The two drag their unconscious new relative over the crest of the hill and into infinite legend.

Shake, Baby Shake.

2006-07-26T16:23:00.000-07:00

Shake, Baby Shake.

July 2006

I first met Lupen Crook when we played together at a venue (whose name escapes me) in London. On that night i was in a horrible mood due to being the bands designated driver on the night we first ever sold out a London show. As i sat and watched the band quaff celebratory champagne and revel, I seethed at the injustice and ill fate of it all. But in hindsight i should have been made up, it really wasn't a big deal, and i had just made one of the most important and influential creative contacts of my career so far.

We had just talked briefly at the gig about a possible collaboration, but our chat developed digitally and we settled upon visualising Shake, Baby Shake (a song described as being about and for a person becoming so frustrated by a screaming child that they are about to start shaking it, but just in time they hear Shake, Baby Shake on the radio and start dancing instead and the baby's life is saved).

My initial treatment ideas were a little too dry and flat, involving dancing flowers and decaying photographs, but somewhere in our discussions we happened upon the idea of stuffed toys coming to life and trying to wake an ominously quiet baby. I sketched scene ideas and booked my tickets down south.

It was a sweltering summer week, a time that makes you think that Britain is finally catching up with it's European neighbours in the barbecuing and skin cancer enabling stakes. Just before the rains come to wash away optimism and villages built on flood plains.
The house in which the film is set was in a state of disarray, having been recently moved in to, but Lupen and Sam were very kind and accommodating, and their baby daughter, Matilda was about to star in her first ever film role. Unfortunately, she was at a playful and inquisitive age and it took the best part of 3 days for her to be settled enough to film.
In the meantime me and Lupen set to work on making mobiles and photos for several scenes, scouring charity shops for suitable stuffed bears (although the lead bear was kindly donated by the Family Roper) and drinking into the night.

During the shooting I pioneered a couple of useful techniques:

Using lots of string to form a delicately balanced web to hold a digital SLR, 'Cot-Cam' was born.

The leading bear was given life through a rough wire mesh in his head and my hand up his unstitched anus and through his fluffy guts. I had timed how long the lyrics took to mouth then broke that information down into which frames needed an open mouth and which should closed. The capture process was a bizarre scene of slow-motion puppetry, counting and singing and rhythmically pressing the spacebar.

When Matilda finally went to sleep, i had a match her breathing with the shutter releases so that she would appear still when the frames were put together. Each shot was agony; a camera makes so much noise when you are trying not to wake a sleeping child that has taken hours to get to sleep.

The look has been used many times before and since, but i felt the need to make the effort and print out hundreds of photos and insert them frame by frame to make the picture frames come alive. I think inserting moving images into another moving image using aftereffects or whatever can create really jarring and unpleasant video. I find that capturing as much as possible in camera, no matter how laborious or difficult the process, produces much more satisfying results.

I really enjoyed my stay at the Crook household (except for waking up each morning at 6am to the sound of the dual carriageway commute next to my lightly curtained window and a swirling hangover), and i got the opportunity to return a week or so later after Lupen casually mentioned during the filming that the finished song had a new, extended minute-long rock-outro.
I was momentarily frustrated, after carefully planning the film down to the last second, but this was the delight of working with Lupen. Within minutes we had sketched out a pile of ideas to fill that extra minute and when i came back to shoot the scene, he had made costumes with so much enthusiasm and creative flair, that they enhanced the video immensely.

That final scene was shot in the basement of Lupen and Sam's house. It was a recently abandoned brothel, still featuring scattered rose petals and an ominous pair of fuck boots. I got to meet brothers Bob and Tom who are the Murderbirds, we had beers and laughs in the waining summer sun, hearing the story of how that afternoon, the day Lupen's debut album was released, they had gone down to the local record chain the steal themselves the album, then we all had a spaced out jam in the brothel with me on a valveless, battered bugle. It's moments like these that i love about film-making. Whenever i look back at old videos i have made, it's these memories and senses that come flooding back.

Broken Pixel 2008

THE BEECHiNG REPORT

2005-12-31T18:58:00.000-08:00

Coulonges, France, December 2005

In 1963, Dr Richard Beeching finished his report, 'The Reshaping of British Railways'. It was the result of several years of government-funded research into finding out ways to make the rail system more profitable. A lot of people criticise Beeching and his report for closing down so many stations and making the country loose so many of it's picturesque branch lines. This is a valid point, but I feel that this emphasis on the plight of the disgruntled rail enthusiast seriously undermines the real tragedy of his reforms.

Beeching's report estimated that at least 40,600 people would loose their jobs as a direct result of his plans to downsize the railways. This turned out to be a conservative estimate, with figures ranging from around 70,000 to over 200,000 redundancies stemming from the reformation process. I was appalled when I discovered this and wanted illustrate what a staggeringly large number of people 40,600 is. I wrote a treatment for the song that symbolised the damage that Beeching had done, along with a fictional uprising of the redundant workers which ultimately fails because The Man is bigger than the People.

The People were represented by 40,600 balls of plasicine, all hand rolled by myself, Guy, Dave and my Mum and Dad. (A surplus contingent of them still resides in Birmingham, care of Lawrence and Jasmin of Shady Bard). The combined weight of these balls is more than 20kg and took over a month to roll them all (They can probably stretch from John OGroats to Lands End if placed end to end as well, I just havent done the maths). The life sized model of Dr Beeching was made from chicken wire and plasticine. His eyes are ping pong balls with irises made from shards of the Super8 film London to Brighton at 700mph. His costume is a modified GNER uniform, kindly donated by Alex of Shady Bard. His hair belongs to me. He freaked a lot of people out in our house over Christmas and seemed remind most people of a scary uncle they once had.

I went to France to shoot the animation because they have the best kind of floorboards. I hitched a ride with my parents who were going there anyway. We were a little concerned that transporting a 6 foot plasticine bureaucrat and 40,600 suspicious looking small black things might have caused a few problems at customs, but luckily we werent routinely searched. The room was ideal, small, barren, cold enough for the plasticine not to alter or for me to sleep; an ideal place to spend a Christmas holiday. It took 37 hours over 3 and a half days to animate the video, moving trains, blobs, hands and the camera in sub-millimeter increments. I had a break for an hour on the third day to see in the New Year with my Mum and Dad and our fascinated neighbors, then I worked until the first 9am of 2006 to get it finished.

I had the most satisfyingly lazy new years day of my life.

Broken Pixel, 2006.

A ROOK HOUSE FOR BOBBY

2005-09-30T18:56:00.000-07:00

Hyde Park / Wortley, Leeds, September 2005

ROOK HOUSE was the simplest video I have ever had to make. The animated sections were spontaneous and expressive (i.e. easy and fast) and the performance sections only took an (admittedly long and irritating) afternoon to shoot. The biggest problems we faced involved in filming were worries over whether Dave’s trousers looked too clownish and if Guy’s mental guitar thrashing was going to look realistic or not.

The biggest problem I faced overall was how to depict the character of Bobby Fischer, who, through a reasonable amount of internet research, appeared to be a volatile and not particularly likeable man. From what I have read, there would seem to be aspects of his personality that are quite unpleasant and not the sort of thing that should be brought to the surface whist visualising a song that, whilst certainly not condoning his actions, doesn't try to condemn him either.

So I decided to trace the course of his life through the medium of clay, both in literal formations and metaphorical shapes. Again, I wrote a lot of model destruction into the script. I had to make two identical Fischer models to facilitate his growth out of the spinning ball (filmed backwards), then his later explosion into a maelstrom on the chess board. It was liberating for a while to gradually twist the model into a swirling mass of tormented plasticine, but after an hour and only 60 or so frames I decided to skip to the finish (avoiding the extra 600 or so frames I still needed with some crafty editing) and make a rook house for bobby.

Seeing as this was the easiest and most basic video I have ever made for iLiKETRAiNS I was very surprised to receive a reward for my efforts. The video was voted ‘Leeds music video of the year’ in the Leeds Independent Music Awards. We were all really surprised at the award show, we assumed Four Day Hombre’s video would win, it being a much more professional looking effort. I think this surprise was quite evident when I stepped on stage, looked gingerly over a sea of expectant faces, blurted out a barely audible ‘thanks’ then leapt back down into the blissful anonymity of the crowd. I hope I will be more together when we win our first Smash Hits award.

Broken Pixel, 2006.

The Story of Youme Town (part one)

2005-08-13T06:22:00.000-07:00

In a time that is forgotten and in a place that never existed lived a cautionary tale of a giant and a boy who didn’t have cholera. The town of Youme is our setting and it is a bleak bleak place. It’s people so disillusioned they have abandoned their language in favour of emitting screams that convey meaning through context and variations of ferocity. Their currency is shiny but their expressions dower. Everyone must work in the Factory.

Prologue : The Pilot

Our story begins with a chivalrous sky pirate named ‘The Pilot’. He chases a balloon full of gold but crashes his bi-plane into the mountain and dies. More of him later.

There is only one shop in Youme Town, it sells various items. Today it sells flowers. Our hero, ‘Big Brother’ is trudging down the dry and efficiently clean street on his way home from working in the factory. His trudge is more of a shuffle, as his perpetual winter coat is made from stiff cardboard. His head is bowed to avoid the bitter cold and strange dust that compete with each other to rule the air. His hands are glued to the insides of his mittens. He thinks of pity for his Little Brother who does have cholera.
The Shop Keeper is a Clay, but everyone thinks that he is a Card like everyone else. In fact the cards don’t even know what a Clay is (Clays kill Cards for the giant), but The Shop Keeper wears a cardboard mask, just to be sure. The bells on the shop door go jingle, jangle.
Big Brother enters and shuffles towards the bare dusty counter past bare dusty shelves across the bare dusty floor. For a split second he wonders (for he is one of the cleaver ones) why there is an inanely grinning cardboard mask selotaped to The Shop Keeper’s unusually smooth, dark head. He questions whether his own hands (which he has never seen) are as smooth and supple as The Shop Keeper’s long, black, fingerless limb. And if Big Brother knew anything about physics he may have momentarily questioned why The Shop Keeper had a third dimension. But Big Brother doesn’t even know how to take his mittens off and after a split second he decides to not ask any questions (for he is one of the cleaver ones).
Big Brother screams. It is a short, standard burst. The Shop Keeper screams back for five seconds at medium pitch and at medium velocity (for he is fluent in the language of The Cards). Big Brother duly hands over five shiny particles (*5) and The Shop Keeper produces three dead flowers form behind the counter. He emits a standard scream, as does Big Brother as he grasps his purchase. The transaction is over and Big Brother leaves the shop.

Meet Little Brother. He is pinned down by sheets on the only bed in his and Big Brother’s one roomed house. He is very thirsty and his cholera makes him very weak. Big Brother left a glass of water on the bedside table this morning and Little Brother is trying to reach it.
His cramp filled arm inches out of the warm safety of his hospitalised sheet. Carefully he crawls his bemittened hand across the frozen wastes of his meagre chest to rendezvous with his left hand, which is waiting at the edge of his bedside table, ready to embark on the next leg of this epic journey. Together they set off at a torturous pace. As the pair of mittens, followed by thin-paper paisley pyjamas, creep closer to the glass, the rest of Little Brother’s dilapidated body has to tilt further away from the safety and warmth of his mattress.
A breath of ice on his back contrasts horribly with the itching heat that lives under his skin. His fevered muscles quiver in desperation, knowing they are woefully incapable of completing the task in hand. His entire head burns, crushed by headache and acidic sweat, but expanding constantly and aimlessly like a drunken universe.
But yet, as his simple breaths become harder to take, a glimmer hope. The tip of his right mitten makes contact with glass. The thought electrifies him; cool liquid coursing down his throat, dowsing the thousands of tiny fires that burn him from his lungs to his toes. Serotonin, which had laid dormant within him for weeks, finally leaks into his brain and tells his heart to gain momentum. Almost hyperventilating, Little Brother pushes on to gain more purchase on the glass, but in the excitement and resultant lunge, the smooth cylindrical beaker gets edged further away from him.

Dejected, Little Brother collapses back into his mattress. He knows instinctively that water can save his life, but the cholera makes him so weak that he can’t raise the merest scream to ask his Big Brother for help. He knows that he has to do it alone. With one final push, exerting every last of strength within him, Little Brother reaches out once again for the sweet, sweet water. He gingerly stretches out his two hands and somehow finds them at either side of the glass. He squeezes with all his remaining might and makes the purchase he requires. Agonisingly slowly he drags the water towards his mouth.
The door opens! Big Brother scuttles into the room excitedly. He holds the flowers aloft and screams twice, one standard belt as he shakes the flowers then a slightly lower and longer one with his head titled slightly. He proudly deposits the flowers in the glass that Little Brother had once again let slip from his grasp in all the commotion.
With one last murmur of energy, Little Brother emits a staccato bleat, closes his eyes then sinks back into his pillow and breathes out forever.

Big Brother, not wanting to disturb his Little Brother’s peace, sits down in front of the television and turns the volume down low. There is a programme on about chivalrous sky pirates that bores him to sleep.
For this nap, the chemicals of his unconscious mind decide to project images of ski slopes into a more conscious part of his brain. The image is subtly altered by the tiny sound of some Clays entering the room through secret trapdoors to remove the cadaver from his Little Brother’s bed. The Ski Slopes are filled with inky red oil. In reality there is a whir, clatter and thud as the disposal belt lurches into action and takes his Little Brother to the Factory. In his dream, red fills everything then turns to black and a single white eye blinks in and out of being. Reality tears a bright white hole into his sleep and he returns to basic consciousness. On the television is the Test Card, a pattern of colour and grey scales accompanied with a meandering saxophone solo. It is Hobby Time. For a set period every night the television stops distributing entertainment and everyone has to go and pursue his or her hobbies. It seemed that every adult’s hobby involved going into the bedroom and vigorously rearranging furniture.
Big Brother’s state designated hobby is astronomy. But see seeing as Youme Town’s sky is constantly shrouded with impenetrable grey clouds, Big Brother has to spend his Hobby Time peering into the windows of nearby houses to see what the adults are doing.
Today he decides to watch the sailors in the harbour.

Next … Chapter 1 : The Captain

Featuring : Deception! Angler Fish! Shanties!

The Youme Town Story was conceived by a Mr Kevin Roper and elaborated on by his colleague, Mr Ashley Dean.

Adapted for Jackanory by Broken Pixel.

BEFORETHECURTAiNSCLOSEPARTii

2005-06-30T18:49:00.000-07:00

Chapel Allerton, Leeds, June 2005

After the release of BTCC Part i, Tug went into retirement and spent most of his time sitting in our living room with a bottle of beer in his hand. It was to our great surprise then, to find one day a mini-tug sat by him on the settee! We did not want to question where he came from, but given Papa Tug’s inability to move independently we assume it must have been some kind of immaculate conception. This discovery and various budgetary issues led to the decision that PARTii should be entirely stop-motion animated. (Although it finished with several live action parts being skillfully fulfilled by the rest of iLiKETRAiNS, plus a cameo appearance by the band Milk as the ravenous Paparazzi.)

For the basis of the story, I concentrated on the time inbetween the happenings that the lyrics of the two songs describe. More precisely, I asked myself where “I discharged myself” from “today”, and why would our protagonist do such a thing? I love the atmosphere of scenes set within mental asylums (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ringu 2, Come on my Selector) and was keen to use elements. I had seen to create a claustrophobic, malicious psychologist character to terrorise the song’s narrator. I wanted his tests to send the protagonist into a fitful rage which would unleash the wiry shadow alter ego (played again by Tug) that had inflicted so much terror in BTCC Part i. I had researched Rorschach ink blot tests when I was designing the artwork for the BEFORETHECURTAiNSCLOSE single and knew I wanted to use this imagery again. (Although not the actual Rorschach images I discovered, as it is supposed to be a closely guarded secret as to how they look because some psychologists (amazingly) still use the test.)

All this imagery worked really well together in my head, but when incorporating it into the lyrics of the song and the time constraints of the music, I found that my back story had to be squeezed into a 5 second segment in the middle of the song. At least I got to play the malicious psychologist.

I had no plans on how I was going to build the set, I just pottered around our cellar for a month with a big pile of carpet, lots of cardboard boxes and several feet of gaffer tape. I used wire, perspex, wood stain, tracing paper, drinking straws, dirt, fairy lights, gloss paint, chopsticks, a blackout sheet, some decently wired lighting (courtesy of Dan Skevington) and some (highly flammable as I found out later) brown cloth to make the interior / exterior set that I was to film around. The asylum on the hill is actually a health spa that was in Ilkley about 100 years ago.

I was dismayed to find that mini-Tug was just as much a pain in the arse to animate as his father. Despite the fact that his feet are made from drawing pins and the floor of the set is a drawing board, he still insisted on keeling over at the most inopportune moments. Quick re-writes in the script meant that he did a lot more sitting and leaning than was originally intended. The rest of the fortnight of animating (interspersed with a fancy dress party, a gig in Manchester and some really vivid dreams), went ok. Apart from cutting a chunk out of my thumb trying to make the stars bigger and filling our house with smoke as I razed the set for the final shot.

I intended to burn the set all along (I seem to script the destruction of most of my models) but when it came to the last day of shooting I couldn’t anything to catch fire. I covered mini-Tug in all manner of household products that claimed to be highly flammable, but nothing seemed to kindle. Then, out of desperation I introduced my lighter to the curtains and they roared into life. I stood transfixed as the flames lapped around the cardboard and paper set I had been toiling over for weeks. The release from the tense frustration of the animation process was glorious. I let combustion do the work and at a rate of 25 frames per second; my average rate was more like 2 frames per minute. But as I was drawn into this beautiful destruction I lost sight of the true terror of fire. The flames had got hold of the underside of the roof and the fire to set ratio had become significantly unbalanced. Around me I noticed that smoke had begun to cling to the sides of the room, my head was now in a cloud of hazy fumes. The walls of the set were about to implode and I may have been in danger of choking so quickly I reached for the jug of water I had ready and doused the flames. The whole house was filled with a clingy grey mist and quite an uneasy charcoal smell, but it spelled the end of a grueling mental feat.

Broken Pixel, 2006.

BEFORETHECURTAiNSCLOSEPARTi

2005-02-28T18:42:00.000-08:00

Thorpe Hesley, Rotherham, February 2005

On an icy Saturday evening we descended on the home of Melvin and Sue ... kind and inviting owners of a tree perfect for the filming of BTCC Part i. After weeks of fruitlessly searching the woodland areas of Leeds, we got a call from our South Yorkshire location scout, John Dean, who had noticed a suitably sized, sturdy looking tree that was close to a bedroom window. Whilst Dave practiced his stop-motion miming (and kept his feet warm) in the car, Guy and Simon wrestled to keep the real star of the video under control.

Tug had been constructed a few weeks before using coat hangers, gaffer tape, papier mache and some basic electronics (which turned out to be too basic as the lights in Tug's head weren't visible on film). But despite my efforts to make him light and sturdy (and with a failed ambition to make him stand on his own two feet) he turned out to be a totally uncontrollable unwieldy lump. So the first nights shooting consisted of me up a step ladder, trying to keep my hands warm enough to press the shoot button on my flimsy digital camera. Guy puppeteering Tug and trying to stay out of shot, and Simon running in and out of the house swapping over batteries for the camera. We retired at 1am when my hand was shaking too much to be of any use. (you may notice that Dave's hands aren't in shot for any of the in-tree shots as he was designated one of the two pairs of gloves we had between the four of us.)

After a hearty breakfast provided by caterers Janet and John Dean, a failed (due to faulty super8 light metering) shooting of a video for THEACCiDENT and a photoshoot (with photographer John Dean) at some nearby follies, we got back to the set. We met aspiring actor Andrew Dobson (found by casting director John Dean) and his friend Becky ... and ran through the (very rough) script. We shot their gloriously warm indoor shots without a hitch, both of them adapting well to the situation and each other. Then I got to have fun with special effects, using 3 different kitchen knives, cut off at different lengths along their blades (thanks to Martyn Dean of our special effects department), and lots of red marker ink (carefully trying not to get any on Melvin and Sue's sheets), to create the effect of the knife being plunged deep within Andrew's innards. I wish i had shot from a more head-on angle so that the tearing of the knife through the rest of the body could have been more gratuitous, but i was reasonably pleased with the results. After that it was time for the acting talent to go home and for us to once again brave the bitter, bitter cold. The car's thermometer read -2ºc, at least it wouldn't rain.

The first outdoor setup of the night almost spelled the end of iLiKETRAiNS. It was a complicated drainpipe shot; I was getting pissed off with Tug's inability to grip anything other than himself and had managed to lodge him and his 9 inch kitchen knife between the wall and the pipe that he was supposed to be climbing. Guy was stood below holding the ladders, (whist Dave and Simon toasted themselves in the car) when Tug's hand dislodged itself, his blade slicing through the air and missing Guy's forehead by a matter of centimeters. Visibly shaken he went and warmed up in the car whilst I abandoned the shot and made Dave crawl around the garden, hangout in the undergrowth then get back in the tree for a final 2 hour stint of menacing looks and very slow movement.

By 10.30pm our joints and brains had seized up, but we had captured our last frame and were full of relief that we hadn't died from pneumonia or from knife attacks to the head. Soon we were merrily on our way back up the M1, safe in the knowledge we had completed a solid weekend's worth of work and it was one of us that had another solid week of editing left to do.

Broken Pixel, 2006.