‘Get Well Soon’ is a short film by BRAG Productions. Its a quiet, visceral horror starring Gresby Nash and Laura Howard. I saw it last year at The Exhibit in Balham and thought the combination of cinematography and sound design were particularly effective.
The film has finished its festival run and will be released online on 13th June. Here’s a short video of the cast and crew, talking about the making of the film.
Director Ian Baigent has also created a lovely montage of all the clapper boards from the film shoot. I think all films should have one of these.
Tag: Film (Page 5 of 11)
Reviews, comments and thoughts on films
I found this video, of an uncontacted tribe meeting a white man for the first time, utterly compelling.
I admit that the Enigma style sound-track (actually Yeha-Noha by Sacred Spirit, a new feature on YouTube helpfully reveals) helps churn the emotions.
But there is a beauty in the images, in the actions of the startled men and women on film. Initially, they are clearly shit-fucking scared. Although they are armed, and could have let loose an arrow into the explorer’s gullet at any moment, they do not give in to their fear. Curiosity is the more powerful emotion. They dare to touch the hand of the explorer and his cameraman. And crucially, they trust him enough to shake his hand, taste the salt, and take him to their village. For his part, the white explorer (film-maker Jean-Pierre Dutilleux) appears honest and sensitive, and the moment early on where he reaches out his hand is just sublime.
Its an imperfect experiment, but these uncontacted tribes are the nearest thing we habe to a tabula rasa, a mind unpolluted by the sensibilities and preconceptions of our infinitely connected world. And, untrained and unprepared for the moment, they win it. Its a blow to the idea that humankind is essentially destructive and violent, and that politics must essentially be about protecting ourselves from others, in the pursuit of self-interest.
The video is actually from 1978, but these tribes-people are totally outside of time and only Dutilleux’s short-shorts date the piece. But I came upon it because of a more contemporary campaign to help preserve uncontacted tribes in the Amazon Rainforests. There is a lot more fascinating imagery, and a petition to sign, at UncontactedTribes.org.
In my youth, I would go skydiving at weekends. My take-up of the sport was round about the time that digital video was coming onto the consumer market and into the world of freefall. Most electronics shops sold high-end mini-DV units for four figure sums alongside VHS camcorders. All units were relatively bulky and you required a homemade helmet with a camera-mount bracket on the front.
The films we produced then were rudimentary. They were washed out and a bit shaky, and any that were edited were typically very basic montages set to some kind of dance-music sound-track. Here’s an example I made earlier.
Compare that with this beautiful thing from design studio Betty Wants In, advertising a skydive centre in Melbourne. Its in a different league to what I saw being produced a decade ago, even from the professionals. Chief amongst its virtues is the focus on stillness and calm, and the relative stasis that you achieve in freefall (relative being the operative word). By contrast, when I was doing this sort of thing, the entire culture revolved around speed and the iconography was all cliched lightning bolts and flames. It shows how the practitioners of this relatively new genre have evolved, helped of course by the reduced price and size of HD video.
Check out this stunning animation by Ryan Woodward:
I was delighted to see this, because it takes to a perfect, polished conclusion a visual style I messed about with briefly, a few years ago:
For the avoidance of doubt, I do not claim that my sketches had any influence on Ryan! ‘Construction’ type sketches are a common enough aesthetic, and I’m not even sure that it was an original style when I created my own animation.
Rather, I just say that there is a certain pleasure in seeing such an idea realised. When I was messing about with tracing paper, I knew I did not have the artistic training, nor the resources, nor the talent, to actually realise what I saw in my head – a depressing realisation one learns to accept. But watching Woodward’s piece, I see he has incorporated everything I would wish, especially a sense of the transient, the fleeting, and the whiff of faeries.
See also: Fifty Nine Productions animations for Jónsi.
The latest YouTube craze is to take a common film or TV cliché or plot device and splice them together. Its a diverting way to highlight the many recurring scenes that we see in our media, the audio-visual grammar of our entertainment.
A couple my favourites are Cool Guys Don’t Look At Explosions and Let’s Enhance, below.
Via that video, I came across the massive time-sink that is tvtropes.org. I think a wiki-style project to create a YouTube video for every TVtrope listed would result in a fantastic media- and film-studies resource. A good use of our cognitive surplus, I reckon.
Update
Tom Cruise, running.