Sunday, April 29, 2007

Narrative photography



I am beginning to feeel the stress and strain of too much work this term and blog entries have suffered as a consequence.

I am getting to grips with poetry, kind of ok with fiction, behind with critical studies (through no fault of my own) but floundering hopelessly in a visual sea with no life raft in sight.

The cause of my angst is a wooly brief that involves narrative and photography/film. It's not that I don't have ideas. I have plenty, too may in fact. Some of them too ambitious or big for me to realise. No, what I am struggling with is to bring narrative to my ideas. Why I don't know - it should be easy. Other people don't seem to have a problem with it. The trouble is that some of the ideas that I tried that did have narrative didn't work visually and the photos that I like best don't (for me) seem to fit into the narrative framework.

Help!

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Losing ones head


Losing ones head
Originally uploaded by pupski.
This is turning out to be an incredibly busy week. We spent all day today in the photography labs - here is one I prepared earlier today. Not the real deal but a digital photo. I can't get my head around the SLR camera. The tutor talks at about 100mph andit was very hard to remember everything. This is one of those times when I could have really done with a handout to rmind myself how it works later. It's one thing listening to someone talk about all the steps in a class but quite another to remember it all two hours later when you are on your own. I have always had automatic focus cameras in the past so have never had to worry about apperture etc...

Friday, April 13, 2007

Weird Music Videos




I saw a really weird music video on TV today. A kind of soul/disco cover of the Smiths song "Stop me if you think that you've heard this one before." Which is weird enough in itself you might think but no there's more - towards the end of the song it miraculously changes into a cover of The Supreme's "You Keep me Hanging On". Then there's the video itself, which feature a pair of sneakers with a life of their own - shade of "the Red Shoes" - but it also really reminded me of the video "The Wrong Trousers" by aardman, where the trousers run away with Wallace inside them. The director is Scott Lyon.




Another director that is well worth a look is Michel Gondry - his most memorable in my opinion is "Let Forever Be" by The Chemical Brothers, a surreal trip of a video that I can watch over and over without getting bored of. Even my 14 year old son was impressed by it and that's saying something. Gondry has done some famous adverts and some other great pop videos too - The White Stripes animation totally done in lego and the Massive Attack video set in a block of flats. All of which are brilliant works. If you want to see Gondry's work there might be some on youtube or you can buy the DVD "The Work of Director Michel Gondry" from Amazon.