#N30 Photo diary – Occupy join thousands of people protesting public sector cuts in the UK #N30 7am. Occupy marchers meet at Liverpool Station, London, and spread out a banner to the sound of a drum band escort. This same banner would see a lot of action during the course of the day.  #N30 the drum band escort lead us along the streets of London where we visited the other picket lines where workers were on strike against public sector cuts.  #N30 Heavy police presence for the Occupy morning march  If you don't want to see your pension being cut, look away now.
 Occupy London morning march heads along the streets of London towards the picket lines of other protest groups against public sector cuts.  The Occupy camp at St Pauls, where the structures for the banners were made.  The banners, completed. I was honoured to be among the many lending a hand to build them, and to be among those carrying them. Unweildy things, they are, but damn effective! Make your own at www.demoteck.org  George, a former public sector worker whose pension has been cut - again.  Occupy march grows are we head toward the merging point to meet other protesting groups from the public sector.  The polices subtle way of saying they didn't want us going down that street.  Occupy join with protestors from the public sector  thousands take to the streets of london to protest public sector and pension cuts.  Lots of mums brought their kids on the marches. One told me “sadly, she will probably have to do this for the next 20 years, so i figured now was a good time to learn how its done“  More of the protesters. I wish, at this point, I had bought a camera instead of my phone, as I couldnt get a good shot of the thousands here!  Occupy protesters, shortly before the picadilly action, which I have no shots of as I had gone for food. Cursing myself cos I wish I had gone in with them.  Post Preston House action, Police move in on occupiers who were simply returning from the march and not involved with the action.
Posted in Politics / Philosophy, Uncategorized
Tagged #n30, #occupyslx, #occupytogether, england, government cuts, london, march, occupy, occupy london, occupy together, ows, protest, UK
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The Arsonist – new video by Shaun GareaIt might be a cliche, but only because it is true. A picture is worth more than words, and can conjour up richness from nothingness in only the seconds it takes to absorb it. So when you know good people in the visual arts world, it makes sense to collaborate! Being in the fortunate position of knowing some fantastic film makers and visual artists, I had the opportunity this year to work with the very talented Shaun Garea. This is a man who single handedly runs a production company (Estrata), works with musicians on Mike Patton & Billy Goulds “Koolarrow Records” and produces films, documentaries, and, as it happens, comics! And because words really ARE inadequite for describing the amazing job Shaun and his crew did on the video for “The Arsonist”, I shall stop typing and let you check out his work for yourself!! “The Arsonist” was filmed by Shaun Garea – http://www.shaungarea.com – on location in Christchurch, New Zealand. Music by Jordan Reyne, actors, Keri Wheeler (the scientist) and Charles Grubb (as the adventurer). Dedicated to the people of Christchurch. And now the comics – which give a background to the characters in the video:
Posted in Uncategorized, comics, cross-artform projects
Tagged comic, comics, graphic novel, koolarrow, mike patton, sepia, steampunk, video
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Slavoj Zizek speaks at Liberty Square October 9 2011This is a transcript of Zizek’s peach at Liberty Square today. I’m putting it up because it is important and because I could not find a transcript elsewhere. THe speach has been recorded but without a microphone s the crowd repeats Zizek’s words and it can be hard to hear. Slavoj Zizek addresses the crowd gathered at Liberty Square – October 9th 2011 … 2008 financial crash – more hard earned private property was destroyed than if all of use here were to be destroying it night and day for weeks. They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think that things can go on indefinately the way they are. We are not dreamers, we are awaking from a dream that is turning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything, we are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. We all know the classic scenes form cartoons – the cat reaches a precipice but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is nothing beneath it. Only when it looks down and notices it, it falls down. this is what we are doing here. We are telling the guys there on wall st, “hey, look down”. In April 2011 the chineze government prohibited, on TV, in films and in novels, all stories that contained alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. If people still dream about alternatives, you have to prohibit the dream. Here we don’t think of prohibition, because the ruling system has even supressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world, an asteroid destroying all life and so on, but you cannot imagine the end of capitalism. So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful old joke from communist times: A guy was sent from East Germany to work in SIberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors so he told his freinds “lets establish a code- If a letter you get form me is written in blue ink, it is true, what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false”. After a month his freinds got a first letter. It says, in this letter “Everything is wonderful here. The stores are full of good food, the movie theatres show good films from the west, apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink”. This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want, but what we are mising is red ink – the language to articulate our non-freedom. The was we are taught to speak about freedom, war and terror and so on, falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here – you are giving all of us red ink. There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here, but remember carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal life. Will there be any changes then? I don’t want you to remember these days – you know, like “oh we were young, it was beautiful” – remember what our basic message is – we are allowed to think about alternatives, the tabu is broken, we do not live in the best possible way. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we dont want, but what do we want. What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want? Remember – the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. Beware not only of the enemies, but also of the false freinds who are already working to dilute this process in the same way you get coffee without caffine, beer without alcohol, icecream without fat. They will try this into a harmless moral process – a decafinated process. But the reason we are here is that we have enough of the world where to recycle coke cans, or to buy a starbucks cappucino where one percent goes to the worlds starving children, is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and tourture, after marriaga agencies are outsourcing even our lovelife, daily, we can see that for a long time, we allowed our political engagement also to be outsourced. We want it back. - We are not communists. If communism means the system that collapsed in 1990, remember that today those communists are the most efficient ruthless capitalists. In China today we have capitalism that is even more dynamic than your american capitalism, but doesnt need democracy, which means, when you criticize capitalms, don’t allow yourselves to be blackmailed that you are against democracy. The marriage between democracy between democracy and capitalism is over. The change is posible. How? What do we consider today posible? Just follow the media. On the one hand, in technology and sexuality, everything seems to be possible. You ca travel to the moon, you can become immortal by bilogenetics, you can have sex with animals, or whatever – but look at the feilds of society and economy, therem almost everything is considered impossible. You want to raise taxes a little bit for the rich – they tell you its impossible, we will lose competitivity. You want more money for health care? They tell you “impossible, this means totalitarian state”. Is something wrong in the world, where you are promised to be immortal but cannot spend a little bit more for healthcare. Maybe we have to set our priorities straight here. We don’t want higher standards of living, we want better standards of living. The only sense in which we are communists, is that we care for the commons. The commons of nature, the commons of what is privatized by intellectual property, the commons of biogenetics. For this, and only for this, we should fight. Communism failed absolutely, but the problems of the commons are here. they are telling you we are non americans here, but the conservative fundamentalists who claim they are really american have to be reminded of something. What is christianity? It is the holy spirit. What is the holy spirit? Its an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other, and who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense, the holy spirit is here now, and down there on wallstreet, there are beggars who are workshiping blasphemous idols, so all we need is patience. The only thing I am afraid of is that we will, at some day we will just go home, then we will meet once a year, drinking beer and nostaligically remembering what a nice time we had here. Promise ourselves that this will not be the case. We will go on – you know that people often desire something, but do not really want it. Dont be afraid to really want what you desire. Thankyou very much.
Posted in Politics / Philosophy, Uncategorized
Tagged abbusters, ad, anto capitalism, communism, lierty square, occupy wall street, october 9, ows, philosophy, politics, slavoj zizek, socialism, speach, zizeck
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The Drums of SatanAfter the last surveys I sent out asking you guys what you wanted in your newsletters, one of the things you guys asked for was “random tales from my life”. I kinda sidled over that request for a while, partly cos chosing randomness is a bit of a contradiction, but mainly, cos I wasn’t sure what to write about. Having had a few letters urging me to please do it anyway, I decided the best thing to do would be to relate the non music related stuff that comes up in conversation for me at odd points in the week. “The Drums of Satan” It happens on New Zealand’s west coast, a ruggedly beautiful place where the mountains plunge straight into an ocean that hurls itself onto talons of rock, ripping itself into foam. It happens where I grew up, though some time after me and my family had all moved on, in a place called Tauranga Bay, where the sea roars out its rage at the coast.
Tauranga bay is half an hours drive out of Westport, which is three hours drive throgh a mountain range and one-lane roads, from anyplace civilized. I wanted to show my then-partner what this place I had come from was like – probably because I thought it explained something, thought what that something might be, I have yet to figure out. In a rusty old holden station wagon, whose column shift screetched in fear when you so much as touched it, I drove the poor man, whose name wasn’t Ben but will be for this story, into the depths of nowhere – to the only place left in the country where one-lane bridges still share with trains, and where the locals point and laugh if you drive over at the wrong time of day cos everyone knows that’s when the good train comes through from the south.
We arrived late at night, only to find the nearest campsite wasn’t near at all, and was, in any case full. When we got to the shore, “no camping” signs poked up from the ground ike middle fingers, jeering. We took a side road; drove the car over shuddering, unsealed chip, hunting for a likely looking place. With so little space between earth and sea, we hit the end of the road before finding anything suitable. We stopped and killed the lights. Sea booming in our ears. There seemed to be a broad sort of area to one side of where the road ended, where the ground flattened out between two hills. A picnic table was balanced there with rocks underneath the foot that was falling away into soggy ground. “What the fuck is that?” (we use the f word for anything and everything down under). That was the first thing I heard before yanking out my earplugs to hear what the problem was. All around us there was drumming. It would rise up on one side, deep and irregular and loud, before sinking back into the sound of the far off sea, and then rising up again someplace else nearby. It was eerie and other worldly, and definitely not human. I went with my eyes shut. I didnt want to see ANYTHING, cos if I did, I would be forced to believe mumbo jumbo. The slick cool of the grass on my feet didnt sooth me, normal as it was – my brain sent me images of bloodied skins lying piled up upon one another; of the slick dead tongues of murder victems taken out here by mad pagan locals on a dark night, whose ghosts lingered here forever. Eventally I realised my own imagination was far more horrendous than anything real life could offer, and I opened my eyes. In the lighter black of the road, the car sagged on its haunches, unscathed and not crawling with deamons. The moon was half. The booming hadnt stopped though, and seemed to come from several directions at once. I took a few steps toward the bushes near the tent – leaping back and letting out a yip as something skittered off into the undergrowth. The booming continued. There was nothing to see but shadow on shadow, and when something dark moved off across the corner of my eye I got back into the tent as fast as I could, lest I see anything “ghostly”. The sun comes up early on a clear day in summer. By 7am we had crawled from the tent, now heating up and baking us inside it. Ligaments cracked as I tried to realign my body with gravity, stretching as Ben headed over to the car to get the cooker. He stopped by a large plackard At this point I would like to thank the New Zealand department of Conservation for its informative sign that let us know that we were not insane, and that the word was still completely devoid of ghosts, miracles or wonders, and that besides that, wekas (flightless, curious, chicken-sized birds, that look a lot like Kiwis if you dont happen to ever have seen a kiwi) bred at the exact time of year we had decided to camp. These birds, said the sign, made a deep booming noise with their throat, to announce their readiness to screw to potential sexual partners. The sound, the placard went on could be “surprisingly loud”, but was not often heard by people as the birds were “easily put off” their mating rituals.
As if on cue, several of them appeared, as they actually do all the time on the west coast. They lunged about, gawky and decidedly unfrightening, near the boot of the car. One of them jumped into the open boot and made off with a slice of bread.
Posted in camping stories, random tales from my life
Tagged camping, coastal highway, holiday, karamea, new zealand, paparoa, punakaiki, tent, tentin, tramping, weka, west coast, westport
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More places to play online – StageitYesterday I had the privelidge of presenting on a panel about the role of online performance in building a fanbase for the modern musician. I had the pleasure too, of drinking beer in a happily crowded pub in London, with many of the wonderful and talented artists that came along. Ideas flowed, fantastic yarns were relayed (some of which involved Micheal Jackson, and I probably am not at liberty to repeat them!). All in all, a wonderful evening, but it left a lot of poeple, including me, wishing I had got my damn book out earlier – the one that tells you about how to make a living playing music online.
Compared to the VR world of Second Life, and the hybrid platform Streamjam, and even some of the other broadcast channel setups, Stageit is by far the simplest to use. Second Life might have the most established economy and advertising infrastructure, but it sure can be a pain in the proverbial if you haven’t done this kind of thing before. Stageit, as it happes, is also quite lucrative. Refreshingly, compared to the other broadcast channels, it doesn’t bombard your viewers with adverts for laxatives in the middle of your most poignant love song (or hard out shred-solo).
The only tricky part about playing in stageit at all is sorting out “stage one” of the signal chain – ie getting your sound into your computer. A lot of you will have done this without realising, as it is a similar setup to what you use for home recording, so if you are set up for that, chances are you can almost plug and play Once you have that side sorted out, you will also need a webcam. The best kind to get are ones WITHOUT an inbuilt microphone as these cause embarassment with audio sources. If yours does have a mic though, its not the end of the world, you just have to be wary of selecting the right audio source when it comes time to play! Head over to www.stageit.com where you should see something like the image above. In the top rigth hand corner there is a grey box that says “log in” and “sign up”. Click on “sign up”. Its actually a pretty simple and transparent process. You can set up an image and a profile blurb and so on. Setting up an actual show is the only slightly tricky part – its on the blue bar near the top, two accross from the “stageit” logo and says “create a show”. You will be asked to pick a time and date. Make sure you have selected your own timezone, and set your show up to be at least a week into the future so you can promote it. You can set the number of tickets to anything you like too. Be aware that Stageit limits its show times to 30 minutes, plus a 20 minute encore, but it will show how much time you have left for the lengh of the broadcast so dont panic about being cut off. Having set up your show, you should ge advertising. Depending on what territories your listeners are from, you might want to do time conversions for different territories. I have a lot of listeners from Second life, so I use SLT, as well as in the states, UK, Germany and New Zealand – so yes, it can be a headache. The best tool I have found for timezone conversions is “world time buddy” which looks like this:
and can be found here. Before you do your show, you should have a soundcheck to make sure everything is working. You can do this without being on air. Just log into Stageit, click on “my shows” (in the blue bar area ner the top of the page) and then on “upcoming performances” (in tiny green writing at the top of an almost blank page). You will then see a green button around half way down the screen and on the left that says “go to stage”. Click on that. You will see a grey column to the left appear, and a chat area to the right. The grey area will have a white box in it asking you to allow an application to control your camera. Click on “allow”. You should then see yourself on screen. Below the screen is a set of tabs for controlling audio and video quality, and source. Click on the audio tab and check that the sound source is set to your soundcard. You can also use a scrollbar to set the quality of the sound. If you have an insanely low bandwidth you may want to take it down a notch. I never do and have never had issues with lag or stuttering. You can do the same in the video tab aswell – setting the video quality as high or low as you like. Seeing as your shows are about music, if you are on a low bandwidth connection, turning down the image quality is the better option. In all honesty though, I never have listeners reporting any problems when I have both audio and video set to max. When you are ready to start playing, hit the “go live” button to the right of the audio and video control area. Keep an eye on the chat too, as anyone tying in there, you should respond to and the audience are what makes it fun to be there. If they tip you, it will show up in chat too, and you should make sure you have any links you want to post into chat (for places people can order your albums for example) are on your clipboard for easy pasting into chat. You can also set up links to merch and music in your channel page, but I find the chat is an effective suppliment, as it is in real time. Enjoy!
Posted in How to make a living playing music online, what you need to play music online
Tagged broadcast, cyber concerts, cyber gigs, cyber shows, guide, how to, howto, live music, live performance platform, live shows online, making music online, music show online, online gigs, online shows, playing online, stageit
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A Woman Scorned – comic by Ben NaylorBen Naylor is a UK visual artist from Brighton. We met in the Brunswick pub during the fringe festival – a time of year where Brighton fills with people toting guitars, wearing all colours of the rainbow at once, and playing join-the-dots, by foot, on a map of fringe events. I was playing a show at the Brunswick, which likes to play with boundaries so much that it is in Hove and Brighton both at once. I had trouble finding it, but onyl because I tried following people with guitars and found out that that was 50% of the populace. After the show, in the windowless gig room, we got chatting. People are chatty in England. I like it. It turned out Ben was a very talented visual artist with a style that combines all the best elements of storytelling, humour and horror. For those of you who don’t know, I have a thing for the visual arts, and visual artists too When the upcoming album, “Children of a Factory Nation” had the release delayed to co-incide with tour dates later in teh year, it seemed the perfect opportunity to hunt out some unusual and interesting multi-artform ways of presenting the stories within it. It’s times like that where I am very thankful to know as many talented filmmakers, authors and artists as I do. Added to the people we already had plans with – the globe-trotting, groundbreaking, Eloise Coveny who was working on an animation video for Johnny’s tale, and Anarchy Books’ chainsaw weilding mastermind, Andy Remic, who was organising a writing competition – Ben’s artwork seemed like the perfect fit. A few emails and rough sketches later, I was very excited to see what would come next. So, without further waffle, Ben’s work is presented below. What I will add is that working with such wonderful people as those named above makes me proud to be a creative type, and able to hold my head up at least half high when snarly tax-office types accuse me of engaging in terrible folly for even imagining that the arts is a valid persuit. In the name of creativity being a very valid persuit indeed, here are the picures, as promised.
Lastly, if you’d like to have a copy of your own, cos of technical hitches, the comic has become one of those special things you can only get at gigs – unless you order one of the 15 copies my partner and I printed at home and cut ourselves in our dimly lit flat on a rainy afternoon. Our eyesight has since deteriorated too much to do any more by hand, but the images, in full, will also be part of the magazine that comes out after the album release with all the related projects presented, and will be released digitally, with the track itself, closer to the albums release.
Posted in comics, cross-artform projects, folklore
Tagged black and white, comic, comic artists, fairytales, folk tales, folklore, line drawing, UK comic, welsh folklore
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Tour Dates AnnouncedBuzzing to announce my first UK tour, thanks to Inspired Artist Agency and 7pm Management. Hopefully, I am heading to a town near you, so head along and say hello October November Digitech Jamman Stereo SecretsPlaying with yourself on stage is not nearly as offensive and out of the question as it sounds The Digitech Jamman Stereo is a loop machine. A wondrous device I have worked with for almost two years now. It allows you to sample yourself as you play, and plays those samples back in a continuous loop. What it means is, you can record a guitar riff, or a vocal phrase, and have it replay indefinately, whilst you play over the top of it. Unlike most of the competitors out there, the Digitech Jamman Stereo allows you to record both vocals AND guitar, albiet on the same channel. This blows the scope for making full, harmony rich performances as a soloist wide open. With that in mind, I’ve made a video on how to use them for those of you who are looking into buying one, and the few of you that are worried that it’s all very complicated. This vid should show you the opposite – it’s actually really simple. I am a clutz at the best of times, and this thing is simple enough for me not to get wrong too often There will be another two videos coming up in the future about the Digitech Jamman Stereo with some tricks for advanced users, and a couple of secrets about how to synch them up if you are using more than one (which is one of the ways to separate the vocal and guitar parts). For now though, enjoy messing around with your loop machine! They are an inspiring gadget and make a lot of very creative things possible. And yell if you have any questions jordan
Posted in Digitech Jamman Stereo
Tagged digitech jamman, footswitch, help, howto, live looper, live sampling, loop footswitch, loop machine, looper, sampler, tips
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Glastonbury – the inside story. Day One.Ok, so everyone moans about the mud at Glastonbury, apparently. Any of you guys that know me, however, will know that I am not averse to muckiness, messiness, or “roughing it”. As a New Zealander too, camping comes as second nature to most of us. I packed my army boots, my powdered milk, my pocket knife and soap, and thought “whinging poms, what do they know about camping. I bet it’s fine”. How doubly crap to admit one is wrong in such circumstances. on the day I arried at Glastonbury, it had been raining for a week and a half. My army boots died a death so quick that I wondered if Neopolean or Hitler could have actually conquered Russia if they had thought of wearing gumboots.
Having battled the rain to put up my tent, I made my way to the oxfam tent. I waded to the table where gumboots were bing offered at merciful prices (some people are rumoured to make their fortune at Glastonbury selling the things at 20 pound a pair) and peeled my now useless John Bulls from my feet to force my sodden socks into the first pair of “Wellies” could lay my hands on. That accomplished, I have to say, the whole experience was far easier to enjoy. Umbrella up, and it was off to explore. Glastonbury is the size of a “small town” – to quote the locals. In New Zealand, it would be the size of a city. At 100,000 people, Glastonbury is bigger than all bar 5 of NZs urban areas, and it takes you about 40 minutes to walk from one side to the other. I decided to spend day one exploring the feild where my first gig was – Greenfeilds. it only took a few minutes to discover some seriously amazing construction art. I am a sucker for the visual arts at the best of times, but even so, I have to say that Glastonbury offered some installations that were worth going for on their own, and in my opinion, rivalled many of the headlining acts (ok, cynics, I admit, with Beyonce as a headliner, that isn’t saying a lot, but I have been to a lot of galleries in my time, and this stuff was truly impressive).  Hanging Pods - the Dark Crystal meets Mork from Orc. This next one is another of my favorites – an anti-consumerist installation right on the border of Greenfeilds. Greenfeilds, it turned out, after my day of exploringm was the place to find interesting people – the alternative lifestylers, neiche music lovers, solar powered cafes (a severe disadvantage in the weather we had), alternative fuel initiatives, fair trade stands, nice things to smoke, and above all else, the people who are prepared to do something about the fact that Capitalism will screw the planet if we let it. If you don’t want to hear such things and would rather buy useless junk in peace, look away now. This peice is a powerful one and one of the highlights of the festival as far as I am concerned.  Enough - Stop Shopping  Enough - Stop Shopping Day one ended soggily, with me hoping for sun and wondering what on earth had posessed me to only bring weetabix and powdered milk when I was meant to be there for 5 days. At least I got to sleep early, cos my spot was next to the Tadpole stage, where I was scheduled to play the next day, and which normally finished at 3am. As I drifted off to the sound of gently chatting neighbors, I was glad that I was there and had seen a few things already that I wouldnt have gotten to otherwise. day two, on its way soon.
Posted in Glastonbury
Tagged england, Glastonbury 2011, live shows, mud, music festivals, UK, united kingdom
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Johnny & the Sea – or how to make a 6 minute animation, even though it’s a mad idea.Out-takes, gossip, drama and mysterious accidents at sea, this post is all about the behind the scene stuff that goes on in making a video. So if you are a musician and have wondered how to go about getting a video made, this post is for you. If you are a filmmaker, you’ll enjoy part two which is where the people who actually did the hard work present the same project from their perspective. The crew: Director: Eloise Coveny & Jonathan Lamb, Music & Story: yours truly, Compositing/editing: Jonathan Lamb, Ghost Ship Concept Art: Jacob Grossman, Character Art: Tristan Alarcon, Figurehead animation/Whale/2D assets: Billie Carroll, Figurehead Pre-vis Model: Sean Winchester, Figurehead Modelling: Leon Woud, Sail Dynamics: Jason Wong, Smoke Dynamics: Richard Chang, Additional Animation: Nicholas Plaire, Tentacle Animation: Aksh Malik, Ship 3D Model/Figurehead Lighting/Render: Simon Heath, Additional Sky Photography by Aleksander Sakowski. The cast:
The first thing you may notice is that one of those lists is massively longer than the other, which only goes to show how many man hours go into a minute of animation. In fact, when the project began – with my naively asking an incredibly talented filmaker, Eloise Coveny, “How many weeks does it take to make a 6 minute animation?”, the next person on board, Jono Lamb, gave us our answer with a smile in his skype-beamed voice – it was a mad idea. Phase One – “OK, is there any way we can make this a bit shorter”? In truth, my demands were even madder than first thought. “Johnny & the Sea” was over 6 minutes 20 when I skyped with Eloise and Jono using a clunky old laptop that frozen Hamburg January. When told how much work would be needed, we cut fades, bars and beats, anything we could in the parts where hoped no one would notice Phase Two – the story This was the part that would have cost thousands in phone bills if we had been doing it in the 90s. Thank the lord for the net and it’s facilitatory role in projects that span numerous timezones. It was also the part where I got to see that even the most talented visual artists draw stickfigures like the rest of us when in a hurry. Those stick figures made up something called an animatic (so proud I now know some tech words in film now), which showed us all what happened when, in relation to the music and formed the backbone of the planning and animation. You’d be amazed how a buch of stick figures could cause such excitement. At this point in the process, we already had a rough idea of the characters and events – we had a ghost ship, grim factories, a sea adventure, a marriage and a mysterious possible death. We could already talk about weather that worked, when it should happen in relation to the music, and if those events properly represented the themes in the song, and so on. We dealt with the characters chronologically, starting with the ship. This is where the balancing act between facts, folklore, looking good on screen, and making life as painless for the animators as posible began. We wanted a dark, slightly steampunk look and feel to the video, without going too far in that direction (my music is really only on the fringes of steampunk in that it has lots of steam tech sounds). Here is some of the Ghost Ship concept art, by Jacob Grossman, with notes that show how designs are negotiated.
History, Herstory
The very talented Tristan Alarcon came up with the images above, and all the character designs for tha tmatter. The middle illustration became the obvious choice because of the real Johnny’s working class background and youth. In the more folkloric song, he refuses to conform to societal expectation, and this is made more relatable by his bad lot. In terms of story structure, his broke circumstance is the crucible that makes him act – answering the call of adventure.
Johnny’s not having a face is not some attempt at creepy horror stuff, rather, the process of character design was a sort of honing in process, starting with the framework of the story, moving into the form of Johnny. Greater detail came at each iteration and here were the ideas our character designer, Tristan, came up with:
Enter Johnny’s wife, Mary. As the young bride of an out of work seafarer, she needed to look somewhat broke too, so we chose the simpler, poorer looking woman rather than the circled one shown below:
Mary actually comes into her own in the video that follows – “A Woman Scorned” – but for this video she really only needed to appear at the end, when Johnny shatters her world by walking out into the ocean. The representation of this death was a tricky aspect of the video and proof that compromise has to happen at all stages. With me being the more bloodthirsty member of the team, there were cries of “But I need to see that he actually drowns!”. Instead of hitting people over the head with that fact though, the team managed to work through my pigheadedness on matters of death and gore, and introduce me to the power of the more open ending, where Johnny walks out into the sea, and then, when the shot moves back to him, he simply isn’t there. Phase Three – the hardest part This is the part where I actually got to be blissfully ignorant. With the overview, concept and character descicions worked out between us, the real work started. Eloise and Jono will enlighten us in the post that follows too, which is most wonderful of them, but for now, take a look back at the list of the crew. Its over 12 people, and with all of them working, full time, following the animatic, we only just managed to get the video out in the 3 months we had. Those guys are no slackers either, and as with so much in the music world, there were tenderhook moments regarding plans and release dates. Despite the huge scope of the project though, thy delivered as heroically as Johnny on his ship, and the adventure of seeing how poeple would enjoy it, started.
As a musician, it is a really special thing to work with visual artists whose ideas and ability produce a thing one can feel proud of. I am lucky enough to have worked with a great team – several great teams – and a lot of talented people who like sharing ideas as much as I do. That is really the key: communication, and finding people with passion and vision. One you find them, hope that you can work with them again! Eloise, who also brought us the video for “the Proximty of Death”, will be working on the next video from the upcoming album too – Mary’s song “A Woman Scorned”. Keep your eyes peeled for the story behing that too as it is going to be fantastic. Next post – Part Two, the teams take on the same process, written by Jonathan Lamb (co Director). Tune in for extra tech insights, further opinions pertaining to the madness of artists, and the HD version of the video itself!
Posted in New music, folklore, making a music video
Tagged adventure, animation, celtic folk music, folklore, galleon, ghost ship, herstory, history, howto, industrial revolution, insane projects, legend, music video, new zealand, pirate, sea shanty, video
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