Michel Gondry

The video module and my film studies elective have made me look at film and video in a completely new way. My interest in Michel Gondry has been established since seeing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - definitely one of my favorite films, which won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. The thing I love most about Michel Gondry is the fact that he uses no special effects, everything is done in camera.

Here are some quotes from the actors that explain a little better than me how and why Michel Gondry is so brilliant!

Jim Carey: "The completely artistic and whimsical, crazied visual side of Michel Gondry and his ability to experiment is incredible."
"When i got on the set and saw what Michel was doing with forced perspectives it was not only brilliant but so much fun for the actors."
"He has this desire to do things differently and it's brilliant to be original"

Kate Winslet "He really is a visual genius and i say that with utter admiration.




These are a few music videos that i found particularly inspiring.


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Gondry's most recent film Be Kind Rewind - also a brilliant film. Some of the shots and effects he creates are very clever.



During the remake of Rush Hour 2, Black recalls, "I was hanging off a jungle gym in a playground, pretending it was a tall building, and Michel put some toy cars on the ground beneath me. Shot from above, it looked ridiculous, but also totally effective and hilarious."

The result is a film in which the characters make movies the same way Gondry does — with improvisation, ingenuity, and a good deal of chaos. It's definitely not the Hollywood way. Think of it as two kinds of science: Hollywood is all computational physics — elaborate mechanics and digital effects — while Gondry is the home chemist, more superglue than supercomputer. His movies are a kitchen-sink brew of animation, claymation, stop-motion, in-camera tinkering, pedestrian jerry-rigging, and old-school smoke and mirrors.
(http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/16-01/ff_gondry)

I would very much like to develop my video editing skills and hopefully continue to use video within my work despite there not being a module on it next year.

Stefanie Schneider

Stefanie Schneider's images are very interesting and unique. She uses expired Polaroids to create washed out colours and distortion in her photographs.
I have not experimented with film this year at all, this is something I will definitely be doing next year.

Something interesting to look out for...

Stefanie Schneider: I am working right now on a feature film on Polaroid. In it I explore and document the dreams and fantasies of a group of people living in a trailer park community in the California desert. It will be finished in about five years and is developed online at www.twentyninepalms.ca". Every year we are having an exhibit to show the bits and pieces already shot. I hope I will be able to finish the film. Due to the closure of Polaroid this project might be in jeopardy. Because I'm working on outdated material I have a little bit more time. This is the first and only film ever made on Polaroid. Right now in Berlin I'm showing the very first exhibition of the project. It's still on till March 15th.

(text from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kimberly-brooks/artist-stefanie-schneider_b_89245.html)

Lars Tunbjork

Lars Tunbjork's series Home interests me as he seems to concentrate on colour and geometric shapes which i also tend to look at. This is especially evident in my images of Byker. I really like how Tunbjork documents these areas leaving them absent of any people it leaves a little to the imagination, you can almost imagine what the people that live here look like.

Made primarily in the suburbs of Stockholm (but also in Boras, Hedemora, Espevik, and other Swedish towns), Tunbjork's saturated color photographs immediately call to mind William Eggleston's images of suburban America. But upon a closer look, his style and method is far less 'democratic' than the American master. There is an homage to structure taking place within these pages that is decidedly quieter than the snapshot liveliness of Eggleston's world. For one thing, there are far fewer humans included within the frame, and while the attention to color and the quirkiness of suburbia is plentiful, likewise the absence of people adds to the slightly eerie stillness.
(http://www.photoeye.com/templates/ShowDetailsbyCat.cfm?Catalog=PK860)

In Home, from the late 1990s, the terser aesthetics refer to memories from Lars Tunbjörk’s own childhood. It is not a documentation of suburbia or middle-class taste, but a personal exploration of childhood surroundings and the buildings and areas we call home.

Commenting on his work, Tunbjörk says; “I want to be strictly documentary, but it’s all about me.”

(http://www.modernamuseet.se/v4/templates/template3.asp?lang=Eng&id=3529)

Nicholas Sinclair

AG The International Journal of Photographic Art and Practice

Winter 2007 Number 46

Trent Parke

I can't find any evidence to suggest that Trent Parke uses any digital postproduction, he shoots in film however it is easy to make this mistake. Alot of his images are quite dark and surreal especially from the series Minute to Midnight and Dream/Life.
His excellent use of light and shadow is so perfect and dramatic that it becomes quite unbelievable that there has been no editing.

Trent Parke

These are a mixutre of photos from Coming Soon and Welcome to Nowhere.

The colours are extremely vivid and dramatic. It amazes me that there is no postproduction here. Parke's use of light and shadow is impressive and something he considers in great detail.

This is a quote from Parke in an interview he did for The British Journal of Photography.

“I wanted to have this quietness, this stillness to the images. I’d have five spots in my day where I shoot from and I know that at say, 7 o’clock in the morning the light will be in a certain place and I can shoot there for ten minutes, then I move back to another spot where the light will be in a different place and I’ll shoot there. With this work, I’ll go back to a place again and again and again until something happens. I shoot a lot of pictures, up to 40 rolls a day. It costs me a fortune in film.”

(http://colinpantall2.blogspot.com/2008/01/trent-parke.html)

Andreas Gursky

I first came across Gursky's work in The British Journal of Photography and wanted to research into his work further. The manipulation of colour and form helps to create the perfect composition and this is what i love about Gursky's images. They remind me of the ski photographs i took in Bulgaria.

Andreas Gursky's photographic vision is extraordinarily precise. Teasing an eccentric geometry out of each of his subjects, Gursky reorders the world according to his own visual logic, accumulating myriad details to offer a sense of harmonic coherence. The artist's subject matter is late capitalist society and the systems of exchange which organize it. His pictures may be described as modern-day versions of classical history painting in that they reproduce the collective mythologies that fuel contemporary culture: travel and leisure (sporting events, clubs, airports, hotel interiors, art galleries), finance (stock exchanges, sites of commerce), material production (factories, production lines), and information (libraries, book pages, data). Yet despite the traditions he invokes both formally and conceptually, Gursky has no pretense to objectivity. He digitally manipulates his images—combining discrete views of the same subject, deleting extraneous details, enhancing colors—to create a kind of "assisted realism" as in Library (1999). For example the traders in Gursky's rendering of the Singapore stock exchange wear only red, yellow, or blue jackets.
(http://www.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/past_exhibitions/moving_pictures/highlights_7b.html)