This is

Another year, another competition.

This is my entry for Adam & Joe’s Video Wars competition. They do the Saturday morning radio show on BBC 6 Music and one of the more popular features on the show (out of a grand total of two) is Song Wars, where Adam and Joe create a song each based on a theme suggested by a listener. Other listeners then vote for the best song, and then Joe wins.

In a spirit of openness and inclusiveness, the boys launched the Video Wars competition to allow listeners to battle it out amongst themselves by creating a music video for one of two Song Wars songs. I chose Adam’s song, Jane’s Brain because it was shorter and it was the first one I came up with an idea for. The idea, like pretty much everyone else who entered with that song, was to interpret the lyrics literally.

This is my entry: Jane’s Brain

It’s only thirty seconds long, so it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Adam has a ton of stuff on youtube as well. You can watch that as well, if you like.

I won! The competition results were announced today and Bowling for Sandercoe came out on top. I now get a load of cool guitar stuff to distract me from making more films.

The film has also made it onto the front page of YouTube, generating over 400,000 views and a ton of comments at the time of writing. Fame and fortune can’t be far away now.

In other news, I got around to putting a page up for the film here and a page of fascinating and informative special features to enjoy. See? I haven’t forgotten about the little people now that I’m a minor internet celebrity.

I think this one needs a bit of explaining…

As part of my fledgling midlife crisis, I’m trying to teach myself to play the guitar. Justin Sandercoe is a very nice man with a website devoted to teaching people to play the guitar. It’s like we’re made for each other. Speaking as a complete guitar noob, I can say that his beginner lessons do actually seem to work. And he does it all for free, which is nice.

He posts tutorial videos on Youtube, which was how I first found out about him, and he recently put up a competition there to win a bunch of guitar stuff, with the prize going to the video demonstrating the most innovative use of a guitar.

This is my entry: Bowling for Sandercoe

The music is by my fine internet chum, Loïc Desjardins, who wrote, performed and mixed the score. That’s probably him whistling on it too. He managed to do this all in the space of about a week, despite me giving him nothing in the way of a useable brief and changing around the edit of the film while he was still working on it. Visit his site and tell him how cool he is.

There will be the usual smorgasbord of downloadable versions and behind-the-scenes photos sometime in the near future.

Waiting for the music for this exciting new film has given me time to take stock and cast a critical eye over the version that I’d edited together. It turns out this is a good thing, because I spotted a few problems with it and I’m now in the process of reshooting a couple of bits that didn’t work quite as well as I wanted.

It’s also given me time to throw together a deeply misleading trailer that makes the film look a lot more interesting than it will probably end up being. Kind of like any other trailer, really…

Quicktime trailer
DivX trailer

I’ll post a youtube version once the film is out. The reasons for that will become apparent.

As long as I’m updating things, why not put a new film up, eh?

This is a video for a short snippet of a 50 Foot Wave song, intended as an entry in a youtube video contest, but submitted about two months too late.

Watch Pneuma on Youtube!

Read all about it.

Two cops. One suspect. Fifteen seconds. Anything could happen, and probably will!

As long as it’s quick.

Tough Questions

Shame. Shame on me. This film was actually finished six months ago but, for one reason and another, I never got around to updating the site. So without further ado, here’s the old new old film: The Brick Gulch Chronicles.

Any similarity to a well-known popular web series is entirely intentional.

Good news, everybody! There’s a new film to download. This latest effort is quite possibly the most pointless one yet - two minutes of dialogue from the intro to an ’80s music video. It doesn’t get much more obscure than that.

The film page is here. Let’s rock.