TRANSMISSIVE EPISODES

Psychotransitionary datamoshing on parade, with MC John Cage (apologia)

2012-01-18T13:10:00.002Z

nb: If you are not trained in the interpretation of psychogeographic metering I recommend you start the video and let it play while reading the notes below. It is not meant to be entertaining.

Technical Notes

I AM SO SORRY

It is often said that a film or video should stand up on its own, unsupported by the post-rationalisations of its progenitor. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but anyway in this case the movie is a mistake and I feel I owe you an explanation.

COMPRESSING/DECOMPRESSING EMOTIONAL VALUES

Last week I set out to edit our short film of the Nexus Art Café float at the Manchester Day Parade 2011. The footage had been shot on Super 8 film and transferred, out-of-house, to digital, and I had watched it back in the latter format without any problems. However, when I then imported the same digital file into the Institute’s post-production engines for editing, I was confronted with the images you see in the above video. Something had gone wrong. I assumed it was me.

My first instinct was to delete the file. But since a lot of my work here at the Institute involves the recovery of lost films, I took pity on whatever future-me might have the job of reconstituting the canon of ‘unintentionally datamoshed parade movies of the early twenty-first century’. I saved him or her a job by saving the corrupted file. Anyway, when one ‘deletes’ a digital file it is not actually erased, but only marked for overwriting - and so, if data-energy is never truly destroyed but only restructured, might I not learn more from my mistakes by taking responsibility for restructuring the file's raw information myself?

I set about charting the binary ruins of the video, and it was not long before I began to notice a familiar pattern. Having seen the uncorrupted rushes of the parade, I recognised amongst the rearranged pixels a visual echo of the route we took. There, through the luminous video-fog, could be made out the streets and buildings and the dancers and even some of their moves. But, in addition, the newly fragmented pattern seemed to channel the conflicting feelings I felt on the day:

The pride I felt in representing with my Nexus comrades and celebrating my adopted city, shattered by self-consciousness and crowded-room loneliness into neat rectangular shards.
The particular dismal brand of existential emptiness I’ve only previously felt during extended periods of inactivity while playing left-back for the GM Hurricanes, punctuated by the giddy euphoria of eye contact with this old friend or that sworn enemy in the crowd.
The desire to dance and the fear of falling over, expressed through neurotic video jitter.

Somewhere between committing the images of that day to film, and translating it into a digitally manipulatable form, it seemed that the movie had become corrupted moment-for-moment by the emotions I felt on parade. How?

You will remember (and it doesn’t matter if you don’t) that for three months over the summer of 2010 we were asked to vacate the Institute while one of the major search engine companies mapped the dynamic emotionality of the premises for its latest online cartography resource: a (still) unnamed(*1) psychogeographic atlas of the known universe. It so happened that, as they worked in our absence, several expensive pieces of their psychocartographic machinery were irreparably blown due to incompatibility issues with the Institute’s wiring. The workmen dumped the remains in the Institute’s gardens before they left, and since that summer our IT manager(*2) has frequently raided this abandoned equipment for spares. I asked him: was it possible that some kind of ghost codec had hijacked the parade file and decompressed its latent emotionality? Some frustrated algorithm designed for compressing psychogeographically-metered video, now released from its silicon purgatory by the integration of its motherboard into the Institute’s hardware infrastructure?

He told me No, it was not possible, but that as emotion is a matter for the heart and meaning is created in the mind - and if it would make me feel better - I could certainly ‘read’ the video as some kind of pseudo-scientific videograph of the emotions I felt on parade. This did in fact make me feel a bit better. Then he pointed out that nobody else was going to see the corrupted video anyway, which made me feel worse again - yet more determined to salvage the thing.

PIANO HACK

The moving images were saved by mere fact of their re-contextualisation. By considering the broken video from a psycho-transitionary angle, it had meaning again, without even needing to be ‘restructured’. But it still wasn’t much fun to watch, and it needed some sound. It would be dishonest to create and sync up a psychogeographic soundmap after the matter, and besides I didn’t have the processing power to facilitate such an endeavour. Instead, I thought about a song.

The idea of chance discovery and the turning of unfavourable circumstances to one’s creative advantage called to mind John Cage’s invention of the hacked piano, or ‘prepared piano’ as it was known at the time. It is a story that he recounts on Indeterminacy, a recording of 90 one-minute tales ranging from composer-clique gossip to Zen parable. Cage was the most important composer of the twentieth century but he died without hearing the word ‘Pro Tools’. So I decided to rip/sample/steal this most pertinent anecdote of his and add a beat: time, rather than tone, being the fundamental index of music; and beat music being an instant fix for unwatchable movies.

In the original recording of the story, Cage solves a technical problem - how to create percussive music in a room where there is only a piano - by opening up the piano and attaching objects (a pie plate, a nail) to its strings. I decided to hack the narrative so that in the remake he solves the initial problem but creates a new one, accidentally inventing Dance Music (rather than music for a dance) and being unable to un-invent it. This unhappy ending, this punchline of undesired creative productivity, brought the anecdote closer to my own experience.

The audio facilities at the Institute are less than ideal. The track was put together using Audacity 1.2.6 on an iMac with a 600 MHz G3 processor and 256MB RAM for your listening pleasure, though it might have been easier to use tape and scissors. Bring on the interface city where a gesturally operated Protools XI will be embedded in the ambience of bus shelters! In addition to the Cage number, The John Cage Bounce (as the new song was christened) samples The Rose by Nine Circles and Martin Denny’s March of the Siamese Children. There is no original sound.

TRASH BIN

(*1) I suggested they brand it [search engine company name]Hurt. But by the time they read my email, they had apparently lost interest in building a personal rapport with the Institute’s staff and the series of cold but suggestive replies I received seemed to have been generated by a bot or similar
(*2) whom I detest

Undepth In Real People And Those Who Believe They’re Real

2012-01-09T16:49:00.004Z

An entry in the Glossary project

Francis Dove’s notorious 60,000 word tutorial on character development in film and television productions was serialised over eight issues of the screen industry journal SquareEyes against the will of its then editor, who handed in his resignation when the legal department insisted that a hidden clause in Dove’s contract compelled them to publish anything Dove submitted for print. With no-one else willing to take on the editorship under such conditions, the journal fell under the unofficial control of Dove himself, becoming a textual ghetto for his increasingly unpalatable ideas on film, life and the hybridization of the two.

Only the abstract survives:

Everybody knows that in fiction, if you want to create a deep character all you have to do is create a very consistent character who does something surprising at the end of the second act. In life, of course, we know that when someone does something unpredictable it us usually due to a partly formed or poorly defined personality, or that they are always doing unpredictable things to try and hide a self-perceived shallowness. To really say that someone is more or less deep is an over-neat metaphor for the human condition: we are, more accurately, all equally shallow (though some taller than others), but with different (and fluctuating) levels of turbulence, pressure and indigenous life. However, these are not our concerns here: if you want to create a deep character all you have to do is create a very consistent character who does something surprising at the end of the second act. How have the artisans of film and television worked, and may they continue to rework, this formula again and again and again to give the illusion of real actual inner life?

Somebody, at least, was reading: Volodymyr Nanneman made substantial changes to the character-generating function of his electronic filmmaking kit, apparently alarmed by the misanthropy he saw in Undepth In Real People And Those Who Believe They’re Real. Dove, however, insisted his paper was a gesture of deep affection towards his colleagues, rivals and humankind in general.

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Miscellaneous Fragmentary: Do You Understand?

2012-01-02T12:10:00.001Z

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0026772/

Destructural Sound

2011-12-19T10:28:00.001Z

An entry in the Glossary project

Perhaps inspired by the way a flying trapezist orients himself in the 3-dimensional space of the big top using the balancing mechanisms of his semi-circular canals, it was Nanneman’s belief that movie audiences could be guided through the hidden substructures of a movie by their ears, although in this case through the use of structural sound mapping* rather than endolymphatic stimulation. With every last component of a Redestructivish film chosen from the finite (if massive) selection listed in the Catalogue, it was possible to assign each component (be it a character, a costume, a feeling or whatever) a more or less noticeable sound identity quite aside from any specific functional sound it might be associated with on a narrative level. Thus, an audience member should be able to position himself in relation to a Redestructivish movie’s invisible moral or sartorial or emotional framework at any point during a screening, by triangulating the sound identities of each activated component. It was Nanneman’s claim that, much like the trapezist (or man on the street) whose sense of balance is essentially an automatic process (with conscious attention demanded by the tricky bits), the audience would rarely have to work at recognising these sonically-highlighted substructures, although Hanni suggested that was a slightly optimistic view of how the human mind works.

Nanneman coined the term ‘Destructural Sound’ to refer to a recurring technical fault within this system whereby sounds intended to be ‘structural’ would leak between the materials of a film’s architecture, warping or even demolishing that movie’s substructures even as it unfolded.

For the most part, when this inexplicable glitch occurred, sound identities would jump between components, even between those components that did not feature together in the same scenes; some would become completely detached from their intended components and float freely through a movie without becoming attached to other components; still other sound identities would spontaneously begin to mimic adjacent components creating meshes of unintended meaning, exposing oversimplified versions of unintended undercurrents to anyone who was listening carefully. Hanni reassured Nanneman that such audience members would be few and far between, and that to the casual viewer of these early test movies the Destructural Sound - if noticed at all - would probably be attributed to faulty speakers. Still, Nanneman could only hear these distortions as structural damage and, when a remedy was not forthcoming, he instead opted to recast the defect in a positive light.

Nanneman’s suggestion that a filmmaker using the Catalogue to create a Redestructivish movie might "encourage" the phenomenon of Destructural Sound merely by the (non)-act of not correcting it when it occurred might seem disingenuous. Rather than taking the blame, wasn’t Nanneman attempting to take credit, as conceiver and craftsman, for what was essentially a major fault in the Redestructivish system? Was not his capitalisation of the very term Destructural Sound the equivalent of a car manufacturer trademarking the phrase "break down"?

In fact, the period that Nanneman spent developing sounds and sound systems for the Catalogue was, for him, a deeply troubling time, in which he lost faith in himself as a facilitator and an engineer. He had designed himself into a corner, considered himself professionally stranded and, despite his stated goal of facilitating films that would reassure the nation’s unsettled populace, he perhaps saw in the phenomenon of Destructural Sound an apt and personally comforting structural/aesthetic analogy for his own condition - and by extension a valid artistic mechanism. An audience member trying too hard to navigate the hidden substructures of a Redestructivish movie could now become literally ‘lost’ in it.

Of course, Nanneman eventually worked his way through his sound issues, variously fixing or explaining away or forgetting about the Catalogue’s audio shortcomings, the plain passing of time allowing him to look back on that period as what he might characteristically have called a "forest/trees" situation. All the same, once in the clear Nanneman never returned to confront the "forest" of sound in which he had become so lost: the flaws and their euphemistic labels remained integral to the Redestructivish package. The turmoil that Destructural Sound would have made on the cinema sound system repairs industry had the Catalogue ever progressed beyond the test stage can only be imagined.

*(not to be confused with geographic sound mapping in the films of Francis Dove, whose ever diminishing budgets saw an increasing reliance on sets built from light, fog and upturned boxes and who therefore oriented audiences in his characters’ surroundings through the use of consistent and aggressive soundscaping)

See also: Foley Bleed

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Shapes

2011-12-12T18:19:00.001Z

An entry in the Glossary project

Nanneman’s Catalogue removed the trial of working with actors from the filmmaking process by creating the possibility of generating endless, digitally powered variations on just two pre-recorded performances (those of he and his second wife, Hanni). For a journeyman director like Francis Dove, forced to continue working with real actors and often with little say in the casting process, Nanneman’s reductive approach was understandably appealing:

"Could we postulate that, for those of us who cannot or will not utilise Nanneman's toolkit, there remain two possible approaches to putting an actor on the screen?" asked Dove, in his trade journal column. "The first is ‘acting for the screen’, in which the actor is the screen’s "goon", that is to say they act for and in total deference to the screen. The second, more tiresome method is ‘a screen for the actor’, in which the screen becomes a canvas over which the actor may freely ejaculate his or her deepest needs and instincts safe in the knowledge that none will be wasted, all will be caught and exhibited via the familiar media.

"In the instance of acting for the screen, only a contorted sense of human biophysics is directly referenced: the screen is a two dimensional light show rather than a stage play, and instructions or ‘shapes’ (fine-tuned and categorised through hundreds of hours of laboratory work) are imparted to the actor to carry out without question. (It is a given that such direction is most effective when conveyed with a firmness that borders on cruelty).

"By acknowledging the volition of the players, the screen for the actor method allows a complex but aesthetically arbitrary, exploration of idiocy (the fundamental subject matter of any human-oriented drama). Each actor becomes yet another inlet in the convoluted plumbing of an idea from inspiration to finished screen efflux.

"Thus before embarking on a new project, I always ask myself: can I afford to gamble on the idiocy of my cast? If they unexpectedly turn out perceptive actor-oriented performances of grace and dignity, will I have the resources to fix (break) them? If the answer is No, I get out my big book of shapes.

"Finally, it might be divulged here that actor and screen are both absolutely the goons of sound: this is one of the great secrets of cinema, and sound likes it that way."

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Voiceover

2011-12-05T17:19:00.004Z

An entry in the Glossary project

Ever-cautious about confusing issues of authorship and ownership, Nanneman did not provide a facility for voiceovers within his movie-making kit, claiming that "audiences are wont to recognise the perpetrator of a movie voiceover as the owner of the images and their subsidiary ideas and emotions regardless of the fact that the voice belongs to a fictional character with limited proprietary rights." However, it did not take long for his city council colleagues to find a 'cheat': a specific combination of one of the shyest character types placed into a busy set (where they would inevitably recede behind other visual matter) and pumped full of third-person dialogue. It appeared, when this cheat was being used, that a voiceover was being read by some unseen, all-seeing character when in fact this effect was achieved by specifically generating a self-effacing character with a high intuition level-setting. A cruder version of this cheat, known as a "feelings voiceover", involved partially-hidden characters screaming, grunting or verbalising emotions in sympathy with the surrounding images: Nanneman was not impressed, pointing out that there were plenty of pure feelings to choose from within the Catalogue without having to resort to ambiguous vocal effects.

Unusually, Nanneman was in agreement with Francis Dove concerning the rejection of voiceover, albeit for different reasons. In his (apparently ad lib) narration of an educational video on the history of film, an increasingly distressed-sounding Dove offers the theory that voiceover is first experienced as the third-person narration of one’s own development i.e. as a baby listening to one's parents; that this early exposure to voiceover is an over-clinical yet disorienting affair following the abstract aural experience of womb life; and that indeed, should we choose to go back that far, it all goes downhill after one's respective gametes are rocked by the soundwaves of pleasure or relief that accompany the procreative act. Three-fifths of the way through the same educational video, just after describing Harley Byrne’s notorious documentary Girls of Unfortunate Climes*, Dove declares the voiceover "dead", himself remaining silent for the rest of the programme apart from the occasional faint chewing sound.

Aside from his pathological distrust of certainty - which he identified as a recurrent yet undesirable characteristic of the movie voiceover - Dove had several recent examples of the voiceover-in-breakdown to inspire this moratorium. In Harris Metcalf's Clockwork Film it quickly becomes clear from the way they move that the supporting characters, as the result of a technical fault, can hear the hero's voiceover, though not make out the words he's saying - only cadence and timbre. Their actions become an involuntary dance to an obscure song whose near synchronization with the unfolding events (which the voiceover of course describes) occurs to them as a déjà vu. Metcalf attempted to improve on his "mechanically-generated" filmmaking technique with Clockwork II, but this time the hero - who is retrospectively narrating the images in which he appears - runs out of things to say mid-way through. The on-screen action slows to a halt and, to fill the time, our screen-hero himself starts to dance, accompanied intermittently by the rather amateurish beat-boxing attempts of his narrator alter-ego. After a while, the screen-hero runs out of moves and sits down for the rest of the movie, while the other characters develop a subplot.

Witness also Nola Luna IV's Takashi From End To End, the unauthorised feature-length biopic of her eponymous ex-boyfriend, in which Luna herself provides the "narration": the off-screen parroting of Takashi's every spoken line with sounds like "muh" and "mur" pronounced in what is undoubtedly neither her own natural voice nor a strictly accurate impersonation of Takashi himself.

*(in which Byrne's authoritative narration, rewriting events in his own voice, was committed to tape in apparent denial of the trauma of having been imprisoned and tortured by the feral teens he was documenting; a digital stutter on surviving copies seems, however, to express through technical fault that which Byrne was unwilling or unable to acknowledge in the text.)

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Screams

2011-11-08T11:40:00.001Z

An entry in the Glossary project

As a former trapezist who had swung and dangled voicelessly over the abyss night after night and year after year to the gasps and cheers of audiences, Nanneman really had no idea what a scream was for, or even whether anyone actually did scream outside of the movies. Understanding, however, that the "woman's scream" was an essential part of the filmmaker's toolbox, he set Hanni the task of compiling a library of "one or two dozen" recorded screams in a variety of styles and meanings to be used by the Catalogue's computer-generated characters in appropriate situations.

It seems that Hanni already had a source in mind for the recordings: Serafina Kustra, a "scream musician" of sorts, a folk hero in a binary age whose live performances people would travel from far away to witness. Kustra had previously achieved mild fame fronting a band whose entire repertoire had consisted of songs built around repetition of the band's name and lyrics extolling the group's merits in very general terms: perhaps her messianic appeal as a solo artist can be attributed to the simplification and emotional inversion of this approach. Hanni, idolizing Kustra for reasons she never publicly articulated, offered the vocalist a not inconsiderable sum from the Catalogue project's unofficial city council fund, rationalising the gesture to Nanneman by suggesting he himself could provide the male screams at a cut rate. It is unclear why Nanneman failed to nip this plan in the bud given the expense and his desire to distance himself from the scream-cataloguing process, but perhaps he sensed that the issue was important to Hanni.

(Nanneman was not the only filmmaker of the time to be squeamish about vociferation. Jobbing director Francis Dove, who would generally work with scripts imposed on him by producers, kept a list of alternative non-linguistic utterances with which to replace a scripted scream on set. Dove acknowledged that a written scream is usually structurally important, with its removal potentially undermining a moment of climax or catharsis. However, he discovered that the straight replacement of such a scream with (for example) a laugh, a sigh, a raspberry or snort, would enable him to maintain the structure of the written scene while destabilizing its underlying assumptions. If, having filmed such a substitution, he found that a scene no longer worked, it was not uncommon for Dove to edit the vociferation and even the actress out of the entire scene, leaving murderers stabbing at thin air, rabid beasts howling at dumb walls and in one case the spontaneous materialisation of a pink, wet newborn on the back seat of a moving taxi.)

In the event, Serafina Kustra turned down the job of providing the Catalogue's screams, refuting in no uncertain terms the idea that her vocal style had anything to do with screaming, and taking deep offence at the suggestion that a selection of her most intimate and heartfelt vocal performances might be defined, categorized and donated to computer-generated movie characters. Respecting this position, Hanni instead recorded and labelled 144 wildly varying screams of her own, and finally cajoled Nanneman into providing one single scream for men, although it was recommended in the small print that the latter never be used.

See also: Whoops; Yells

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Indirection

2011-10-10T18:05:00.001+01:00

An entry in the Glossary project

The deliberate withholding of audio or visual information, usually by obscuring it with other matter (sound, set) or out of frame or hearing range, but with its properties hinted at by that information which remains. For example, the physical goings-on in a foggy sauna may only be suggested by the screams of unseen participants, the facial expressions of a foregrounded attendant or the peculiar movement of the steam.

Nanneman’s guide to the appropriate use of indirection is here paraphrased in lieu of his original text:

What you know that you can’t see makes what you can see hilarious; what you don’t know that you can’t see doesn’t bother you. What you suspect is being hidden from you makes you resentful towards a movie, while the showing of that which needn’t have been shown provokes disdain. The revelation of that which was previously hidden brings catharsis, the hiding of that which was previously visible brings disorientation. Summed up: while its excessive or insensitive use may compromise the intended effect on a movie’s audience, indirection can be a great boon to the filmmaker on a budget.

Dissolutionary Cinematograph

2011-10-03T17:40:00.007+01:00

An entry in the Glossary project

A somewhat teleological contraption utilising a highly reactive film stock concocted by Nanneman while he waited to for the Council to redeploy him following the crossing patrol debacle. The frames of a film are lined up face to face in a dissolutionary cinematograph, rather than end to end. The first thing the audience sees projected is a complete picture: the image simplifies as the frames disintegrate sequentially on contact with air, often telling a story in reverse. Movement, whatever the narrative trajectory, becomes synonymous with decay. In the cleverest compositions, visual elements from the final frames show through the preceding frames, playing different parts throughout as they are juxtaposed with shorter-lived visual matter, before themselves being fully revealed and dissolving.

Synchronising any meaningful sound with such films proved impossible; however, Nanneman mentions in the Catalogue how he encouraged Hanni (with whom he was not yet romantically involved) to incorporate the ambient sounds of the kitchen and the street beyond into her appreciation of each unique screening, and paraphrases her response that this approach to soundtrack "made a crushing sort of sense". They would be married before the year was out. He did not pursue the project after he was reassigned to the Town Hall; he did not save any of his dissolving films for posterity; it has never been comprehensively proven whether or not Nanneman’s invention was ‘intentional’ or the fluke result of a period of intensive pottering.

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Plug-in

2011-09-26T15:00:00.000+01:00

An entry in the Glossary project

The concept of the plug-in in relation to the work of Nanneman and his contemporaries can be a confusing one, as various filmmakers of that era used the term to refer to different, albeit interrelated, concepts.

Nanneman used the term in asides to refer to third-party components that were incompatible with those provided within his Catalogue, i.e. any that weren’t included in it. Whether his use of the term indicated that he hoped that, some day, developments might allow for third-party components to be plugged-in to his own, or whether it intentionally evoked the negative connotations associated with electrical current since the (then still recent) scares in order to discourage such piggybacking, is not known. The implication in his contemporaries’ references to "Nanneman’s cross-eyed sockets" suggests they believed the former: that the idealist Nanneman wanted his components to be compatible with those built by others, but that however open his source, no-one else could make head or tail of it. (see also Operating System)

Harris Metcalf was, like Nanneman, interested in using the latest technological innovations to maintain a standard quality across his work. For him, a plug-in was a neural augmentation device that could be literally "plugged-in" to an actor’s nervous system to influence his or her technique. Safety issues aside, the main drawback to the Metcalfian plug-in was that the technology was not yet sufficiently advanced that it could actually improve the actor’s performance, but only degrade it to a given setting or crudely accentuate pre-existing attributes. Metcalf told a court:

"It is only by using my reductive plug-in method that you can ensure unity across the performance of your entire cast. In a sense, it is a lowest common denominator approach, as it ensures that no-one performs any better than your worst actor. In certain circumstances you may prefer to use plug-ins to highlight the performance of a key cast member, so that the entire cast is levelled out with a basic performance-quality plug-in, but the hero also runs a charisma augmentation plug-in parallel to this. Or, if a certain subsection of your cast are representing characters with non-British accents, they might use a common application to ensure their accents are no worse or better than each other, whist running the same core acting-method plug-in as those playing the British. It is a question of performance resolution: it is no good one actor being clear and another all grainy."

The notoriously fickle Nola Luna IV, whose technique during her brief digital period was to video each actor separately and then digitally composite the performances in post-production, used the term to refer to the removal and replacement of entire screen elements long after a film had been finished and had its first release: "By the time it comes to re-release a movie, the main actor may have lost his or her public appeal, through an unfortunate child abuse case or the disfigurement that comes with a bio-chemical assault, for example. When your actors weren’t actually interacting with each other or any of the digital props, sets or noises, how easy now to simply unplug the unwelcome actor from the original edit and clip on today’s hot thing. The same can be done with props and locations, for example a stick of carrot or memory can replace a cigarette, or a lovely garden replace an urban site that has since tactlessly associated itself with some terrorist atrocity or architectural hiccup."

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Nola Luna IV

2011-09-23T14:49:00.005+01:00

An entry in the Glossary project

A filmmaker and contemporary of Nanneman, Nola Luna IV’s style was openly trashy - although she preferred to term her films ‘entertainments’ or ‘invigorations’: the opening line of her only (unpublished) novel reads "They both loved industry, and hated abstract films about the aesthetics of industry." She was not always that way, however: her graduation film was a dense, disorienting piece titled A Running Race For Those Who Hate Music.

Luna was the great-great-grandaughter of the real-life historical figure of the same name, who was represented in the UNIVERSAL EAR episode A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear (portrayed by Briony O'Callaghan in the 2010 premake, below). Of Romanian descent, Luna IV lived her whole life in Manchester but only dated the Japanese.

Selected filmography: Furniture Of The Parasite, I Yearn For Yen (a.k.a. This Bastard Is Greedy), Lunatic Jeweller, This Isn’t Goodbye It’s Goodbyeeeee, Wh-what Are The Rules?, Witness To A Prang

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Eyeline

2011-09-19T17:20:00.001+01:00

An entry in the Glossary project

Questioned as to why it was so difficult to create the correct eyelines when lining up Catalogue-generated characters in dialogue scenes - from shot to shot and even within the same frame - Nanneman responded that of the 65, 536 character templates that his system had generated, it so happened that the majority of them turned out to be of a type that finds it difficult to maintain eye contact. Careful study of the sample scenes has indeed shown that in a large proportion of apparently mismatched eyelines, the characters portrayed are in fact very accurately looking at fluff on the other’s shoulder, the toes of their own boots, or a door handle in the background. Eyeline discrepancies between characters and objects were far rarer and can mainly be attributed to shortsighted or confused characters.

cf. The films of Harris Metcalf, who liberated the representation of eyes from the realm of physical realism, used eyeline angle as an expressionist device and whose characters’ unseeing eyes only ever met by accident.

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Intern's Palette, The

2011-09-12T18:52:00.005+01:00

An entry in the Glossary project

Having hunted, indexed and categorized his (revised) target of 16, 384 colours, Nanneman set the work experience boy the task of creating full back-stories for each hue. Given the vigour with which the unnamed teen took to his work, he must either have believed Nanneman’s lie-by-omission that the project was a genuine City Council task passed on by colleagues tired just by the scale of the project, or been enthusiastic and quite stupid as many of the happier of people are, or, as is most likely, some of Nanneman’s quixotic fervour rubbed off on him. Whatever way around, it was some feat for him to complete, as he did, biographies several pages long for each of precisely 256 colours in the two weeks before he was obliged to return to school. There are indications that Nanneman was all the same disappointed at the tiny dent made in the full spectrum of redestructivish colours and, given that his superiors refused him custody of any further work experience students, progress on further colour back-stories was sporadic. The work experience boy’s accomplishment stands therefore as the largest fully-documented colour range in the Catalogue, and it is from the informal name that this collection became known by that the phrase "the intern’s palette" passed into popular use to indicate a naïve and incomplete glimpse of a utopian new system within the breakaway department of an immoveable institution.

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Character Type

2011-09-05T18:35:00.004+01:00

An entry in the Glossary project

Nanneman was pressured, during a washroom encounter with his line manager, to keep to the latter's list of "16 character types (17 for an art-house film)" when designing the character-generating feature of his filmmaking kit. So as not to jeopardise the continued asssembly of the Catalogue - which had already been vetoed from above and which his line manager, having stumbled upon Nanneman's misuse of city council lab space by mistake, was by turns tolerating and interfering with - Nanneman ostensibly integrated his superior's list, but reduced each of the 16 broad 'types' to its key trait and generated 65,536 new character types by exploiting every possible combination of those qualities. (He excluded the arty 17th type for obvious reasons). The psychological complexity of these new redestructivish archetypes meant that Nanneman was able to create distinct imprints of every one of them using just two actors: himself and his second wife*. Every time one of these intricately designed algorithms was given a new name, wardrobe, haircut and surroundings he or she became a unique character (excepting the improbable eventuality of another filmmaker happening to choose the same type, name and look and putting this ‘new’ character into the same situation).

It is not known which 16 traits Nanneman divined from his line manager's original types, but we do know that he excluded any 'opposites' which might have cancelled each other out. Instead, Nanneman assumed that certain traits - e.g. faith - are an a priori human characteristic so included only their opposite - e.g. incredulity - amongst the 16 potential attributes: if a character lacked any one of the 16 'nurtured' traits he was assumed to have its opposite through nature. Whilst Nanneman acknowledged that such opposites don't always exist in pure dichotomy but on a sliding scale, he considered such nuances to be uncommon and irrelevant to the cinematic representation of human nature, certainly in a time when audiences needed reassurance, not speculation. In the circus and in the civil service, it had tended to be Nanneman's experience that people were one thing or another, and any apparent gradation in between usually boiled down to a case of deception or illness. Hanni, charged with finding "8 good rules" with which to shape the Nannemans' performanced blueprints of the thousands of archetypes Volodymyr had created, briefly looked into the old social networking websites, and discovered that everything Nanneman had suggested about human nature was more or less true. However, in response to the publication of Francis Dove's misanthropic Undepth In Real People And Those Who Believe They’re Real, Nanneman relented, creating a set of digital faders for the adjustment of the archetypes' character trait level-settings, allowing access to the middle ground between opposing traits. The knobs on the interface were all the same deliberately designed "stubborn" to discourage their use.

On discovering the zealous manner in which his underling had misinterpreted his original instructions, Nanneman’s line manager is said to have remarked that, the Nannemans having between them taken the time to create 65,536 characters, perhaps the unremittingly earnest Volodymyr should, from then on, himself be referred to as "Character Zero".

*(we know from his tattoos that she was called Hanni)

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Sounds

2011-08-29T14:00:00.003+01:00

An entry in the Glossary project

On learning that all complex sounds have as their basic unit or building block the 'sine wave', Nanneman was enticed by a city council colleague into purchasing a "bundle" of sine waves with which he intended to construct the Catalogue's sound library. Although a conscientious canteen assistant intervened in the sale, Nanneman was evidently wounded by the attempted fraud as, rather than building his sounds bottom-up, he now stated his intention to carve them from pre-existing noise. (He played down this change in approach, commenting that it "[made] sense given that we’re at the noisy end" - though whether he was referring to the "noisy end" of creation at which point any naturally occurring pure tones had surely already been merged into complex sounds or to his Town Hall lab at the comparably noisy John Dalton Street end of Manchester's Albert Square is not clear).

In fact, there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that, in the event, Nanneman assembled his various sounds any which way he could: bottom-up, top-down, cobbled together, found, stolen, hummed etc. His contemporaries, however, could only speculate about the process, which was hidden from them by the temporary suspension of an interlaced membrane of tarpaulin around Nanneman’s lab, covering walls, ceiling, windows and doors and through which only the initiated might find their way before becoming consumed with panic. The purpose of the tarpaulin was and remains a case for speculation: was it hung, for example, to soundproof the lab, to replicate the circus tents of Nanneman's youth for his own comfort, or to replicate same in order to create the familiar sense of aural 'interiority' he required for his sounds? There was even talk at the time of his using the tarpaulin as a sheath to contain such emissions as might occur as a by-product of his attempts to identify and harness the "smell waves" which, so his colleagues had it, Nanneman was far more familiar with than the sonic variety and which he might therefore be attempting to synaesthesiatize into more manageable sounds using such digital alchemy as was at his service. The chief result of the tarpaulin, whether intentional or not, was then to have kept the precise materials used to generate the 131,072 discrete audio files* that comprised the Catalogue's sound bank a secret.

Each sound had the qualities of being both familiar, in having been sculpted from pre-existing noise, and disorienting for having been chosen and categorised according to Nanneman's own lonely agenda. Furthermore, as he neglected to provide compatible tools (EQ, reverb) with which to modulate these sounds according to the contexts in which they appeared, any given sound would at each occurrence sound identical to its previous use. Thus the single noise created, for example, to represent a mobile phone hitting the floor, would sound nothing like that particular event might sound in reality, yet 'rang true' through some obscure chain of association (the audience would 'get it' without quite knowing why): and should several mobile phones hit several floors in several acoustic spaces over the course of the same movie they would all sound exactly the same. Any effort to place the sound in its environment or to differentiate each event from its predecessor would have to take place in the audience's own minds. An over-used sound, lacking environmental nuance, would effectively fade with use in the passive moviegoer's mind in the same way that we gradually blank out supraliminal awareness of any repetitive alert that contains no new information. Nanneman had inadvertently hit on a way of degenerating a digital signal in a manner comparable to the degradation in quality of successive generations of tape-recording or photocopying, albeit in this case at the receiver-end. Sound engineers were reported to be "astonished and dismayed" and Nanneman himself was never satisfied with his accomplishments in the field of sound. "If only," he wrote in one of many unfiled reports to his seniors, "there hadn’t been something fishy about that sine wave deal".

*(including silences, but not ambience, dialogue or music)

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Mossley, As In A Dream

2011-08-27T15:10:00.005+01:00

Home movie from a ramble around the hills of Mossley, April 2010, shot on expired AGFA Moviechrome, slowed down but otherwise un-edited.

I really wanted to experiment with sound design on my home movies but the Institute's steam-powered editing chambers aren't currently up to anything beyond sticking a sound file and a video file together and waiting to see if the old Macintosh engine gives out. So instead I shamelessly lifted Delia Derbyshire & Barry Bermange's The Dreams: Land piece from 1964, which seems to create a few interesting juxtapositions and, you know, keeps their work alive.

If anyone would care to add their own soundtrack I will happily provide the video file and reward them with an over-familiar pat on the shoulder upon completion of the work.

Colour Hunt

2011-08-22T18:00:00.006+01:00

An entry in the Glossary project
As a young trapezist, not only was Nanneman's training restricted to the technical matters of physical fitness, aerialist technique and rope drill, but even his leisure time was policed against his pursuing any interest in the frills of his trade: music, costume, colour. Naturally, being forbidden from involving himself in what his superiors termed the "realm of the frivolous" only made those glimpses he caught of it more exotic, more unsettling - and more dangerous: music came to hold secret, incendiary meanings, and the unpredictable modulation of shirt colour in the audience, from performance to performance and even moment to moment, was fully capable of disorienting him as he swung, should he ever have let his concentration lapse (that he never dropped might be considered a fluke of disposition).

Years later, then, when he began to compile his standardized filmmaking kit, he had at least two good reasons for creating a reductive colour system - specifically, categorized palettes of up to 256 colours with the facility to utilise only one such set per individual movie: firstly, that the complexity of the colour aspect of his filmmaking system should not exceed his own limited understanding of that domain; and secondly, that it was his goal to facilitate the making of "reassuring" films, and only by control, by unity of colour, could he preclude the unbalancing effect he assumed that audiences had continued to suffer across what he considered to be the largely undisciplined history of the colour movie.

Perhaps it is this perceived autonomy of colour, then, its wildness-in-need-of-taming, that inspired Nanneman to term his city-wide colour sampling expeditions "Colour Hunts". Certainly there is evidence that these spontaneous adventures tended to be embarked upon during periods of professional stress and frustration - that the sheer thrill of unearthing and capturing a feral hue was accompanied by a sense of regained control proportionate to the borderline chromatophobia of Nanneman's aerialist youth. A comment scribbled on the back of the only known photograph (now lost) of such a hunt even suggests that the catharsis and primal satisfaction ("flush!") that came with the successful capture of a desired hue was entirely justified even if that hue was not in motion: whilst capturing a moving colour might seem the greater sport, the hunter himself is always in motion (in an ocular sense at the very least) and, in an uncontrolled environment, the movement of light provides an irregular and unpredictable ("fiendish") dynamic camouflage for a static ("cowering") hue. No colour comes cheap.

Although he did take others on the hunts (including Hanni, and the occasional jobseeker who wandered into the lab having taken the wrong direction on their way to the Town Hall's temporary JSA bureau), it was Nanneman who bagged the great majority of the 16,384 colours that eventually formed the full redestructivish palette. It is not known whether his decision to name and provide full back-stories for each shade was motivated by a desire to honour his fallen quarry or was rooted in aesthetic concerns. Neither is it known whether his decision to outsource most of this written work to others is an example of his personal predilection (through conditioning?) for practical work or an unwillingness to stare any longer than was absolutely necessary into the soul of any individual colour.

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The revolution isn't finished - it's at home watching TV

2011-08-16T17:11:00.008+01:00

The revolution in Manchester lasted barely three days, but it gripped the nation’s undernourished imagination and laid the groundwork for a new utopia founded on tolerance, economic equality and cha-cha-cha. I was there - or nearby - and this is my testimony.

Tuesday 9^th August, 2011

Manchester erupts in a frenzy of erotic wanting and violent taking as the disaffected, the dispossessed and the dizzy plunder city centre shops of plasma TVs, training shoes and ‘high-end’ gadgets. Listening in on the wireless, I experience a sense of liberation at the thought of the ordinary, ordered folk of Britain turning on their heels and telling the powers that be: "you say it’s like that, but we say it’s like this." I am particularly inspired by a live report on looting at the Argos, where enterprising rioters have instinctively split into four teams and are working together to obtain the objects of their desire, one team filling in the little order forms, a second processing them, a third team fetching the loot from the storeroom and the final team operating the collections desk. Of course, no money changes hands, but several of the youths involved find the work so enjoyable that they naively leave their CVs behind upon leaving. Before the night is out, they will be arrested, tried and jailed.

Switching off the radio to instead mentally map the chaos by the direction of passing sirens, my mind starts to wander: those first few successful revolutionaries will already be home by now, wiring up their plasma TVs. But is there ever anything on? And besides, aren’t these front room monoliths in fact the inherently exploitative cornerstones of the very capitalist pseudo-democracy we’re up in arms against, pumping out constant reminders of what else we don’t have and why the system to perhaps, eventually, get it all, works? Destroying our environment and our hard work as they break down at a time pre-allotted according to the standard practice of planned obsolescence? And the warrantee isn’t even valid when you stole the telly in the first place.

These thoughts prey on my mind, and it is while I am cooking my tea that I decide to become a revolutionary leader. Seeking encouragement, I text my mum (neither of us has a Blackberry):

This is me: Viva la revolución!

This is my mum: O.K. xx

Wednesday 10^th August, 2011

All night I dream of shooting men in top hats, garrotting bankers with the strings of their own squash rackets and laughing freely but seriously in forest idylls with lank-haired revolutionettes. When one’s very dreams are shaped by the presumption and disinformation of the media one should not sleep in. I rise early and head into town to confront and inspire my people, but most of the other revolutionaries rise late, no doubt tired by a night of rioting and phone-in Bingo on the wide-screen.

An early blow is dealt to the revolution when David Cameron appears on TV to calm the nation and disparage the rioters. Several revolutionaries, seeing our glorious P.M. in high definition for the first time, immediately repent and break back into the very shops they’d previously looted in order to return their plasma TVs and ‘high-end’ gadgets. They are quickly arrested, tried and jailed.

I identify a small band of revolutionaries in Piccadilly Gardens and make myself known to them. I have deliberately not shaved so as to be taken seriously. Robbing the tools of our own oppression, I tell them, has to stop. By stealing such status symbols, we highlight the arbitrary retail value of the desired items and so reinforce our own economic subservience. One of the revolutionaries starts crying and his sister takes him home. I am pleased my words have had an impact but disconcerted when I see a ‘fed’ who has been listening in gives me a nod of approval.

I break for lunch, gazing around the shopping centre at capitalism’s last stand as the red burrito juice of revolt drips down my chin and onto my overcoat.

Despite the electric atmosphere of a town where everyone’s waiting for the punchline, the insurgency fails to materialise. The word on the jealously guarded screens of our communication devices is that it’s "too rainy" and that many of the revolutionaries would prefer to stay in with their new plasma TVs. There are some skirmishes around 10pm when they pop out to loot some snacks but all in all it is a quiet day for the revolution.

Like many of those who returned empty-handed from the previous night’s riots, I start to wonder if maybe I waited too long to move and somebody else got all the best ideology.

Thursday 11^th August, 2011

I rise late having stayed up trying to subvert all manifestations of the mass media as found in my digs. I short-circuited my radio in the sink (partly by accident) but had less success with my record collection. You can’t detourn Cugat - he’s just too good.

The last of the sirens fades into the distance. The morning is spent drawing up plans for the new world order, although to be honest my heart is no longer in it. Most ideas are either self-defeating or too long-term to really get excited about. I settle on the following four-step revolution:

1. Wait for new model of plasma TV to come out. Mobilise comrades by exploiting their desires.

2. Hold pre-riot meeting (new tie?). "This time we won’t steal plasma TVs, we’ll steal MediaCityUK."

3. Non-violent, non-burny revolution.

4. Some kind of lengthy mass indoctrination process for revs and counter-revs alike. Elimination of mutual suspicion, one-upmanship, fetishisation of luxury goods, bourgeois post-industrial concepts of "quality", and television gameshows; and the propagation of mutual respect and empathy, selflessness, slowing down a bit, art as leisure, leisure as art, robot slaves and Cugat.

As I now have no means of following the aftermath of the first, failed revolution, I pop over to the paper shop to buy an MEN. The shopkeeper is in good spirits, boasting about the deterrent power of our "vigilant community": I tell him that "one man’s vigilant community is another man’s vigilante community" but he doesn’t seem to appreciate the nuance and I pick up a TVTimes to change the subject.

The MEN predictably tows the counter-rev line, mocking the revolutionaries for not fully understanding the nature of their own misery and condemning them for rioting in a confusing and ungentlemanly fashion. I mention this to a neighbour as she wheels in her recycling bins, and she sagely replies, "let he who has never lashed out irrationally due to a lifelong build-up of undefined frustration cast the first stone." She is immediately arrested, tried and jailed for incitement to riot.

(In other news, privileged NatWest customers are invited to buy a £12 ticket to a promotional screening of the latest Anne Hathaway flick at Heaton Park. It is not clear where the big screen came from. Bring a picnic. Bring your friends.)

6.92 Billion Portraits: an ongoing side-project

2011-08-10T13:17:00.002+01:00

Having been dispatched to Valencia, Bucharest and Poitiers last Autumn to represent L'Institute Zoom at screenings of our short film It's Nick's Birthday, I decided that rather than clog the Institute's archive with further shambolically improvised Super-8 travelogues I would instead set myself the task of exhaustively documenting the people and places I encounted in a series of 10-second audio-visual portraits.

"Circumstances" (wine, time, cowardice) prevailed and I was only able to take three portraits in Valencia, three in Bucharest and none at all in Poitiers. Thus, to preserve my own dignity I have adjusted the terms of the project so that this handful of films should now be considered the first batch in my ongoing task of creating a portrait for every living person on Earth - which, day to day fluctuations in world population figures notwithstanding, should eventually account for around 6.92 billion of us.

Below are the first six, the inaugural portrait subject remaining anonymous as an exercise in legend-making. The remaining 6,199,999,994 will appear here in reverse-chronological order as they are produced. Whilst the basic tenets of the portrait-taking process will remain consistent, I sincerely hope my technical skills show some improvement as the millions and billions pass.

Please contact me to arrange your sitting ASAP.

SUBJECT: Anon
LOCATION: Valencia
DATE: 20.11.2010

SUBJECT: C.L.
LOCATION: Valencia
DATE: 20.11.2010

SUBJECT: C.M.
LOCATION: Valencia
DATE: 20.11.2010

SUBJECT: S.M.
LOCATION: Bucharest
DATE: 26.11.2010

SUBJECT: A.S.
LOCATION: Bucharest
DATE: 26.11.2010

SUBJECT: A.B.
LOCATION: Bucharest
DATE: 26.11.2010

Current

2011-08-08T11:33:00.011+01:00

An entry in the Glossary project

The flow of a movie; the synergy of its components as experienced in time; the essence of a movie’s movieness. The nagging meta-question, beyond language, theme or character, to be resolved or at least defused. That which each aspect of the movie strives to generate. A term chosen by Nanneman to repudiate the primacy of narrative, which even in a narrative movie should be working for the movie rather than vice versa. (Other commentators referring to other films may refer to ‘story’ or ‘plot’ when really they mean - or would be doing better to address - ‘current’.)

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New Deal For Audiences, A

2011-08-01T16:25:00.007+01:00

An entry in the Glossary project

Mentioned in the Catalogue only in passing, Francis Dove’s A New Deal For Audiences manifesto was written in response to his ongoing inability to break out of TV and into cinema: every time he was offered a shot at fully expressing his vision with a feature-length, the dismal commercial and critical response would force him back to another decade or more of frustration and barely-noticed small screen subversion.

Dove printed thousands of copies of his manifesto (rather than the millions or billions it would surely take to make the necessary adjustments to the world’s movie audience) and took the fight to the front line, intending to picket Friday night screenings of contemporary box office hits but retiring mid-way through the trailers on his first night, quoted as complaining that "the problem with audiences is, they’re just people."

"A New Deal For Audiences

Hello. You can call me Frank. Even my mother doesn’t call me Frank. But my wife does. I am the one who makes the films. You are the one who watches them. I thought we might come to an agreement:

1. Just bear with me on this.

2. You are the centre of the universe.

3. That doesn’t make you special. It doesn’t free you of responsibility.

4. You won’t have to interact. You won’t even have to stand anywhere that you’ll feel self-conscious. But you will have to think now and then, to the extent of questioning what you know and unlearning how you watch.

5. Don’t be threatened by the unusual. I’m not doing it to hurt you or make you feel stupid, though I can’t speak for my colleagues.

6. Include the environmental factors of your screening situation (sounds, objects, light, seating, smell and people) as fully part of the film you’re watching. Accept that I put them all there on purpose.

7. The best filmmaker makes a film that requires no prior knowledge of its own or any other terms.

8. The best audience accepts a movie on that movie’s terms, whether it conforms to the previous statement or not, learning those terms if necessary whilst watching them and afterwards on the bus.

9. Some of my colleagues are responsible for making academic films. Their collective filmographies represent a conversation between academics. Others stick to a basic grammar that by itself stultifies the content and furthermore, in extension of this laziness, tend to pile the grammar clumsily on top of itself until it comes crashing down on you. They still get their point across. A third sect play it vernacular. Some of these are the academics in disguise, some are still lazier grammarians and the worthwhile ones you’ll have to search energetically to find. And even then it’s a risk if you’re on a date.

10. My duty remains, however personal, cerebral or experimental a film should be, to make you at the very least go "Yeah!" and ideally to make you want to hug yourself and those around you. The nature of the hug may vary from film to film and you will have to police the situation yourself.

11. About toilet breaks: I can’t stop you. Why not try taking the characters in with you?

12. Story is essential to the human animal, but the idea of what story is has been monopolised by our oppressors. Don’t feel you have to look for "A Story" - just be ready to absorb "some story". If you need your hits delivered at pre-defined intervals, get yourself a drugs problem.

13. About realism: the visible world is all around you. The cinema is about illuminating the invisible. You trust and worship the realists because, in photographing the natural world, approximating its everyday occurrences and hiding the artifice, they appear to be honest and serious. It takes no effort to go along with because it looks just like the outside. It is a greater and more rewarding leap of faith to give oneself up to ostentatious artificiality. Artificialists use the language of lies to search for coded truths. Your nightmares are the only important issue. Come on - you’re sophisticated enough now to at least play along with us. And laugh the earnest cavemen out of the cinema.

14. If you’re scared of looking silly in front of your friends, then you’re scared of life - and that may be because you have the wrong friends. Take it from someone who’s scared of life.

15. Really, if you’re not going to try, you may as well have a nap. It’s cheaper for you and saves me having to see that look on your face.

16. This isn’t an argument I’m trying to win. It is an understanding I am trying to reach.

Thanks for reading.

Yours faithfully,

Francis Dove. (Frank)."

This was just the first of several such manifestos of greater or lesser, mostly lesser, effect.

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Dove, Francis

2011-07-25T14:58:00.008+01:00

An entry in the Glossary project

When, on the advice of his soon-to-be collaborator Harley Byrne, the TV director Francis Dove had his wife permanently committed to an amnesiacs’ hospice, it was Dove who was left with the memories. In his attempts to monumentalise them, he chipped, sanded and warped these memories into the clunky, quite explicitly falsified stage sets of his own personal history; watched helplessly as the scenes that he replayed again and again in his mind became smooth-edged mythologies, lore without nuance.

Dove’s work began to take on the same clunky, mechanical nature: in over-defining the respective elements of his screen works, he was being sarcastic about certainty. This approach found an appropriate outlet in his cinematic serialisation of Byrne’s music-hunting memoirs, UNIVERSAL EAR. As with the compression and digital archiving of music, Dove sought to reduce, simplify and vacuum-pack the various physical and sonic aspects that the EAR scripts detailed. Yet these elements, although coldly configured in mutual isolation, were selected for their tactile, flawed, organic nature. It is this disparity between the cleanness of their juxtaposition and the imperfection of their individual states that Dove used to humanise the scientific, to devalue the authority of human logic and to dismiss - or ridicule - any definitive reading of the text.

Dove stated that his simplified caricatures of Byrne’s real-life experiences were the most complete picture that it was ethical to provide, however far that may have wandered from any ideal of naturalism: that the real movie did not occur on the screen, but in the eyes, ears and brains of the audience, where it would crystallize as a new memory before crumbling away into the recesses of the mind.

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Mnemonic Control Effect

2011-07-18T10:05:00.004+01:00

An entry in the Glossary project

Nanneman was not the first to hypothesize that films 'help' us by contextualising our experiences: that they interact with our memories, coaxing them into bolder relief that we might explore and understand them more fully. By standardising the basic materials that the state's filmmakers had to work with, however, Nanneman’s Catalogue created for the first time the possibility of an aesthetic and moral continuity across these filmmakers' output, providing a more consistent context in which the audience might analyse their inner worlds. This 'control' effect - the provision of a scientific standard of comparison - would not only have been useful during the viewing of any given redestructivish movie, but also later on when that movie itself became a memory. The human mind would be able to categorize these remembered movies more easily due to their consistency of appearance: had Nanneman's characters, colours and sounds been adopted as industry standard, the problem of wondering whether a memory was your own or stolen from a film you’d seen would have been phased out as memories of pre-Catalogue movies faded away.

Nanneman referred to this process in the Catalogue and in arguments as Mnemonic Control Effect.

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Temporary Musical Lexicon no.1

2011-07-04T12:55:00.003+01:00

An entry in the Glossary project

Over the course of one working day, Nanneman showed a movie scene to eight city council colleagues (Respondents A-H) in turn, asking each of them what meaning they thought the accompanying musical soundtrack was intended to convey. The eight answered respectively:

A. Apprehension
B. The secret presence of a third character (possibly an antagonist) within the scene
C. Resentment
D. Hunger
E. That one or both of the (visible) characters has an unspoken crush on the other
F. Some kind of alert regarding the main character’s bank account
G. Boredom
H. Sleepiness

The scene and its score had been identical for each viewer.

This was the first of a series of experiments designed by Nanneman to prove to his colleagues that the film score is, in its most familiar form, obscene: undisciplined, insular, a casual insult from the composer to the other technical departments of the conventional film set.

As music has no meaning outside of itself - is merely abstract sound selected or generated and organised according to taste - Nanneman postulated that to translate it into something meaningful for the purposes of a film score would require the invention and imposition of an internally consistent musical lexicon. Thus, for test purposes he invented a language of 1024 musical sounds with arbitrarily chosen but specific meanings, which could be combined polyphonically to either express that which isn’t otherwise manifest in a given scene or to reinforce that which is. He re-scored the sample scene from this new palette, and played it again to his test group. This time, the eight guinea pigs respectively understood the music as intended to evoke the following:

A. Terror
B. The secret presence of a third character (definitely an antagonist) within the scene
C. Resignation
D. Nausea
E. Sexual chemistry
F. The main character is ruined and will find out shortly in humiliating circumstances
G. Resentment
H. Sleepiness

For Nanneman, although the results lacked the consistency he sought, the fact that the respondents’ reactions had moved in broadly the same direction was encouraging. He speculated that for the consistency of his musical lexicon to take full effect, the test group would have to sit through several examples of its use so as to be able to infer meanings through context and repetition, as we do with any language: to hear a single theme in isolation means nothing by itself. Unfortunately, it appears that middle-management had by now grown wise to Nanneman’s misuse of his colleagues’ time, as several of the latter declared themselves unavailable for the next round of tests. In order to sustain the legitimacy of the experiment, he wrote up detailed character profiles of the absentees and asked Hanni to step in for them and answer as she believed they would. This time, the test scene was, for each respondent, preceded by an hour of preliminary scenes, each scored from Nanneman’s 1024-sound musical idiolect in order to familiarise them with its terms. Unfortunately, it is not known how many or which of the original eight guinea pigs Hanni stood in for. The meanings inferred were as follows:

A. Perplexity
B. The secret presence of a third character (possibly a gangster, and even if not that would be a good idea) within the scene
C. Perplexity
D. Perplexity
E. Erotic love
F. Perplexity
G. Sleepiness
H. Perplexity

These results represented a stunning vindication for Nanneman, and if the meaning his score was intended to convey could not yet be universally understood, he considered a degree of ambiguity to be forgivable - otherwise one might as well print the meaning of a score across the screen in plain letters. Discarding Temporary Musical Lexicon no.1, Nanneman now began work on a variety of automated composing systems for creating music of integrity, anchored scientifically to a movie’s fundamental qualities, internally consistent, and no longer obsessed with telling its own senseless story.

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Subtext

2011-06-27T14:10:00.005+01:00

An entry in the Glossary project

A supplementary screenplay explaining those unspoken or unacted but more or less important plot devices not made manifest in a movie’s shooting script. Nanneman made mandatory the provision of the subtext as a digital file available for display as sub- (dialogue) and super- (action) titles during the exhibition of any film made with the Catalogu e’s components.

Not to be confused with the Implicit.

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Implicit, The

2011-06-27T14:02:00.006+01:00

An entry in the Glossary project

In its redestructivish sense, the Implicit is the inverse of Visual Matter or, to put it another way, the essence that fills the holes in the mise-en-scene.

Nanneman stated that although the Implicit was intangible and existed only as an unambiguous natural force that would come into being between any two or more of his components once activated, there would still be a small fee applicable for its use. Hanni took to referring to this fee as a "subtext tax", although Nanneman discouraged her use of this term as it just confused things. The Implicit was an aesthetic side-effect which, whilst unavoidable, could hardly be considered vital to any movie, while the subtext was an essential structural tool which Nanneman suggested had been, since the birth of cinema, "screenwriting’s dark little secret".

For Francis Dove, Nanneman's idea of the Implicit was too weighted and specific. The gaps between screen presences were "less, even, than essence". While visual matter could be used to contextualise (not define) the nothingness that it framed, that was not the same as making this nothingness something itself. From this perspective, Dove's use of ostentatiously artificial sets, props and performances as a moving architecture of absence can be considered an acknowledgement of the futility of artistic pursuit against the dumb mystery of the universe. His contemporaries alternately labelled Dove’s work as "clunkyist" or "nothingist" depending on the part of the screen to which they were referring: he might more accurately have been described as a nothingist wrapped up in a clunkyist (as a filmmaker) or vice versa (in his day-to-day life).

Dove’s creative partner Harley Byrne, who had enormous respect for Nanneman as a thinker (but not as a man), countered that "just because the unknowable isn’t defined, doesn’t mean we’re unsure what it is," though it is possible that Dove wasn’t listening.

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Miscellaneous Fragmentary: The Great British Gangster

2011-06-25T11:55:00.002+01:00

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065469/

Contract

2011-06-20T11:32:00.008+01:00

An entry in the Glossary project

Nanneman issued Hanni and himself "contracts" for the creation of each redestructivish component: these contracts might otherwise be described as briefs, designs or scripts, but Nanneman’s preferred term (apparently arrived at without much in the way of forethought) indicates his ongoing need for discipline, and quite possibly an unconscious desire to add a sense of legitimacy to the pursuance of a project which had, after lengthy discussions both formal and otherwise, been vetoed by his superiors at the city council, and which Hanni and he were pressing ahead with anyway using city resources and apparently in a spirit of blinkered ignorance rather than insurrectionary defiance.

These contracts ran into the tens and possibly hundreds of thousands, ranging from single-word exhortations to individual sentences, statements and questions, scientific diagrams, abstract doodles, 3D structures made from paper clips and/or plasticine and often posed as questions, excerpts, cuttings, recorded conversations (with or without Hanni), knowing looks, mutual assumptions, the physical manipulation of Hanni’s and/or his own body, but - strangely - no collage, and each in the tone of absolute seriousness that characterized at least the public face of the Nannemans’ marriage.

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Establishing shot

2011-06-13T14:18:00.008+01:00

An entry in the Glossary project

Not to be confused with their more integrative Backgrounds, the Nannemans’ establishing shots comprised a portfolio of static, un-modifiable exterior shots designed to be slotted into an edit in order to broadcast the fact of the subsequent scene’s location to the audience.

Whilst creating a test film from an early version of the Catalogue, Hanni apparently became confused over the concept of the establishing shot and ended up using the same one for every location. She was, some have speculated, so used to seeing the raw materials of the interior scenes laying around her husband’s lab in the Town Hall that, when it came to signposting the site of each interior with an exterior shot, she was unable to imagine any more suitable frontage than that of the city council headquarters itself – whether the interior that followed was that of a house or school or sports arena. More generous commentators have claimed that Hanni was in fact trying to make a profound phenomenological point: we never stray from the base of our own perception so place is just a state of mind.

The test film was unpopular among Nanneman’s colleagues, although whether this was an academic response to Hanni’s misuse of form or a visceral reaction to the unsettling viewing experience is unclear. Such was the provocative nature of Hanni’s film that several unnamed civil servants banded together one evening after drinks to create a sarcastic reply-film on a finance undersecretary’s mobile phone. Hanni’s contentious method was inverted so that, in the reply-film, a different establishing shot was videoed for each of several consecutive scenes manifestly set in the same interior location as each other. Thus a recurring argument in a fictitious if rather familiar office setting was variously introduced by images of a burger bar, a toll booth, a dog kennel, a hunting cabin, a river bed, a mountain range, deep space etc. The move backfired as the finished video, in its inadvertently emotive juxtaposition of the absurdity of modern man’s Sisyphean struggle and the diverse enormity of a universe in which we may be considered little more than mites with carpentry skills, may have genuinely countered Hanni’s solipsistic statement (if that’s what it was) but offered no less depressing an alternative. Whether Hanni ever saw this video riposte is not known, as the undersecretary subsequently took a six month sabbatical and, upon his return, was seen to have replaced his mobile phone.

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Subject D

2011-06-09T11:17:00.007+01:00

An entry in the Glossary project

At the age of eleven, Nanneman spent one lunatic summer creating looped studies of himself engaged in mundane human behaviours (brushing his teeth, feeding the elephants), using an SVHS camera he had found apparently abandoned near a campsite outside Widnes. Each study was 24 minutes long but designed to loop indefinitely. The videos could play faster or slower so that, for example, a video of him brushing his teeth for 24 minutes real time could be slowed down for detailed observation, or sped up to correctly represent the average duration of the unvideoed process as timed twice daily over a period of 28 days: it could not, however, be trimmed or electronically spliced due to a lack of cables. His contemporaries (he later recalled) described Nanneman’s studies as "fascinating" and "very good", although it should be noted that they did not have regular access to other screen media, and that viewing the videos through the eyepiece of the camera must have accentuated an already vivid and exciting sense of illicitness.

The demands of such a pursuit were clearly in conflict with those of Nanneman’s rigorous training regime and, what with the project’s effect on the discipline of the circus’s younger members, it was only a matter of time before the camera was confiscated by the company’s deputy ringmaster. Nanneman promptly stole it back and continued his studies within the secure confines of a locked bathroom trailer until the camera suffered irreparable water damage, becoming useful thereafter only as an un-working anatomical model, which Nanneman speculatively reconfigured into a series of new recording devices which were, of course, equally un-working. Nanneman would later refer to his childhood studies regularly, particularly a sub-category of the work which involved extensive documentation of the behaviour and response patterns of a dog, by way of contextualising the results of his laboratory work at the city council. The identity of the dog remains unknown, Nanneman having only ever referred to him as ‘Subject D’.

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Rhythm

2011-06-08T10:30:00.018+01:00

An entry in the Glossary project

The distribution of a film’s audio-visual properties in time. Nanneman, frustrated by the primitive and unquestioned rhythmic values that narrative filmmakers had always adopted for their works, provided 8 new rhythmic templates according to which his components could be arranged. While the idea was still being developed, Nanneman held an impromptu demonstration evening in the basement of Manchester’s shuttered Central Library, in which he re-cut several well-known local films to approximate the effects of his new rhythms. The occasion was not well attended, but at least two fist-fights broke out and the event marked a turning point in Nanneman’s attitude towards developing his ideas in an open forum.

Here are Nanneman’s rhythmic templates explained:

1. Rhythm of dialogue. Composed of sixty-four sub-grids in which the dialogue - with the other film elements anchored to it - could be arranged. These were mainly based on familiar Mancunian cadences but also included settings inspired by the wider world of rhythm, such as ‘tango’ and ‘bossa nova’.
2. Rhythm of feeling. Responding to the emotional pulses.
3. Rhythm of moral. Early on in the development of the Catalogue, Nanneman posited the existence of ‘moral rhythms’: complex editing patterns which, when repeated over the duration of a movie, would induce in the minds of the audience the correct moral perspective on the content therein. Nicknaming such rhythms "breathing patterns for the eyes," Nanneman hit the lab with the intention of identifying and replicating sixteen distinct moral beats, soon downscaled his efforts to the pursuit of four such patterns, and eventually finished work on just one moral (the obvious one).
4. Rhythm of light. Responding to the movement of light around the 2-dimensional screen space.
5. Rhythm of luminance. A simple algorithm which calculates the total lumen value of each frame and adjusts the duration of that frame accordingly, with brighter images passing more quickly and longer looking times for darkness.
6. Rhythm of character. Inspired by the temporal expressionists. Applying the level-settings of a chosen character’s traits to the respective time value of every other element of the film to create a complex and disorienting dance of plot, props, gesture etc. Thus the character’s relationship to each element of his screen world is illustrated through duration and repetition rather than figural proximity across the 2-dimensional space.
7. Rhythm of audience. Farming the audience’s own rhythms and processing them in real time to create a dynamically responsive structure for the pre-selected content of a film. Unsure whether this method would provide the ultimate synergetic cinema experience, or create unwatchably puerile bilge, or possibly just result in unmanageable levels of feedback, Nanneman deliberately made the instructions ambiguous and there is no recorded example its successful utilisation.

8. Freestyle. The ability to go off-grid.

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Backgrounds

2011-06-07T12:00:00.013+01:00

An entry in the Glossary project

As an idealistic young civil servant, years before the inception of the Catalogue project, Nanneman’s efforts to understand the city of Manchester were frequently outrun by his desire to influence and improve it. Nanneman’s idea for an upturned and sunken city, a metropolis in which the windows of the buildings would lay on the earth’s surface and simultaneously reflect and take energy from the sun, and into the 'back' of which - towards the earth’s core - we would hurry in our harnessed boots in times of climatic or environmental distress, and the right-angled window-roofs of which would form, as we lay upright to sleep, a nocturnal study area for hairdressers and statisticians, may well have been inspired by the bizarre perspectives he experienced during al fresco trapeze sessions. Critics have scoffed that Nanneman would have considered himself, in such a world, a kind of perpendicular god. But such a poke at Nanneman’s architectural earnestness overlooks the importance of his early cityscape sketches to our understanding of Nanneman the man, and to his later work on the Catalogue. Working along the corridor from Manchester’s cliquish city planning department, Nanneman must have known even as he drew that his basement city would never be built: that it would exist only, but not merely, as an imaginary city, perhaps to be wandered by those trapped meanwhile in the penthouses of his own memory and who were deprived, like the sideways city, of physical manifestation. However, the city’s flatness, its submersion, the topsy-turvy topography itself drawn from the dizzying isolation of thousands of hours of trapeze work, would later be transformed into the flat worlds of his redestructivish cinema vision - in the demotion of the third dimension, in the essential separateness of parallel planes, in the partial re-angling of obsolete artefacts to serve new purposes, and in the overwhelming redestructivish tendency to turn in on itself: Nanneman’s city was, at heart, an impulse to release a fleet of steel- and glass-churning ploughs across the cityscapes that he’d always found emotionally inhospitable, and neaten up whatever remained.

It was perhaps in deference to his early urbanist ambitions that Nanneman did not later transform this - his most ambitious - cityscape blueprint into a useable redestructivish Background, instead appending digital fascias to Hanni’s comprehensive videography of Manchester’s outer surfaces, the nature of which can only now be appreciated through the surviving labels - City With Swellings, Tropical Metropolis, Anonymous City, Wooden Town, and so on. Or perhaps the superficiality of these urban visions, in contrast to the complex, warped optimism of his early sketches, reflected Nanneman’s realisation that it would take a force greater than the will of a provincial civil servant to realign the character of a city whose flesh, no matter how smartly swathed in the attire of a communication age it played no small part in creating, remained stubbornly ingrained with the soot of industrial-economic subservience.

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It's Nick's Birthday in Aubagne

2011-03-21T15:13:00.005Z

Feet bleeding, the dancing celluloid heroes of our Super-8 musical It's Nick's Birthday limp on to another festival screening this week, at Aubagne near Marseille:

It's Nick's Birthday @ 11th International Film Festival of Aubagne

WHERE: Theatre Comedia, 7 Bd Jean Jaurès, 13400

WHEN: Thursday 24th March, 2011, 19.45

COST: enquire at venue

Do you have any idea how this might have happened? and 47 other questions, with no answers, in alphabetical order

2011-03-10T14:45:00.009Z

It is something of a cliché, or better said “truism”, to state that a film or a piece of art that one has created does not attempt to provide any answers (“I wouldn’t be so bold”) but only to ask questions.

As a filmmaker and pre-maker, it’s an excuse that I unashamedly subscribe to. I’m dim but curious, so I think I’ve got things the right way around.

In the name of transparency, and of self-justification, I thought it might be time to share a few of the key questions that emerge in the work produced here at the Institute, plainly and unobfuscated by the convolutes of aesthetics or narrative.

Here, in strict semi-alphabetical order, are 48 of the most pressing questions that our work raises:

Am I in your way?
Are you some sort of idiot?
Couldn’t we just try?
Does this bother you?
Do I have to get up?
Do you expect me to touch that?
Do you have any idea how this might have happened?
Do you think I’m some sort of idiot?
How do you work this thing?
How far will you go to stop me?
How much is too much?
How the hell am I going to get out of this?
How the hell did I wind up in this?
Is doing that going to hurt more or less than not doing that?
Is that supposed to be funny?
Is this ever going to end?
Is this your dog?
Shouldn’t we give the whole thing up?
Shouldn’t we stick together?
What are the chances of getting out of this alive?
What are the chances of retaining my dignity?
What are you doing with that thing?
What are you trying to say?
What do you think that behaviour’s going to achieve?
What’s it worth to me?
What’s on your mind?
What’s that look for?
What’s the big idea?
What’s the worst that could happen?
What the hell were you thinking?
What time’s the last train?
Where am I?
Where did you go?
Where is it?
Who am I?
Who are you?
Who do you think you’re talking to?
Who’s going to clear this up?
Who’s that man?
Why are you hitting me?
Why did you hide it?
Why is he crying?
Why is she screaming?
Why me?
Why oh why oh why?
Won’t you leave me alone?
Would you like to dance?
Would you recommend [subject matter of film] to your friends?

Please feel free to add questions via the comments box if you believe there are any major themes I’ve overlooked. Once we’ve got all the key questions here in one place we can stop making art and hand it all over to the scientists to deal with.

Miscellaneous Fragmentary: Beyond the Screen

2011-02-28T12:32:00.002Z

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051744/

Miscellaneous Fragmentary: My Favourite Song

2011-01-31T10:30:00.000Z

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051174/

Let's just try and take 2011 one stupid day at a time

2010-12-31T16:06:00.003Z

This time last year, I predicted that this time this year (i.e. now) everyone would be compiling predictions as to what will happen next year (2011) - and I was right.

Building on the success of last year's prediction, I have compiled a list of top tips for the filmmaking trends and tropes of '11. Here they are in no particular order, except for alphabetical:

Butter

Nobody knows what the real fall-out is going to be from the demise of the Film Council. Filmmakers are facing unsure times now that it's unclear who we should butter up to and why we wasted so much time buttering up to the previous administration. The industry therefore has a surplus of emotional 'butter' which will surely be spread over the subject matter of its output, although it’s too soon to say whether this will manifest itself metaphorically or otherwise.

Furthermore, there will be a portion of butter (metaphorical) for each and every one of our darling online supporters as we try to milk them, piecemeal, for the budget of our next picture. This is called crowd-funding and, considering the feeding of cow offal to cows resulted in BSE, the Institute advises against it in its purest form. Instead, try the alphabetically convenient:

Crowd-producing

Similar to crowd-funding, but more hands on, 'crowd-producing' involves directly engaging an online fanbase with the ongoing production process. A list of tasks (chiefly: sums, phone calls and ego-management) considered too mundane for the director but too important for the crew will be made available online, with fans encouraged to pick a 'chore' and deal with it efficiently parallel to sorting out their own complex problems (messy divorce, looming audit into dodgy former business). Like crowd-funding, crowd-producers will be expected to stump up cash for their slice of the glory, but in this case it does not have to be their own.

The Institute is also looking into ways of making 'crowd-mothering' - a network of reassurance and (where feasible) hugs for insecure filmmakers - into a workable initiative.

Increased importance of L'Institute Zoom on global film scene

Here's Armend, the Institute's marketing man: "We do a variety of fine work here at the Institute, and we also make films. By ceaselessly going on about what we're doing and thinking about doing, and bandying our name around in connection with upcoming awards until it's a virtual inevitability that we'll win them, our marketing strategy is intended to catapult us right past 'annoying' and into the lucrative realm of 'familiar background noise'."

Words are cheap in the internet age - there are over 1,000 of them in this important and prophetic article alone!

Notworking

What is your USP? Last time I went to a networking event I left after thirty minutes and threw up next door, then came back and told everyone I met that I'd just sicked and that I was developing a web series about electronic brain augmentation. People were genuinely interested in the sick.

Already a prevalent trend, Notworking is to Networking what Cloud Gazing is to Cloud Computing. The idea is that while you sit down by yourself and have a cup of tea, the ether/the others can sort themselves out and inspire/inform/employ you at their will. Notworking is at its best unpredictable, and at its worst pleasantly predictable. The important thing is to allocate a precise time when you are Notworking, otherwise you are just not working, which can be guilt-intensive.

Nuisance Campaigns

Combining the sophisticated punch-in-the-face tactics of internet rollover ads with the time-proven effectiveness of the nagging child, Nuisance marketing will be the phenomenon you can't escape in 2011. GPS and online social networking will enable pushy campaign teams to track the movement and desires of the potential audiences. When the marketing team becomes aware of a congregation of the appropriate demographic (in pubs, shopping centres, at funerals), they will spring into 'life' to create thematically linked 'situations', which the target audience must negotiate in order to 'survive' or 'escape', depending on the theme of the film. (This idea was originally conceived by Guy Debord, but he didn't word it very well and nobody thought they could make any money out of it). Cloned SIM cards and hoax profile pages will be used to stir up and externalise the tension hinted at in the semi-public relationships of online social network users, creating a genuinely malevolent 'nuisance'. The Nuisance campaign will continue until each would-be audience member gives in and commits to seeing the film.

In the case of smaller arthouse films, a one-to-one stalking-type approach will be utilised. The underpaid but otherwise jobless quirky-faced star of the movie will travel from city to city with the director and his girlfriend, and spend a week at a time personally harassing (in character) the handful of local pseuds whose purposely obscure online Likes suggest they might actually 'get' the film and forgive its dismal production values. When the locals have created a vehement enough online campaign to justify a screening, the director will arrange for the film to be shown on the city's Big Screen, or just underneath it on his MacBook.

3D-Nausea

I think I mentioned this on Twitter once but I haven't worked out all the technicalities yet and just want to reassert it was my idea before someone steals it. Basically, "3D-N" is metaphysical 3D for existential arthouse-type films. The characters and locations appear all around you in suffocating detail, but it feels like something's missing.

Hats

This year we'll be seeing a lot of movie villains in hats.

Aidan Smith awarded "Best Music" for It's Nick's Birthday score

2010-12-09T11:03:00.014Z

We are most proud to announce that the Institute's staff composer Aidan Smith has been awarded "Best Music" for his It's Nick's Birthday score at La Cabina Medium-Length Film Festival, Valencia.

Whilst the Institute's staff were too thinly spread over other award ceremonies, diplomatic functions etc., to attend the prize-giving in Valencia, it has been reported that on being told the news privately Mr Smith responded with modesty, gratitude, and bouts of nervous mock-boasting followed by fierce self-degradation and an unsureness about where to look.

Mr Smith's solo work can be appreciated here, with his nightwear/pop outfit Pyjama Party represented here.

(Here follows a music video the Institute made with Mr Smith some years back).

It's Nick's Birthday screenings in Valencia, Bucharest, Poitiers

2010-11-17T11:19:00.004Z

Our hermitcore musical It's Nick's Birthday goes on a mini-European tour next week, stopping off at Valencia, Bucharest and Poitiers:

It's Nick's Birthday @ La Cabina International Festival of Medium-length Films
WHERE: MuVIM, c/ Quevado 10, 46001 Valencia
WHEN: Saturday, 20th November 2010 , 20.00 & Saturday, 27th November 17.00
COST: €2

It’s Nick’s Birthday @ Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival
WHERE: one of two venues (program to be updated)
WHEN: Friday, 26th November 2010, 16.00
COST: enquire at venue

It’s Nick’s Birthday @ 8th Festival O.F.N.I.
WHERE: Cinéma Le Dietrich
WHEN: Saturday, 27th November 2010, 23.15
COST: €6

Institute's company anthem receives prime-time television coverage

2010-11-11T15:27:00.009Z

As followers of this blog will know, each morning the employees of L'Institute Zoom gather to sing our company anthem - Zoom by Fat Larry's Band. Although the song fell out of the charts some years ago, it seems the opening up of our working processes for public scrutiny at the Institute's temporary Universal Ear Studios complex over the summer has drawn attention back to the R&B classic, as it was recently selected for performance by one of ITV's talented X-Factor participants.

Elitists among the Institute's staff have discouraged me from sharing the video, but X-Factor is a family show with high production values which, whilst I consider it a little racy for viewing by my own offspring, is nothing to sneer at. And just look at Simon Cowell's displeased face! Priceless. My only reservation is the alteration of the lyrics from "sunrise shine in a midnight sky" to "sunrise shine in a morning sky", apparently just so that it makes sense.

Thanks to Nexus Steph for the tip-off.

Miscellaneous Fragmentary: Hello Flash Gordon!

2010-10-09T15:57:00.002+01:00

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032475/

Overkill

2010-09-14T14:06:00.008+01:00

Yesterday afternoon I dropped into Nexus Art Cafe, scene of the Institute's now-defunct Universal Ear Studios complex, where Nexus Al suggested that I cast an eye over our former workspace as he'll be clearing it out at the weekend and doesn't want to chuck anything he shouldn't. Everything seemed to be in order, but I couldn't help noticing the rather excessive approach that had been taken to the removal of our Snuggle Office door sign, as designed by UNIVERSAL EAR 1st AD Rowan. I suppose the end of any snuggle is a wrench.

Post-brew, I had a chance street encounter with Girls Of Unfortunate Climes art director Rebecca Manley, whom I'd not seen since she departed the Nexus studio for the bright lights of London, leaving our versatile crew with bits, bobs, and instructions for a full pop-up set & costume design. Manley is looking forward to her forthcoming solo exhibition in Germany, where she is to create a physical representation of the entire internet. The artist and designer, who habitually wears a crinkle-cut Pringle around town, hinted that the work may involve a mirrorball, and I daresay there will be plenty of coloured paper involved too - as we parted ways, however, I realised she had neglected to mention whether her version of the internet would be functional or not.

Miscellaneous Fragmentary: Ceylon Swimmers

2010-08-16T12:35:00.004+01:00

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0129389/

Do you have a FACE? Are you interested in THINGS?

2010-08-11T12:42:00.004+01:00

With the closing of our Universal Ear Studios complex, the Institute has today announced an end to its brief policy of openness.

We have, however, taken a bold step into the future by establishing an official Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/LInstitute-Zoom/116786905039573

Please join it for updates and strictly non-interactive interaction.

Brain spill, reports and news will continue to be published on this very blog, with unofficial leaks leaking from http://twitter.com/Nanneman.

GOUCLog 6

2010-07-30T17:55:00.003+01:00

GOUCLog 5

2010-07-28T19:49:00.002+01:00

GOUCLog 4

2010-07-27T18:13:00.002+01:00

GOUCLog 3

2010-07-25T23:23:00.002+01:00

Facebook group...

Understanding "Girls"

2010-07-18T16:29:00.003+01:00

When the postal service took delivery of Harley Byrne’s one and only documentary for them, shot in Manchester in the Spring of 2012 and edited from his hospital bed over the subsequent weeks, they quickly decided to lose it. Far from the portrait of a robust but alienated local population that they had sought, the commissioning body perceived Byrne’s vision of the girl gangs it represented as nihilistic and self-reliant; doomed, yes, but preferring a fate concocted by the arbitrary forces of nature to security under the patronage of state or corporate powers. Where was the letters-to-mum narrative device Byrne had agreed to structure the film around? Where, indeed, were the teenage girls Byrne had originally identified as his subjects – and who were these twenty-something imposters in pig-tails and moonboots?

As a consequence of none of this having happened yet, these questions have not yet been asked. The flawed clues dredged back from the future for us at L’Institute Zoom’s Future Films department being fragmentary at best, our own questions today may go unanswered. Much of what is written here is wrong. The prehabilitation of Girls Of Unfortunate Climes (a.k.a. Icy Video@Abel’s Vagina) over the next two weeks will only cause more problems.

Firstly, it has been asserted that Byrne shot the documentary on a shed-built “one-man filmmaking machine – a contraption to record and re-interpret the spirit of a given subject rather than to reproduce light on film or pixels”. How, then, are we to pre-interpret the mess of visual textures that “Girls” presents? A typical scene features a Mancunian underpass, badly exposed on grainy celluloid; across the shot dances a ‘teenage’ girl in an anachronistic spacesuit – however, her image has a pixelated, apparently digital patina and her shadow is out of sync. A crude silhouette of roadside foliage in the foreground fails to distract the viewer from the sense that these images have been composed from separate sources. Is this documentary? Would it encourage you to buy stamps? What (if any) of this is real?

Secondly, Byrne himself had it that his machine would not reproduce photographed light, but rather record the spirit of events and fabricate them into a movie using entirely new light: it was not a camera. Yet close analysis of the mobile ‘shot’ that leads us up Abel’s Vagina (as a certain stretch of the Princess Parkway is colloquially termed) suggests that Byrne’s recording device was mounted to the handlebars of a postal worker’s bicycle. Would this be appropriate for such a device as Byrne describes, netting “spirit” rather than photons? Perhaps - but it seems unByrneian. He was never a cyclist, opting for the reassurance of feeling his feet against the ground. (He never learned to drive, and would change the subject when the question came up in conversation.) He preferred to work alone, but could there have been a second documentarian, on a bike? If so, what happened to him when the girls took Byrne captive?

Thirdly, did Byrne have permission to film the girls – and if so, who did he negotiate this with? It seems to me, from what little Byrne’s film actually teaches us about the “Girls”, there are three possibilities:

1. For Byrne to have got close enough to study them satisfactorily he would have needed their permission. We see that they are highly territorial and willing to kill in bloods cold through hot. Given the deferent adulation the gang show towards their apparent leader, Ms. Selena Jolly, the decision would surely have been her call. She can be seen manipulating the dramatic/aesthetic effects of the gang’s behaviour in Byrne’s presence. Indeed – even allowing for the impaired judgement of the bereaved – it is only in Ms. Jolly’s absence (through death) that the remaining girls turn on Byrne.

2. Byrne was unable/chose not to gain permission, captured the “spirit” of events from a distance and embellished/structured the material according to his own sensibilities and background knowledge, if any. The girls, after all, had footage enough of their own from their perpetually reeling camera-phones, and hardly need engage with a square like Byrne.

3. The whole thing was made up.

It seems best to proceed – both with this essay and the project at large – from the first assumption. We can see where that leaves us afterwards.

Fourthly, the girls of the title all die violently at the end. So how did they post-dub their dialogue? Did Byrne fabricate their deaths in the name of “spiritual” unity? Predict the trouble and have the dialogue pre-dubbed? Have a cast of female hospital staff fill in the gaps at his bedside? Is the effect of badly-synced dialogue merely a misleading technical glitch, a side-effect of Byrne’s peculiar recording techniques? The answers are out there – or not.

Fifthly, the girls brutally murder a policeman – for kicks. Notwithstanding the suggestion that the victim might not be an authentic officer – may instead be a civilian in costume, seeking his own thrills – how are we to understand Byrne’s standing by to coldly capture the event for his film? Was he afraid he would suffer the same fate should he become involved? Hardly – although he no doubt entertained himself with self-defence scenarios in the quiet moments that followed. Rather we should see Byrne as a creature of the street, whose self-preservation instincts were more than matched by an animal indifference to (or acceptance of) the toil and tragedy of a natural world to be found at work with the same cruel innocence in the tangles of the human mind-brain and the bramble bush.

Sixthly, I am not at liberty here to go into depth concerning the “thought virus” that can pass from a mobile phone to human brain, but suffice to say that although Byrne found the idea “a little cognitive” he thought it best to play safe.

Seventhly, the most convincing shots we have recovered of the original “Girls Of Unfortunate Climes” are those featuring the primitivist Lonely Girls gang. These fantastic beasts are generally seen apparently filmed on location (as opposed to the cut-and-paste edit suite trickery of the Space Race scenes). The ostensible use of a long lens lends – on a superficial level – the illusion of authenticity, as the Lonely Girls understood the taking of their image as a provocation: Byrne would need to stand well back with his camera. But Byrne didn’t use a camera. Unless the laws of “spirit”, in the context of Byrne’s spirit-capturing, light-producing, filmmaking contraption, happened to coincide with those of optical physics, surely this long-lens aesthetic was a contrivance added by the so-called “purist” Byrne to evoke the distance he was forced to keep from the Lonely Girls. Didn’t such artifice die with the “noddy”?

Eighthly, hospital records suggest that - aside from the obvious violation – the main physical damage Byrne suffered was the scraping of his face against the gravel as he was dragged across the underpass having been rendered unconscious by Ms. Eve Witherspoon. The use of the phrase “brave, ruined face” in the Future Films blueprint should probably be considered a rare and decadent instance of poetic flair on the part of the engineer who drew it up. However, if the documentary is to be trusted, he was certainly in no state to continue production of it, and the remainder of the film (at least as far as the somewhat perfunctory coda) must be attributed to the spirit-capturing device having been left running (which rather devalues Byrne’s former presence as cinematographer).

Ninthly, although Byrne was rather snappy with the written word itself (claiming, oddly, to have “read more than you’d think”) he didn’t always follow the meaning of certain types of words when they were organised around each other in sentences – particularly sentences of a scientific flavour, given his long-held assumption that scientific knowledge comes free with genetic memory and shouldn’t require further development. This being the case, and yours truly being no expert in weather of the future, perhaps we should consider his description of the fate of the Girls of Unfortunate Climes in terms of his status as layman eye-witness: where once there was acid rain, in post-communication age Manchester ‘information rain’ falls instead – and you don’t want to get it on your shoes.

GOUCLog 2

2010-07-15T23:23:00.002+01:00

A largely uncontroversial day of chance industry encounters and clinically engineered professional conferences.

Only irregularity in the running of Universal Ear Studios today was the discovery that a shady and hitherto unheardof organisation known as "Bad Check Productions" have pinned a call for auditions on our wall display. Let me tell you this, "Bad Check Productions": we will not be intimidated. If you attempt to move in on the Institute's (albeit temporary) turf you will be CRUSHED. However, I have left your ad up and wish you all the best with the casting process.

GOUCLog 1

2010-07-12T22:01:00.008+01:00

On my arrival at Nexus, my first duty is a phone conference with Lockwood. Yes he's well, no he's not found a wife, he has auditions but they feel empty (I picked up this last in his voice). I, in turn, turn to him for strength - I've hit the biscuits again, I confide, following a weekend clearing up bad judgement calls and ill-thought-through plans. "Aren't you listening to the tapes?" asks Lockwood. "Learning from the mistakes we expunged daily to audio cassette during the UNIVERSAL EAR shoot?" Yes, I tell him, I've learned from those mistakes, which has freed me up to make entirely new ones.

First day of auditions for Girls Of Unfortunate Climes today, and there's not much I can divulge here given the sensitive nature of the Institute's recruitment rituals. Of course, given the open nature of our temporary home at Universal Ear Studios, the public were absolutely welcome to come and spy on the process as it happened. But only Nexus Steph showed her face, drawn in by the chorus of our company anthem - a casting rite apparently not widely observed within the industry, which is news to me and GOUC Executive Producer Nexus Emily (who is sitting in on auditions and anthem alike).

We are auditioning four actors at a time for the roles of the Space Race gang, but find that two of the auditions are each two actors short. Having  at first misunderstood a throwaway comment* of his during this morning's call, Lockwood has advised me that sedating the first auditionees so that we could see them together with the later auditionees would be both "unethical" and "illegal". So instead, Emily and I read the missing parts, the Exec getting quite carried away with her role (statuesque gang boss Selena Jolly, with me alternately as underlings Agnes Ivey/Neva M. Perdue). Indeed, the way that one audition works out, the invited actors finish their roles several minutes before the end of the script, leaving Emily and I to fully explore the dramatic potential of our would-be screen relationship and really develop our techniques as actors - quite forgetting to assess the responses of the auditionees. As the auditions are not being videoed, we have not only lost our two-handed tour de force forever but have to run through the entire script again. The chemistry is lost, but the actors do their best to match the pungent tension of our exemplary showcase before we dismiss them, and Emily and I break for Danishes and to bitch about "London".

In fact, notwithstanding the panel's own voyage of creative self-discovery, each actor we see today represents theirself with talent, grace and versatility. Not one stinker! And following the flurry of anxiety and logistical deadends that preceded the day, that favourite old, vaguely meaningless Linus Van Pelt refrain thought-bubbles itself above my head... "and did you notice something, Charlie Brown? The world didn't come to an end..."

I even decide not to label this new blog strand "UNFORTUNATELog 1".

--
* Lockwood was actually suggesting I sedate myself.

Film night to launch Girls Of Unfortunate Climes shoot

2010-07-09T15:17:00.010+01:00

Girl Gangs! Delinquents! Deviant Oiks! is a one-off film night to launch the production of GIRLS OF UNFORTUNATE CLIMES at Nexus Art Cafe.

Expect a punchy feature or two, lurid short films & ludicrous documentaries on the problem of THE YOUTH...

...punctuated by an introduction to the GIRLS OF UNFORTUNATE CLIMES project and a brief look at the ROTTEN SYMBIOSIS of CINEMA and BAD KIDS!

Bring your personal teen gang stories to share if you wish...

Cake & pop available at the cafe.

Full bill to be announced shortly...

Facebook event

WHAT: Girl Gangs! Delinquents! Deviant Oiks!
WHERE: Nexus Art Cafe, Dale Street, Manchester, M1 1JW
WHEN: Friday 16th July, 7.30pm-11ish
COST: FREE (suggested donation £2)

The Page Turner and the Queen

2010-07-02T16:40:00.002+01:00

Lost girl gang documentary of the future to be reconstructed at Nexus Art Cafe!

2010-06-24T13:29:00.007+01:00

Cast and crew are required for the latest short film project at L’Institute Zoom’s temporary Nexus Art Cafe studio, as we begin production on our remake of Girls Of Unfortunate Climes.

“Climes” is the only documentary known to have been made by UNIVERSAL EAR creator/star Harley Byrne, and follows the exploits of rival girl gangs in Manchester, 2012. Beginning as a straightforward anthropological film, events get out of hand when the technophile SPACE RACE and primitivist LONELY GIRLS clash – and Byrne is caught in the crossfire.

Planning and pre-production begins Monday 28th June. The 10-minute film will be shot on digital video, mobile phones and Super-8mm over the last week of July, with a budget of £0. All are welcome to pop into the studio, observe and contribute, with the following jobs in particular still available:

CREW

Cinematographer

Sound recordist

Editor

Art Director

Costumes Director

Costume makers

Runners

CAST

The Space Race - will also play silent roles of the Lonely Girls:

Selena Jolly (“tall, beguiling”)

Eve Witherspoon (“strong but unremarkable, charmless, forceful, insecure”)

Agnes Ivey (“affable, matter-of-fact, the comedian of the group, possibly a sociopath”)

Neva Perdue (“of slight build, the child of the group, of Slavic descent”)

Milo Byers – broken-down I.T. support worker (brief nudity)

Policeman

Former astronaut (retirement age)

Please email director graeme[at]zoomcitta.co.uk with CV/covering note. All levels of experience will be considered and if you think you have something to offer that isn’t listed above, please offer it...

The project will be launched with a film night on July 16th, and can be followed at twitter.com/Nanneman, zoomcitta.blogspot.com, and our Facebook group.

Girls Of Unfortunate Climes

2010-06-24T12:01:00.004+01:00

STRANGE LANDS!

Harley Byrne’s Girls Of Unfortunate Climes documents the social ruins of MANCHESTER where, in the year 2012, the deserted streets are controlled by gangs of delinquent teenage girls. Witness THE SPACE RACE, a band of bubble-helmet-wearing technophiles, who film their every waking moment on camera phones, spy on retired astronauts for fun and hold court on a roundabout at the climax of Manchester’s notorious dual-carriageway, “Abel’s Vagina”.

EXOTIC CULTURES!

Witness THE LONELY GIRLS, a tribe of neo-primitives who reject language and live in peace... unless provoked.

IMMORAL ECOCLIMATES!

And witness Manchester’s unique weather system, where the acid rain of the industrial age has been bullied out by information rain that corrodes with computation!

DARING MANHOOD!

The documentary cracks its Public Information Film mould when the self-effacing filmmaker is drawn into a life-and-death dispute between the two girl gangs of Abel’s Vagina. Himself now the target of the Lonely Girls, whose code he has broken, Byrne is held as bait by The Space Race who seek revenge for the killing of their sister.

DEUS EX MACHINA!

As Documentarian and Girls alike seem doomed, Manchester’s famous precipitation offers up the truth behind the contentious murder. Data pollution is to blame! Wrong-footed by the tide of information, dizzied by animal instinct, unable to escape the cage of societal structure, the girls side-step salvation to be drummed into electronic graves by the power of progress: Condemned by malicious hailstones to exist as two-dimensional video displays on the very asphalt they once ruled. Only our brave documentarian escapes to share the thrills of his bizarre adventure with movie-house audiences the world over...

What do we do when our heroes go south?

2010-06-09T17:48:00.000+01:00

Lockwood has left the (Nexus Art Cafe) building. He is on a Megabus back to London, where he will have to explain to his family:

a) why he pretended the acting gig was at the Royal Exchange;

b) why he did not find a wife;

c) his hair.

He can probably cover all three with the same excuse: "I was playing Harley Byrne playing himself, a former postman of the future, in the remake of a series that hasn't yet been conceived, on a production that hasn't yet been funded, lost in the semi-fictitious characterisation of a quasi-real character, both of whom had awful hair."

The first run of UNIVERSAL EAR wrapped at 5pm yesterday. Just to be absolutely clear:

- UNIVERSAL EAR is a lost adventure serial from the future.

- L'Institute Zoom have, over the past 5 weeks, attempted to prehabilitate three UNIVERSAL EAR episodes in our temporary, open studio at Nexus Art Cafe.

- We don't know what order the original episodes were in.

- We will continue, elsewhere and elsewhen, to prehabilitate UNIVERSAL EAR when the opportunity arises.

- We will remain in exile from our Zoomcitta headquarters for at least another month, in refuge at Nexus Art Cafe.

What happens next at Nexus will be revealed next week.

Thank you for watching.

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day 29

2010-06-08T23:23:00.000+01:00

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day 28

2010-06-07T23:23:00.000+01:00

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day 27

2010-06-06T11:51:00.006+01:00

Lockwood and I relaxed last night in front of Takeshi Kitano's Hana-bi: but barely had Nishi bought the stolen cab from the bullying scrap merchant before Lockwood said it was time to turn in. Sharing a room, as we have done for five weeks now, means bedtime for me too.

But in the morning, rather than being super-fresh from our extra zzzs, Lockwood complains of being "beyond fug". Sluggish and woozy, washing his hair for the first time since The Bad Lieutenant fails to straighten his brains out, and he leaves the flat under a cloud to pick up his friend - and our guest star for the day - Jennifer E. Jordan from Manchester Piccadilly.

Midday at Nexus and the three of us take tea and reinforce the fundamental insult parameters within which the studio has come to operate. Tuesday Betts has done the vodka & cider thing last night so rolls up late and full of attitude. Nobody does angry/apologetic like Betts.

Our production design deputy Suzanne Thompson has made an incredible woman-sized teabag costume for Jordan, who will be playing an undercover botanist (Harley Byrne - and, it transpires, Being - has an deep-rooted hatred of botanists). We fill the time til lunch supplementing the tealeaves therein, as they are to become a central image of this episode.

Following lunch we run through the whole, violent scene at the bottom of a tea-cup. Byrne's nemesis, BEING, has miniaturized Byrne under the pretence of enabling him to record the "Song of the Biscuit Crumb Algae" amongst the dregs of a brew at Nexus Art Cafe, back in the year 2010. Really, she has ambush in mind and - distracted by the pathetic tears of our guest botanist - Byrne is attacked, robbed and tied up.

What makes this particularly fun is that the teacup has been built in the snuggest corner of our studio; is lit by two redheads and a pair of garden lights; the doors are closed to insulate us against Nexus's acoustic gig beyond; and Lockwood is feeling worse than ever. We steam him, leap on him, grab him, bind him and gag him in the sweltering heat. Betts, feeling somewhat better for a chilled ginger pop, has lost the prop she requires for the final shot and thus Lockwood is left trussed up like a cartoon villain under the lights for several minutes as false-start after false-start convince us it would be inefficient to give him a break. But break he does, the second we wrap: rather than attend his own goodbye drinks tonight ahead of his departure from Manchester this Wednesday, Lockwood opts to go home to bed. I feel a bit bad for my slight sense of triumph, but shrug it off.

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day 25

2010-06-03T23:23:00.014+01:00

Strigner may be gone, but she lives on postally. What a parcel!

Lockwood draws a circle.

It is a quiet day at the studio, today.

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day 24

2010-06-02T17:33:00.000+01:00

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day 23

2010-06-01T18:10:00.000+01:00

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day 22

2010-05-31T23:23:00.001+01:00

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day 21

2010-05-30T23:23:00.008+01:00

Next couple of days at UNIVERSAL EAR + acoustic ZOOM

2010-05-29T17:56:00.002+01:00

A busy bank holiday weekend for the UNIVERSAL EAR crew begins tomorrow. With series regular Tuesday Betts in town and guest star Jonny Addy on set, there are 35 shots to get before the close of play Monday. Join them to help out at Nexus Art Cafe Sunday 12-6 and Monday 10-6.

Here's another interpretation of our anthem, which is sung on set every morning. MC Acoustic makes the controversial choice of leaving out the coda - but he is performing his own accompaniment, so perhaps he didn't know the chords.

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day 20

2010-05-27T23:23:00.050+01:00

"Bloodless Offering in B Minor": an artichoke sacrificed to the heavens: duplicity: a greengrocer dressed as a priestess and a radish trader who won't get his/her hands dirty: an omnisexual love triangle between five identity-shifting Greeks, many of them not even Greek. The role of the Real Ianthe is to be played by Marie Louise Cookson, the Future Films engineer who blueprinted the episode for us - Cookson flunked an audition for previous episode "A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear", but has included her own performance as a vital component of the blueprint for "Bloodless". Cookson claims that parts of the signal she received through the modified 2D Quantum Propagada Engine were so obscure, the only way to render them useable was for her to interpret them using Acting. This EARLog is not the place to cynically question the engineering techniques of the Institute's hired help or hint at the use of professional blackmail.

Morning production meeting, and Lockwood takes the thespian context of Cookson's presence as an excuse to further ridicule my Bourbon technique for directing actors (more to follow on that). Cookson nods and smiles, and I sense that she is unwilling to compromise her screen chemistry with him by disagreeing. Cookson - and this is just my intuition - sees there is something in Biscuits, and I make a mental note that should we ever work together without Lockwood, Cookson may be the actor to try my salad dressing method on. 

I cut Lockwood down to size by having Strigner trim his hair: our production designer has never used clippers before, but I assure her "hair's just another material". It's a pity Lockwood can't see Strigner's face, as the range of emotions she journeys through during the process would put a Youtube tutorial on screen acting to shame. Eventually, though, Striggers finds her rhythm and I have to switch the clippers off at the mains when she sails past "Harley Byrne"-style and veers dangerously towards "Travis Bickle" territory.

The Nexus Art Cafe 'secret' garden is dressed as an ancient Greek marketplace, Cookson is dressed as an ancient Greek radish trader. The weather over the garden is changeable, making doubly unfeasible the use of direct sunlight for the scene, as the garden forms a petite rectangle between four imposing 5-storey walls. Given that the ancient Greeks did not have glass, is using light reflected from the Nexus windows going to look inauthentic? As the crew ponder this, shivering self-consciously in our al fresco fishbowl, Lockwood thoughtfully finds a fake fur robe to drape over Cookson's toga'd shoulders. We admire the look, and - like many of the problems the production has brought up - the window issue is soon forgotten, driven away by the current of superficial concerns. We'll see how it looks in the cut.

This morning we are also joined by Adam and Sam, film grads who have wandered into Nexus and - I can only assume - been wowed by our underground movie studio set-up. Adam is quickly put to work lowering in a digital caption from Lockwood's "Stew-Cue" (the latter was pretty jealous at Elly's Strig-Rig getting a proper name), and dusting Lockwood liberally with talcum powder (on film, it looks like dust!). Sam is trusted to manage our most complex sound set-up so far with the addition of an external mic to the cassette-dictaphone we've been taping with, but first he must toss some radishes into shot - a delicate duty which he nails first time. 

Ianthe is torn between her heart and loins (longing for Harley Byrne) and her brains (which have been told he is a veggie fiddler). For reasons of 2-dimensional geometry and the politics of screen pace, "hearts and loins" will be expressed in long shots, brains in close-ups - often cutting between the two during the same line. It should be noted that when Cookson - as the radish trader (a high-born priestess in disguise) - is asked to express desire towards Harley Byrne, she finds the posture technique that Lockwood has previously scorned is in fact really effective at getting her loins aflame. (If you remember, one should imagine the object of desire on a rug which must be dragged towards you, fists hip-high, whilst struggling with one's shoulders not to be dragged in the opposite direction; if - like Lockwood - the eyes still appear terrified, imagine you're at the end of your life and an old friend is walking towards you with his hand outstretched. This technique should not be attempted in nightclubs).

After lunch we cower back in the studio hoping that no-one will notice the carpet of talc in the garden. Crowd scenes next, utilising the home-made gaggle that Strigner (design) and Lockwood (therapy painting) put together yesterday. Cookson is due to stand in front of the crowd but as we are only able to get it a couple of feet off the ground, she has to "stand" perching on a cushion atop two large paint cans (the only combo that works), an adjustment that adds a peculiar tension to her performance. Cookson's technique is uncluttered: we tick off shot after shot until  we find we can progress no further without giant asparagus leaves, which Strigner quickly cooks up out of fiber-optic cables and cloth. There is to be a rare bit of camera movement in this shot but, still startled by the evocative clunk of ad lib leaves, I accidentally tilt Doris too far and take in not only flying veg and Radish Trader's heroic catch, but two cans of paint and Cookson's sport socks. There are no second takes on this shoot, so I devise another angle the sequence requires and am careful not to get carried away this time.

Cookson quivers admirably for her finale, and it's a wrap on today's special guest star. It's also the end of Elly Strigner's last day on the UNIVERSAL EAR set, an emotional moment as we'll miss her instant clunky designs, insults, mischievous interpretation of her 2012 alter-ego Edith Downing and all-round fine company. It feels sort of like the beginning of the end of UNIVERSAL EAR at Nexus, although we still have one and a half episodes to shoot here and over a thousand episodes unrealised beyond that.

Lockwood and I spend the evening at Contact where Dominic Berry is director and compere at Outspoken. As we stand to leave I notice a peculiar halo hovering around Lockwood's head. It is a million tiny talcum powder particles dancing in the limelight.

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day 19

2010-05-26T18:04:00.007+01:00

Lockwood awakes complaining of feeling "fuggy". He hasn't been the same since The Bad Lieutenant. I know things are bad when I offer him £7 to go and get his haircut and he says he'll just let Strigner do it: the very idea of letting our production designer loose on his follicles was enough to bring him out in shakes just three weeks ago.

We manage, all the same, and despite Strigner being delayed by dog health issues, a quietly productive morning. I complete the entire shotlist for "Bloodless Offering in B Minor" in the Snuggle Office whilst Lockwood deputises for Strigner in the studio. At 11am I pop my head round the door to find he has built the beginnings of a fine miniature for our model shot of an ancient Greek marketplace. However, when I return an hour later he has progressed no further, painting the same tiny radish and muttering about his veg stall being structurally unsound.

We escape into the cafe area for pizza pie, a concoction of toast, cheese and tomato that looks and sounds like something I might make (I don't make things) but tastes superb, and briefly alleviates Lockwood's fug. Strigner's right hand woman Suzanne Thompson arrives with a bagful of handcrafted veg and a bad head: on Strigner's arrival we finally get around to singing the Institute's anthem, a discipline that has been neglected three out of the last four days.

Buoyed by our Fat Larry imitation (and personally by Strigner's remarks on my own improvement at same) we crack on at a mild canter. A pleasant moment occurs as we stand by the window to the secret garden (should a secret garden have a window?) when Nexus Sally, distracted from her homework, wistfully imagines we are talking about the weather: whilst Sally is not far off, I am taken with the idea of imagining other people wasting time in mundane conversation whilst daydreaming oneself. Such pockets of time are undervalued, ephemeral and uncontrivable. If only you could tin them for emergencies.

The rest of the day is spent messing around with togas and attempting to keep Lockwood from harming himself. He is left painting quietly in the studio and we pretend not to be disturbed by the occasional perverted assertion that issues from his troubled lips. Tomorrow Doris rolls on the next episode of UNIVERSAL EAR. An early night for all.

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day 18

2010-05-25T19:21:00.000+01:00

Lockwood spends the morning alone in the studio, no doubt grunting and hooting in response to the ridiculous "find your natural voice" book his head has been stuck in for the past two days. If that's his natural voice, surely losing it was the whole point of drama school?

The first thing I achieve once on set is Lunch, and it looks for a while like that's as good as it's going to get. Even as I allow myself a self-congratulatory "whoop" on having hunter-gathered carbs, protein and pro-biotic yoghurt for the pair of us, Lockwood tells me it's the wrong kind of carbs and the bottom falls out of my day.

A ray of of light appears in the form of a visitor to the Snuggle Office: Ian from k'motion Films, who is - until Nexus Alistair introduces him - a stranger. We talk of our respective ambitions, struggles and triumphs, although I decide not to mention the post-lunch slump thing (I don't know if Ian has eaten by this point but there's no evidence of any slump on his part), and generally reassure each other of the nobility of trying to create something from only a wisp over nothing. Ian has big plans, he also has a lunch partner waiting him for out in the cafe so Lockwood and I reluctantly allow him to leave, whereupon the energy in the room dissipates and I impulsively down the remaining yoghurt in one.

To the cafe, then, where I don my 'serious' look so that Lockwood doesn't guess I haven't a clue what to do next. I have him shift some furniture around to make up a set for "Stampys", the postal service members club from where Harley Byrne introduces each episode. But it doesn't feel right, and we decide to save the cafe environment for our next-episode-but-one, in which the space is to feature prominently. We retire instead to the studio, to which I have Lockwood drag more furniture. We are able to utilise some of the Lumpenbal donations - a splendid bicycle, an Egyptian tea set - to create the Stampys set. But then it comes time to actually film it, and I find I have nothing. I don't even have the notes we made whilst rehearsing the scene several weeks back, as - whilst embodying the spirit of original UNIVERSAL EAR director Francis Dove - it seemed to make more sense to lose them and perform instead from a memory of a contrivance of an interpretation of a script. This somewhat indefinite, analogue approach is in fact completely inappropriate here, as it is our intention to shoot Byrne's performance "lo-res" - glitching from emotion to clunking emotion with nary a segue from one to the next. (Doris, the Super 8 camera, is to record this sympathetically by gearing down to 12 frames-per-second - not least because we're running perilously short of film stock).

However, if there's one thing that'll make you slap yourself across both cheeks and face up to your professional obligations, it's having a photographer appear on set and ask to snap you in action: and that's precisely what happens, as Kit from Hong Kong pops her head bravely through the studio door and asks what we're doing. Kit packs an arsenal of proper old cameras herself, and by redirecting some burning tungsten from Lockwood's gurning face to Doris's mechanical curves I am able to draw her right in and ascertain that she is no rush to leave.

Will you help us, Kit, get these three shots? Kit is no rush, wants to get some pics and agrees to extra as a Stampys tea-girl. I quickly scribble a direction ("billowing vowels", "Bond [Roger]") on each of Lockwood's prompt cards and we're ready to go. Once Doris is whirring, we all get caught up in her momentum: Kit pours steaming tea, Lockwood clunks from "hard consonants" to "condescending pity" with zero grades of performance in between, and I aid him by holding/swaying/rolling his cue sheets in the direction and distance I think he should stare with each line. Before we know it, we've burnt through 48 feet of Tri-X on Lockwood and used the last couple of feet for Kit's close-ups, and are wrapped for the day. It's only 16:30 so Kit takes this opportunity to turn her cameras on Lockwood and I. Hunter becomes hunted as we hold our respective contraptions (Doris for me and the Universal Ear for Lockwood) feebly at each other and allow our likeness to be captured by Kit's vintage bellow-hinged Polaroid and medium format Rolleiflex. We say our goodbyes, and Lockwood and I high-five.

The excellent mood is only soured when Lockwood is shortly after given some free chocolate cake by Steph and Hannah in the cafe and I get none. What hurt the most was the way he wolfed the remainder down when he saw I'd caught him.

Cast, extras & runners needed for UNIVERSAL EAR

2010-05-25T10:33:00.004+01:00

This week production starts on the next episode of UNIVERSAL EAR, on an open set at Manchester's Nexus Art Cafe.

"Bloodless Offering in B Minor" is a swedes-and-sandals epic in which our hero Harley Byrne travels back to Greece, 425BC in order to record the pulsating rhythms of an immolated artichoke. But his arch nemesis BEING has arrived ahead of him and spun a web of tangled identity and multiple disguises amongst the religious community. In the balmy, fetid-smelling air of the temple of veg, Byrne finds himself attracted to his host's official greengrocer, Thersites. A boisterous and tender relationship blooms between the two men, compromising the success of Byrne's mission.

We need!

1 chap to play the REAL THERSITES (any age 18+)
->auditions this afternoon and tomorrow (Weds), shooting Thursday and Sunday this week

1 couple to snog in the background of our opening sequence
->get in touch, we'll work out a time to do it

Set decorators, prop/crafts people and runners are also needed Wednesday, Thursday, Sunday & next Monday... however much or little you can do, please get in touch (experience not essential).

Please email info [at] zoomcitta.co.uk or drop into the studio at Nexus Art Cafe, on Dale Street opposite Vinyl Exchange; or leave a comment below.

This week we will be there 10-6 Tues-Thurs and 12-5.30 Sunday.

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day 16

2010-05-23T23:23:00.001+01:00

A day of fleas, Hawaiian shirts and the baddest of lieutenants. More soon.

Second UNIVERSAL EAR episode going into production

2010-05-22T15:30:00.004+01:00

L'Institute Zoom are continuing to reshoot the entire lost UNIVERSAL EAR serial in our temporary film studio at Nexus Art Cafe.

UNIVERSAL EAR is a perpetual adventure series, charting the progress of Harley Byrne – arch-explorer and former postman – and his mission through space, time and sound to capture and make available for download “all the world's music, ever”.

The first episode "A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear" will wrap on Sunday 22nd May, and the production is looking for extras dressed smart (black tie) and carrying musical instruments (talent non-essential) to join us from 2.30pm-4.30pm to 'perform' in the flea orchestra itself. Please show up at the cafe and ask for the UNIVERSAL EAR studio.

Next week we begin work on the second episode, a swedes-and-sandals epic entitled "Bloodless Offering in B Minor". Wednesday 26th & Thursday 27th we will be making sets and costumes, and rehearsing and shooting on Thursday, Sunday 30th and Monday 31st.

Our film studio is to the right of the cafe counter and is open 10-5.30 Mon-Thurs and 12-5.30 on Sundays until further notice. Whenever you see the door open, you are welcome to come through and say hello, whether you'd like to help or just be nosy.

You can also follow our progress online at twitter.com/Nanneman, and join our Facebook group.

Extras needed in Manchester this Sunday

2010-05-21T14:06:00.004+01:00

Please join us at the UNIVERSAL EAR film studio in Manchester City Centre this Sunday, as we film the final shots of first episode, "A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear".

We will be shooting the Flea Orchestra itself so require extras in smart dress (preferably white shirt, plain black/dark tie, dark jacket), with whatever musical instruments you can bring. We have a few shirt/ties & instruments so feel free to come along and borrow. You don't have to be able to play the instruments as we will add the music later.

The shoot should last from 2.30pm-4.30pm. The cafe will be open before, during and after if you'd like to factor your Sunday mellow into the day. Extras will become a part of cinematic history, and one day receive a DVD of their work.

Please email armend [at] zoomcitta.co.uk or just show up at Nexus Art Cafe on Dale Street in Manchester's Northern Quarter this Sunday from 2.30pm.

& please forward this call-out to anyone who might appreciate it.

If you would like to join us earlier to help make up some costumes, we'll be in the studio from 12 ... please drop in.

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day 15

2010-05-20T23:23:00.002+01:00

This weekend at UNIVERSAL EAR Studios

2010-05-20T18:22:00.003+01:00

Just to warn you, the studio will be closed Friday 21st-Saturday 22nd May: please watch here or on Facebook or Twitter.com/Nanneman for updates on what's happening next...

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day 14

2010-05-19T23:23:00.001+01:00

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day 13

2010-05-18T18:59:00.006+01:00

Lockwood and I awake, once more, to the sound of drilling and hammering next door. 8am sharp every morning, our industrious - indeed, industrial - neighbour treats us a complex treat of sensations both sonic and vibrational. I'm able to shake it off though, better rested for having regained custody of "the bed" as we call it - "the bed" being a bed, rather than an arrangement of armchair cushions and folded sleeping bags on "the floor".

I had dreamt of being a child again, moving to a mansion and "Far And Away" style staking my claim to all of the best and biggest rooms (including the basement) before my sister got home. She wasn't happy. Many of my dreams these last weeks have involved me being a child, perhaps because deep down I consider myself to be hideously out of depth leading a reconstruction project off-site from the familiar environs of Zoomcitta. Or perhaps because it's like having a massive toy set. Or just because of Lockwood's liberated, childlike attitude towards bodily functions.

The journey to work involved high speed collisions in both eyes (greenflies), the only levity being provided by the sight of a taxi driver getting roughed up in the middle of the road, presumably for being an inconsiderate road lout.

Rather self-satisfied for having set up today's first shot last night, I am rather gutted when the starlet Tuesday Betts points out that this scene requires soaking our hero Harley Byrne (who has just landed in a lake) which means his costume will be out of action for the rest of the day. Instead, we dismantle the set and prepare the "romantic dinner" scenes. My swagger soon returns as I singlehandedly concoct an ingenious lighting set up out of some garden lights (sans stand), two redhead pots (with barely a directional stand between them), a reflector and a tea tray. Lockwood and Betts have done themselves proud setting up the actual location (dinner table in log cabin in front of window with mountainside vista) and refuse to acknowledge my burgeoning cinematographic genius. Fortunately, Nexus gaffer Emily walks in at this point to see what we're up to and I'm able to quite naturally introduce the fact of my genius into general conversation. Emily has just returned from gardening class and, having successfully photosynthesised over 50% of her runner beans in the past three weeks, can also claim to know a thing or two about the taming of raw light: we instantly gain a new mutual respect, or at least I think we do, as there are still big yellow blotches in my eyes and I can only make out her feet.

Having achieved all this, our three-person crew breaks for pies, which we take in the Nexus garden: it's barely noon but we're hoping the post-lunch slump will get confused when it turns up at two and finds us all fully digested. We crack through the dinner scenes, then I pretend to go through my script whilst my actors build the outside of the cabin for Byrne's big wet arrival scene (really I am napping). Naturally, having each done the work of a dozen disparate crew members today, we are slowing: but we nail the cabin, whoosh through a self-congratulory analysis session and bid Betts au revoir: she has done all her scenes for this, the first episode of UNIVERSAL EAR. She casually points out that she won't be back for at least a fortnight but, giddy on our success, we overlook this and I make a mental note to develop a simmering resentment at a later date.

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day 12

2010-05-17T23:23:00.003+01:00

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day 11

2010-05-16T23:23:00.003+01:00

Scott Bradley performs our institutional anthem

2010-05-15T13:19:00.001+01:00

Following on from yesterday, here's a more modern take on the Zoom anthem. The pop artist Scott Bradley doesn't seem to have truly expert control over his diaphragm - but he's having a lot of fun, and that's not a bad place to start.

Night cafe - extras needed

2010-05-14T17:43:00.002+01:00

Tomorrow night 2am-6am (that's Sunday morning to early-risers) production of UNIVERSAL EAR will move into the main cafe area of Nexus Art Cafe, as the crew reimagine the "orange room" as the atelier/hideout of Harley Byrne's degenerate artist brother Santiago.

Each episode of UNIVERSAL EAR opens with a scene in which Harley must convince... his brother, a temporal cubist, to find him a path through time and space to the origin of the track he is to hunt down. This week we will attempt to get three episodes worth of these scenes - and we require extras (dressed as degenerate artists/temporal cubists) and helpers to do so.

Says director Graeme Cole: "We also need a PRIEST and a BRIDE, or at least people dressed up as those. No lines, you're purely extras. In constumes. If we get more than one priest and/or bride, well we can make that work too."

Please drop into the night cafe or message me or Graeme through Facebook if you'd like to be a part of it.

Zoom Anthem

2010-05-14T15:01:00.006+01:00

Every working morning at the Institute, we all get together to sing our anthem - Fat Larry's Band's "Zoom" - before the day's business begins. Whilst our Future Films department is temporarily relocated at the Nexus Art Cafe studio, they continue to fly the Zoom flag and can be heard performing "Zoom" ahead of the ongoing production of UNIVERSAL EAR each day. If you're in the cafe, please feel free to join them, or listen from your table with a cup of tea.

In the meantime, here is the first in a series of cover versions for the sake of appeal. You might particularly look out for Stevie D's choice to whistle through the instrumental section, and to punctuate the number with a kiss at the camera. Stevie D, we at L'Institute Zoom salute you and your interpretation of our official anthem.

Delays at UNIVERSAL EAR

2010-05-12T21:48:00.009+01:00

The original, 2012 version of the time-travel adventure serial UNIVERSAL EAR is considered - by those few who are aware of it - to be the greatest act of filmmaking folly to have ever been committed to celluloid.

I beg to differ. After eight days of attempting to "prehabilitate" the same series in a public film studio no bigger than my flat (tiny), whilst putting up lead actor Stewart Lockwood (mansize) in afore-mentioned (tiny) flat, a full two years before the original was even made, our endeavour seems follier. Francis Dove, the director of the 2012 original, at least had some finance behind him - even though he never seems to have made up his mind whether the finished work would be destined for TV or cinema or internet, or even whether he intended it to be seen at all. We have only donations of junk (some really fantastic junk), and it is little consolation that Dove - who was in something of an emotionally bankrupt state when he made UNIVERSAL EAR - would have considered the physical accoutrements of his own set to be little more than the flotsam of a sinking reality.

Furthermore, it's difficult not to feel the pressure of time constraints when one begins the reconstruction of a series that had over 1,000 episodes. You can imagine how Dove was actually quite pleased when his leading man Byrne boycotted several episodes, leaving Dove to cut together performances from outtakes from shoots gone by. We don't have that luxury - we're working on a strictly first-take-counts basis, which means there's nothing left on the cutting room floor at the end of the day.

All of which is to say, we've rather jettisoned the idea of shooting a whole episode every week, and are instead basking in the luxury of time and tightly parametered space that residency chez Nexus brings us. We've shot maybe 15% of "A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear" which was meant to wrap last Sunday; we're reveling in the spirit of our 2012 alter-egos; trying things out and enjoying the company. Certain disciplines (morning meeting, warm-up/L'Institute Zoom anthem, closing analysis "What have we achieved? What went wrong?") remain, have even begun to stretch out over the so-called productive hours in between. We may add more - rhythm is important. Join us, and we can beat out time together.

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day 7

2010-05-11T23:23:00.000+01:00

This week at UNIVERSAL EAR @ Nexus Art Cafe

2010-05-10T17:44:00.002+01:00

First off, Mr Cole sends his apologies for being unable to contribute a truly comprehensive blog entry at this point. He has the UNIVERSAL EAR crew working around the clock to find a time-efficient blogging technique that can function alongside the day-to-day pressures of working in a film studio alien to one's usual surroundings (the latter being the currently sealed off Zoomcitta complex).

This week the studio is looking to employ short and long term (one hour or three weeks) art department volunteers. There are sets, props, costumes and backdrops that need painting and building out of assorted donations of junk: please drop into the studio or message us via the Facebook group. (There are now also some photos of what we've been up to).

This week the studio will be open:
Tues 11th 10am-5.30 (outtakes, freezedried emotion tinning)
Weds 12th 10am-5.30 (set design & making for "A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear" & "Bloodless Offering in B-Minor")
Thurs 13th 10am-5.30 (shooting some more "Flea")
Sat 15th 10am-1pm (rehearsal with recurring guest character "Santiago Byrne" .. and watch this space for possible Night Cafe action)
Sun 16th 12-5.30pm Tuesday Sundays - shooting with the starlet Tuesday Betts.

Please drop in for a chat about how you can become involved. We need you.

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day 6

2010-05-09T23:23:00.000+01:00

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day 4

2010-05-07T23:23:00.000+01:00

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day 3

2010-05-06T23:23:00.007+01:00

The day of the Lumpenbal, our launch party in the 19th century European tradition, whereby at the end of the ball season - when all are broke and broken by hedonistic and sartorial extravagances past - the doors to the final ball are thrown open to tramps, vagabonds and spent socialites alike to revel in their collective downfall. (More details on our intentions and conventions can be found here).

The day is largely dedicated to continued set-building (above) for first episode "A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear" - once we've Zoomed, warmed up, and further explored Higginson's temporal cubist work-out (below). I'm careful to earmark a wedge of day for the preparation of the ballroom; however, this wedge becomes smaller and smaller as we apply ever fiercer concentration to cardboard manipulation in pursuit of the perfect screen log cabin.

At 3.45, Lockwood and I hold a meeting with Marie Louise Cookson, a semi-pro announcer, to put together a bit of a show for the "speeches" bit of the ball. The atmosphere is strained and Lockwood and I wonder whether Cookson is ill, or perhaps feeling the pressure ahead of her intended performance in front of up to 150 people. Lockwood and I throw up some suggestions as to how we might approach the public introduction to the UNIVERSAL EAR serial and our prehabilitation of same: I mainly concentrate on funny stuff, while Lockwood becomes somewhat stuck on the question of "what are we trying to achieve here?". To paraphrase our producer, Nathan Povey, if we spent all our time asking ourselves what we were trying to achieve, what would we ever achieve? (Don't try to answer that). Finally Cookson snaffles the best of my material and announces she must retire from the meeting to fashion her notes into some kind of script. Before she leaves, it is revealed that the reason for her spikiness today is that she has taken yesterday's failed audition rather personally - particularly criticising the medium of rejection (SMS text message) and the tone (frank). I look to Lockwood to back me up, but he is apparently searching for something valuable under the Snuggle Office sofa; Cookson leaves, hardly on better terms than she had arrived, and I fear our on-stage chemistry this evening may already be compromised.

The day segues so smoothly into the evening that I almost forget to slip into my ball gown. I have at the last minute asked production designer Strigner to continue working out back away from the festivities this evening, so we might guide guests through to show them the studio at work. Friends and strangers alike begin to teem into the cafe, and we receive - among other donations - a pair of crutches, a fine but immobile bicycle, and a set of Egyptian crockery. First AD Rowan makes a poignant and complex statement about the instability of matter, the ephemeral nature of propriety and the subjective quantification of man-made space by smashing one such hieroglyphed teacup on the floor and bursting into tears. (I will call to mind this impromtu performance a week later whilst watching Gordon Matta-Clark's Conical Intersect (1975) at Kate Taylor's FutureEverything film screening - but pound for pound, Rowan's piece is more affecting.)

Speeches next, and charmed equally by Cookson's delivery and Lockwood's bashfulness, I forget to mention many of the key points I was to illustrate during our address. Cookson's turn will indeed be remembered as a highlight of the evening; Lockwood, a some-time stage actor, can only hope his shy demeanour is overlooked by the masses. Is is past 9pm (the ball is only due to go on until 10) and Tuesday Betts has not yet shown up, so I completely forget that we (she) is meant to be crowning a belle and/or beau of the ball: thankfully no-one picks up on this and we are able to make way for our stand-in band Pyjama Party, whose own Mr Beats immediatly unleashes the song of wild elephants and such on the crowd, embellishing the PJ sound with a concrète underscore. Sugden, UNIVERSAL EAR's executive producer and our portraitist for the evening, continues to take one-minute 'screen tests' of our guests, as general photography is absolutely forbidden.

9.54 and a lost looking glamourpuss in fake fur coat, bob wig, cigarette holder and sherry bottle (Nexus is strictly dry) wanders down from the street, scanning the dazzled ball-goers for a familiar face. Next to our cast of beggars and chimney sweeps, the stranger is clearly in the wrong place... until she is revealed to be none other than Tuesday Betts, the female lead of our UNIVERSAL EAR remake and would-be Lumpenbal figurehead. A truly memorable entrance: in the minutes that remain (not too few, as Pyjama Party refuse to leave the stage), Betts allows Sugden to take her portrait, then helps us clear up before emabarking on the drive back to Blackpool. Legend.

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day 2

2010-05-05T23:23:00.001+01:00

This morning we are joined by our Production Designer Elly Strigner, whose poster (poster is not word enough for this object-advert) for our Lumpenbal has already caused much gasping around Nexus; also J Addy who will assist her; and his friend "I" who has requisitioned some arts materials from a publicly funded educational institution (due to the Institute's current economic crisis the UNIVERSAL EAR production is entirely reliant on donations and, let's say, quasi-donations). We warm up and sing, then go to work building a set to represent the Romanian mountains circa 1861. The Nexus Art Cafe garden is being "done" today and, given our remit (and desire) to merge the UNIVERSAL EAR production with the day-to-day life of the cafe, I am pleased to see Addy bringing us branches, leaves, bits of bench etc. for our rural backdrop. It soon turns out that he has completely bypassed the cafe garden and instead raided the parks and tree-lined streets of Manchester's city centre. Later, Nexus's own Hannah Mosley brings us some legit foliage and my conscience is assuaged.

Our first auditionee for the role of the real Nola Luna arrives, and we immediately recognise her as Marie Louise Cookson - yes, the promising new Future Films engineer who has been put to work compiling a blueprint for the UNIVERSAL EAR episode Bloodless Offering in B Minor. Professionalism dictates that none of us can acknowledge our mutual familiarity, and a tense and peculiar reading follows behind closed doors. Professionalism further forbids me going into detail here, but the audition is a tempestuous stew of emotions both real and performed (and the distinction is not always clear). Cookson leaves and Lockwood and I agree we picked the wrong day to give up Digestives. The role of the real Nola Luna finally goes to Briony O'Callaghan, despite nearly blowing her audition with an over-convincing Romanian accent: I consult my sound people, who tell me we can warp it down to the quality of accent generally portrayed by the Institute's stock performers in post-production.

A postcard is dropped anonymously at the Nexus counter, without a stamp, addressed to me: it is from the house band. They are, they say, recovering in hospital having become fossilised within a cloud of resolidifying lava somewhere on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. They will not be able to perform at the Lumpenbal as planned the following night. Disaster! I ask 1st AD Rowan to make some calls, and she is able to book us Manchester's premier nightwear-wrapped music act Pyjama Party, who - whilst understandably unable to commit to performing a representative cross-section of "all the world's music, ever", as the house band had planned - boldly promise to segue some classic concrète from across the centuries into their repertoire. Saved!

Busy times at film studio from the future

2010-05-05T22:06:00.005+01:00

Hello there, project leader Cole here (attempting to channel the spirit of original UNIVERSAL EAR director Francis Dove).

We're two days into prefabrication of the lost UNIVERSAL EAR adventure serial at our temporary home, Nexus Art Cafe. Frankly, between tea-making, wolf-sourcing and epic holistic warm-up sessions, there's been no time to relay much of what's happened so far - I'd advise you, if you can, to visit us instead and see what's going on. We'll be there 10- 5.30 every day until Sunday, and then publish a new schedule for next week.

Thursday 6th May - set making, preparing for grand Lumpenbal (with last-minute rescue guest spot from Manchester's snuggliest band PYJAMA PARTY)
Friday 7th May - exposure of film begins somehow
Saturday 8th May - A.M. we work with Tuesday Betts on her performance as BEING (in the spirit of the original actress, Brigitte Bridges); P.M. come and play a flea and/or a wave and/or a flame as Downing's original production design gets person-al.
Sunday 9th May - the first of our Tuesday Sundays, when we film starlet Tuesday Betts' scenes for the UNIVERSAL EAR episode A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear.

Anyone is welcome to pop in whenever they can; we're in the studio behind the kitchen, we should have some good signage up shortly. Come and say hello, or watch in silence, or volunteer to paint a set or don a costume. We are particularly looking for make-up people and film (rather than digital) cinematographers, but tell us what you do and there'll be something you can turn your hand to. A bit like those ads for the army only with significantly less killing and that.

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day 1

2010-05-04T23:23:00.001+01:00

Lockwood is rooming with me for the duration of the UNIVERSAL EAR shoot. He and I rise at 8am for probably the last time, and he makes us eggs, possibly for the last time. We mount our company bicycles to head in for the first day of production, and then dismount as Lockwood's Raleigh Pioneer has a puncture. He gets the bus instead, and while I wait for him outside Nexus I am joined by the department's Physical Welfare Enforcer Fran Higginson, and our First AD Rowan, who is already busy making calls at 10am. It quickly transpires that there is no-one on the other end of the phone (aside from in her imagination), but Rowan looks professional and I don't know who she'd need to call anyway, so we let it pass. Aside from her frequent breaks for "mummy milk", Rowan will prove to be one of the most energetic ADs I've yet worked with.

Lockwood joins us on the street and we all talk about the situation we're in. Ten minutes later, I call Nexus to ask if we can be let in, and they apologise for forgetting to open the cafe. The schedule quickly takes on what we will explain away as an "organic" evolutionary imperative, with warm up and the performance of our anthem (Fat Larry's Band's "Zoom") postponed whilst we arrange the two spaces into a production office/dressing room (which Rowan, with no little marketing savvy, christens as the "Snuggle Office") and studio space.

Higginson leads us in a combined warm-up/anthem/exploration of temporal cubist space-time. Our Physical Welfare Enforcer has been training with a Soviet martial arts expert who seems to know the secret of most things. We are shown some speculative photo-montages illustrating muscle-use during temporal cubist-based time travel, and we attempt to warm up some of same.

Later, we spend some time developing Harley Byrne's screen fighting technique. The real Byrne, in 2012, had developed his own technique based on a personal biophysics of twenty years in the postal service. In order to make these acceptable to cinema audiences, a special trainer was employed to refine his moves: however, the trainer was 8-months pregnant, and Byrne took her demonstrations rather literally. Fortunately, we have planned ahead and Higginson is well into her third trimester. In just a few hours, Lockwood is punching like a knocked-up parcel vet: indeed, like Harley Byrne.

First day of UNIVERSAL EAR not a failure

2010-05-04T18:38:00.008+01:00

The preconstruction of the lost adventure series UNIVERSAL EAR began at the Institute's temporary film studio at Manchester's Nexus Art Cafe today, and no-one was hurt.

Please join us tomorrow to make sets and props or to audition for the role of the Real Nola Luna.

(Photos show leading man Stewart Lockwood and 8-month pregnant physical welfare enforcer Fran Higginson exploring hero Harley Byrne's unique martial arts techniques).

UNIVERSAL EARLog: Day -1

2010-05-03T23:23:00.002+01:00

Evening: I meet Lockwood and his sister, having personally invited the latter along to keep the former's self-esteem in check. I introduce them to our temporary studio at Nexus, and they are discreet enough to keep their excitement in proportion to the dimensions of the space (two rooms at each approximately 18ft by 10ft, by 8ft 3 inches high). I draw comparisons with LA's (unrelated) Universal Studios, and Lockwood's sister notes that indeed the carpet on the walls is green and might be used for some of that green-screen stuff you see in "Making Of" documentaries. Mental note: as we're shooting on Super-8, could we align the grain of the film to cancel out inconsistencies in the weave of the carpet?

Later, we attempt a video conference with the Institute's house band, who are due to perform at our launch night on Thursday 6th. During the conference, it becomes clear that they are in fact in the same room as us behind a giant fake monitor made of cellophane. This is just the first of several suspicious circumstances leading up to their last minute cancellation ahead of the Lumpenbal.

UNIVERSAL EAR Schedule 4th-5th May

2010-05-03T17:40:00.002+01:00

The first episode of UNIVERSAL EAR to be shot on our public film studio at Nexus Art Cafe will be "A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear". Please see previous post for audition details.

Tuesday 4th May 2010

1000 Arrive on set, Zoom Anthem/warm-up, brews

1030 General production meeting, plus intro to Flea Orchestra. Putting stuff here and there.

1115 Tea, cake

1130 What do we know about Harley Byrne? How might this be manifested in his facial hair?

1200 Harley Byrne: defence and attack, with Physical Welfare Enforcer Higginson

1300 Lunch

1400 Harley Byrne’s Flea introduction: beat by clunking beat

1500 Tea, cake

1515 The Harley Spectrum: condensed emotion tinning

1700 What have we achieved today? What went wrong?

1730 End of day.

Wednesday 5th May 2010

1030 Arrive on set, warm-up (simulcast with Strigner on train), brews (simulbrew with Strigner)

1100 Production design meeting: A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear

1145 Tea, cake (put up signs for auditions)

1200 ongoing Fabrication of “Ear Wipe”; Strigner to lead design & building of Flea set/props

1200 ongoing Open auditions for role of Nola Luna

1300 Lunch

1400 ongoing Strigner to lead design & building of Flea set/props

1400 ongoing Open auditions for role of Nola Luna

1700 What have we achieved today? What went wrong?

1730 End of day.

Open auditions for role of the Real Nola Luna

2010-05-03T15:16:00.001+01:00

The production of the UNIVERSAL EAR adventure serial starts tomorrow, with our Lumpenbal launch night at Nexus Art Cafe on Thursday...

The regular lead roles of HARLEY BYRNE (hero), BEING (nemesis) and SANTIAGO BYRNE (pest/donor) have been cast, but in the weeks ahead we will be holding open auditions for guest roles and cameos.

The first audition will be this WEDNESDAY 5th May, when female actors are invited to drop into the Nexus Art Cafe studio between midday-5pm to read for the role of THE REAL NOLA LUNA in our first episode "A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear". Filming will take place this Friday, 7th May during the day.

The Real Nola Luna, a 19th century Romanian inventor, is locked in a cupboard by the Fake Nola Luna for most of the episode, but is finally rescued by Harley Byrne. They have a brief love affair before Harley realises that she, too, is a fraud in her own way...

You are welcome to just arrive at the studio, or if you would like to email ahead to book a time and receive a script, please contact the director Graeme Cole at graeme [at] zoomcitta.co.uk. The script will also be posted in the cafe foyer later today.

We are also looking for actors (M/F) to workshop with our leading man Stewart Lockwood in rehearsal tomorrow (Tuesday) between 12-1pm and 3-5pm. This is not a screen role but a series of exercises ahead of the shoot; if you're at a loose end and want a hands-on introduction to our open set production, please drop in...