Two Bosnian films, Murmurs and Epizoda ?, now online

The online availability of two of the Institute's Bosnian-made pictures has shifted dramatically in the past few weeks.

Epizoda ? can now be watched for free on Vimeo. This absurdist detective show pilot was written and directed by Graeme Cole at Béla Tarr's film.factory, and was previously available for VoD on Tao Films, an art film and 'slow cinema' platform, which is currently enjoying a creative pause.

Murmurs is available online for the first time, to rent or buy on Vimeo On Demand. The ASMR-tinged experimental feature film was also written and directed by Mr Cole at film.factory, and just like Epizoda ?, features Elma Selman in a leading role. The male lead is the Institute's regular player, Stewart Lockwood.

Epizoda ?

Video | 39'09" | BiH/UK | 2016
Cast
Vladimir Kajević
Elma Selman

A TV detective who's lost the plot drives aimlessly around the city. Negotiating time and space seem achievable next to solving a murder in a factory, the only witness a robot with the ability to get under the skin with its only two programmed lines: “That interests me” and “What are you afraid of?”

Murmurs

Video | 72'42" | BiH/UK | 2015-2020
Cast
Elma Selman
Stewart Lockwood

Hana is an ASMR artist, creating intimate videos for millions of online followers – and she hasn’t left her house for 18 months. Ed is a remote security image analyst, and Hana’s first online hook-up. When Ed arrives at Hana’s home, they begin to nurture an awkward togetherness. But for these lonely weirdos, building trust might take more than endless days of cooking and fucking.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 38

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 32

Shoot day 01. It starts promisingly as we are warmly welcomed to the Chapel by the building's guardian, forced out of bed on a Sunday - it makes a big difference to get a smile and some kind shrugs about my French language skills rather than the tuts and sighs I probably deserved. Next, an upbeat meeting between our assembled crew, all together in one place at one time, and augmented by Lockwood, our leading man. I establish some rules: clean up after yourself; one take for each shot; never forget where you last saw me put my folder (because I will). 

As regular readers will know, the UNIVERSAL EAR set opens each day with a performance of the L'Institute Zoom company anthem, Fat Larry's Band's 'Zoom'. The French contingent take to this ritual with admirable enthusiasm, although it is a crime of culture that none of them have heard this classic before (leading lady Tuesday Betts, who arrives in the evening, puts the British familiarity with this song purely down to the ubiquity of Smooth FM in our cafes, streets, schools and prisons).

Only once the song is finished do things start going downhill. It turns out I have forgotten to bring not only the clippers to do Harley Byrne's 'do', but his entire uniform; Leray and I are dispatched in different directions across Bourges to rectify this. The guest cast begins to arrive in my absence, little suspecting the wait they will have ahead of them, since on my return our efforts to perfect the hologram effects that we require for all of today's shots prove unsatisfactory. Over the past few test weeks, we managed to get the fx to what we considered to be something like 70% perfection; today, it proved a gross overestimation.

The complexity of the script was another mis-judgement; naturally, it's pretty hard for the French cast, with mostly a limited grip on the English language (though far better than my French, as the common and disingenuous disclaimer goes), to understand the esoteric and pretentious dialogue, let alone memorize it and perform it with the required (albeit limited) level of nuance.

While the togetherness and doing-ness of the day was still very valuable (we're not here to make a movie, after all, but to make a movie), it was a huge blow to lose the time that could've been spent with these wonderful performers figuring out how to best create their characters - instead we just wound up trying to get the shots. We'll try to use these shots as a skeleton and add some flesh together in the week, where schedules allow. After months of script work worrying about words, it turned out to be light itself that we had neglected.

One nice touch: Robin-Tyrek steps up to be our smoketographer; she buys a vape machine and fluid from a local tobacconist, and it is magical to discover the smoke in our movie will be of the 'Berry' variety. It turns out that this refers to the flavour of berries rather than a specific vaping blend local to the the Berry region in which we are stationed, but sometimes authenticity is in the eye of the beholder.

In the evening, Tuesday Betts arrives via both Liverpool and Manchester airport, having turned up wrongly to the former and caused a security alert at the latter, and having eaten nary a Wagon Wheel since 11am. Believe it or not, more mischief and chaos may be just what the production needs. Niemczyk, whose lunches and dinners have fair sustained our bellies and souls since long before the Canon 814 rolled today, does not disappoint with her baked roots.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 31

A day off for the interns, since tomorrow we shoot - and we don't stop again for the next six days. So mostly Niemczyk and I in the studio, with the freedom for the occasional selfie inbetween ritual clearing-up and preliminary set assembly. Queissner and Robin-Tyrek also appear for constructive meetings. In the evening, Lockwood arrives - if not raring to go, at least pleased to get off the bus.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 28

The day begins with a confusion of keys which results in me walking to the studio by myself in the rain, a delay that I try to exploit as thinking time in which to resolve both the problems at the studio and a broader existential malaise; it is my birthday, after all. Well, I only have thirty minutes to walk, so I don't get very far with either pursuit. Mostly I wonder whether it might be good human management to make fun mandatory in the studio on my birthday.

Yesterday, however, Leray and I managed to hurtle our way through creating an entire shot list and storyboard, meaning today we each face the challenge of tedium: it's time for me to attempt to start scheduling, leaving Leray in the hands of the Tangibles - and our art team unfortunately have to delegate the less inventive jobs to their temporary ensigns (in this case, stencilling wallpaper).

The shot list seems to be quite completable in the eight days we have assigned to shoot it. Unfortunately, the matter is complicated by the varying availability of our enormous cast and our studio space - questions that I hope will be resolved over the next 24 hours, since the illusion of feasibility that comes with a draft schedule is like a warm hug in these nervous pre-tournage days.

Preliminary sub-hugs come in the form of our first actors-on-set: Felipe, who will play a security guard (and quite possibly the only biologically authentic human in 2187 Bourges) and Josephine, who will play the late Brieanne Morelle - the disgraced former heritage minister responsible for the state in which hero Harley Byrne finds the city. With their presence comes, if not the illusion of feasibility, at least the reassurance of some sort of inevitability.

They are both game, and we drape them in some preliminary costumes before attempting the canning of emotions - the back-up technique used by all major contemporary serials to ensure they can always complete the show if one of their actors should wander off or become otherwise unpresentable. It is a technique we first tried with enormous success with Stewart Lockwood/Harley Byrne himself.

This is actually a very challenging way to act, starting from a discrete emotion (hungry; outraged; numb) with no dramatic context or scenery. But it's a splendid way to get to know each other and to start figuring out the talent's metaphysical topography. 

It's also a great way to ensure the actors don't get too carried away with the ol' "method", and engage instead with preconceptions and stock characters. This tends to make Lockwood/Byrne look rather absurd as the only person who's trying to really get inside his character and create a nuanced, sensitive and sympathetic portrayal. He would never 'play' a villain, for example, because nobody believes they are a villain - just a person with certain wants, needs, and insecurities. Josephine, on the other hand, jumps right into being an awful Tory teen, and I find myself measuring her attempts at her given emotions against those of Theresa May (who is actually a great study figure for the 'I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way' type).

Midway through the day, before Felipe's arrival, our daily screening of Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers is interrupted as the Bandits-Mages team invade the studio with cake, sparklers, pink booze and other surely contraband materials. Somebody clicks play on iTunes and by coincidence, Lockwood's singing voice rings out as the track happens to be cued up to his guest vocal on Duett's Running Scared. Niemczyk is noted to have made herself quite at home in the studio, since she is wandering about in her socks (in fact a result of the rain/wet shoes). She hunts out the giant pink monster-feet slippers that Chaillou has found for her, and wears them around the impromptu party, apparently being all about the mandatory fun. Getting nervous, I draw the fun to a stop before Felipe walks in on us: there is already too much to explain.

UNIVERSAL EAR: A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear is now online

The first episode of Mr Cole's artist film series UNIVERSAL EAR is now available to watch online in full.

UNIVERSAL EAR is a lost adventure serial charting Harley Byrne’s ongoing mission: to capture and make available for download “all the world’s music, ever.”

Mr Cole and his roaming, ever-evolving Universal Ear Studios team have made it their business to (p)reconstruct this unfound serial of the future, episode by episode into infinity. Other texts, videos and supporting experiments have also materialized.

A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear was produced during an artist residency at Nexus Art Cafe in Manchester in May 2010 and premiered at Abandon Normal Devices in August 2012. The film stars Stewart Lockwood and Tuesday Betts; music is by Aidan Smith.

In this episode,  heroic ex-postman Harley Byrne travels back in time to 19^th century Romania, to record the world’s first ever remotely delivered electronic music. But while recovering from a dramatic splash-landing, he finds himself falling head-over-heels for his host, the sultry inventress Nola Luna. Is she really all she seems? Will she let him record her electronic ‘Orchitron’? Or will Harley Byrne finally be thwarted in his ongoing mission: to record and make available for download all the world’s music, ever?

A new episode of UNIVERSAL EAR will go into production during Mr Cole's forthcoming EMARE residency at Bandits-Mages in Bourges, France.

UNIVERSAL EARLog II Part 2: Day 4 (10)

The final day of the final reschedule of UNIVERSAL EAR: Banned Insubstance. It's Tuesday.

Today we are joined on set by Daniel Glynn who has been drafted in to play two roles: Linus, a disgraced former jockey (most character descriptions in this episode are prefixed by "disgraced former") and his disgraced former he-horse Gloria. In our excitement at Mush and Ravey's weekend work on Glynn's horse costume, we've completely forgotten to find him a jockey costume; we scour the area for a jockey shop to no avail, but a trip to Primark and a lucky tweet for a riding helmet see us right. We're against the clock today with Lockwood due to fly out of Manchester on the National Express at 15.00.

With every element now in place, we gather in the 'Zoom Room': a plywood-partitioned storage area of the Takk basement we have been using to perform our company anthem, Fat Larry's Band's Zoom, each morning before work - the idea being that the plywood will absorb unnecessary waves before they reach the paying customers upstairs. This precaution is particularly welcomed this morning as Glynn throws himself wholeheartedly into his performance, leaving no doubt as to his allegiance to the cause.

There is only one functioning movie light remaining, our other vintage bulbs having blown (and somebody didn't think to ebay 'new' ones as back-ups instead of waiting until we needed them as replacements). Boom shadows are almost unavoidable as I've fashioned our lone lamp into an unforgiving Mediterranean sun for today's horse stable scene; soundie Martin Salomonsen has no place to hide as miking from a distance tends to foreground the chatter, MacBook tapping and Scandi-pop from the cafe upstairs. Through a combination of Salomonsen's ingenuity and my turning a blind camera-eye to straying shadows, we line something workable up. There's something beautiful about an unintended boom-in-frame, like a dropped accent or a disappearing-reappearing wristwatch. If you want to see it as a negative thing, you aren't welcome in my cinema: such flaws are, in fact, wormholes into parallel extended filmiverses. Still, this isn't mentioned to Salomonsen as the set requires a certain (albeit upbeat) tension to operate.

The drama between Linus (a former sports-doper now strung out on street-dope) and Byrne (who wants to get his hands on the sports dope but recognises in Linus a tragic echo of his own degenerate brother, Santiago) is moving: Lockwood (playing Byrne), who has by now given up on pretending to have read the script, compares it to Shakespeare. Byrne tries the straight approach, flattery then empathy to get the required information from Linus until finally resorting to slapping the blissed-up wash-out repeatedly in the face. Still, by the end of the scene, they are in each others arms in one of the few non-libidinous shows of intimacy from Byrne that we've seen in the series so far.

With Linus and Byrne's scenes shot, the priority now is to get Byrne's scenes with Gloria the "mixed-up" horse before Lockwood has to leave for his coach. There is a delay as I struggle to frame a shot in which Gloria puts his hoof to his head in shame: deputy art director Mush has followed my precise instructions on which horse parts we need, and improvised beyond my wildest dreams in the execution of this horse-from-the-future (tigery!) costume, but there is a flaw in the plan: on creating the brief, I pictured the horse hoof, beak and ears as being worn by an actual horse, but as is to be worn by a person there is the difficult matter of framing out Glynn's human shoulder. The solution may be the closest thing Glynn has ever come to Yoga.

With the horse shot, we send Glynn on his lunch and casually set up a missing insert of Byrne first discovering the newspaper article which alerts him to the Linus-and-Gloria lead. It has been hand-drawn on the back of an unused (Lockwood's?) script this morning, by Takk Joe. Everything is ready, we've recreated our fine noir-window-frame set up from yesterday, when I decide that the light, that movie lamp with the one remaining vintage bulb, could be just a smidgen higher. In the farce that follows, the bulb is blown and we're left in the dark: Lockwood is sweating over the departure of his coach, I am overcome with self-loathing at having brought the production to its knees by simultaneously failing both as producer and cinematographer, and Salomonsen is philosophical - something along the lines of "it's in the nature of bulbs…"

Fortunately, this corner of the studio is brightly enough lit that we are able to get some, albeit unstylized, exposure for Lockwood's final shot. We pack him up and send him on his way. He has worked hard this weekend; he has ignored the script; he has seriously compromised the iconography of the character he has the honour to regularly personify by refusing to have his hair shorn into Harley Byrne's signature undercut for this episode. I suspect he won't get much sleep on that coach.

There is one final shot to get with Glynn alone: how long can it take to get this one shot? Quite long, attempting to again light the shot with just the studio's floating fluorescent tubes. Unable to get a flicker of recognition from Doris the Super 8 camera's internal light meter, we surround him with white cardboard and the Strig-Rig, shine our mobile phone torches at these and him, and finally, get some mechanical acknowledgement of our efforts when I hold my bicycle headlamp in my teeth and direct it straight at Glynn's face (one of my hands is holding a mobile torch and the other is needed to operate Doris).

Expect to see this one in cinematography textbooks in the near future

It's unconventional; it's unprofessional; it's probably ineffective. It's a wrap. The fourth episode of UNIVERSAL EAR has finished production. Next time I'd like to scale back the narrative and scale up the resources. The restrictions are becoming restrictive. Meanwhile, the rest of the afternoon is spent sweeping straw out of the studio, the rest of the day spent picking straw out of our hair. Byrne will be back.

Salomonsen, who were it not for his good nature might be pre-fixed "the long-suffering", attempts to mic a scene and be a lighting rig

UNIVERSAL EARLog II Part 2: Day 3 (9)

Monday, Day 3 of the Banned Insubstance reshoot in our temporary studio in the basement of Manchester's Takk coffee house.

The guest stars for this, the most expansive UNIVERSAL EAR episode so far, are starting to pile up: today we welcome Aidan Smith to the set - the Institute's staff composer, responsible for the soundtrack to our musical It's Nick's Birthday and the flea orchestra in A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear. He is to play Hector, another competitor in the Bash Walk event at the 2112 Olympid Games, who attempts to block hero Harley Byrne's progress with the quite legitimate use of a croquet mallet. It is not difficult to see that Smith has been awaiting his big chance to exorcise his inner actor: when he is directed to racewalk on the spot, he keeps enthusiastically speeding off out of shot. Our races are filmed on the spot for a reason: our original Nexus Art Cafe studio was too small for panning shots - or wide shots - and despite our new gaff being at least three times bigger, we've naturally nested into a Nexus-back-room-sized corner. 

By the end of the morning, he's standing where he's told, gnawing on his croquet mallet to intimidate his rivals and smeared with ketchup-blood, a statuesque vision of Extreme Future Sports beyond anything imagined in the likes of Rollerball or Death Race 2000.

Once Smith has turned in his performance and departed to put in a few hours at the library, just Lockwood, soundie Martin Salomonsen and myself remain on set. An efficient afternoon of pick-ups is planned, and instant progress is made when I inform Lockwood we are to start with three shots from the opening sequence, and he replies that we already filmed them last November. Did we? He has a good memory of it, or at least being in proximity to some of the props needed for this scene; I feel I must have had a good reason for scheduling them for today, but decide to trust my leading man. Instead, we erect a blue-screen studio that perhaps more closely resembles a padded cell, for our first attempt at chromakeying with Super 8. We'll see if it works when we get the footage back in a few months.

The most ambitious set-up of the day, however, involves shooting the reverse angles of the seduction scene we began last November. On that occasion, I had to body-double for Lockwood who was off sick; his character, hero Harley Byrne, confronts a corrupt National Olympid Committee official, Yolanda (played by Amanda Belantara) but is seduced before he can complete his line of questioning. Belantara has since skipped the country, so now we have Lockwood's face back for the reverse shots it falls to myself to once again step up as body double, albeit this time in place of someone half my size who looks much better in the required little red dress. (Although I still look pretty good, causing some introspection amongst the more or less heterosexual Lockwood and Salomonsen).

With me sitting on Lockwood's lap and Salomonsen's hands full of boom pole, this leaves no-one free to operate Doris, our Super 8 camera. Doris has no video monitor, just a tiny viewfinder, and no workable record lock, so Salomonsen body doubles as me body doubling as Belantara while I frame him up in a shot that I will be able to record myself when I retake my place from him on Lockwood's knee. It works: I even have a hand free to tune Lockwood's performance by fondling his pectorals, though I don't know how this will match with the rest of the scene as shot last year.

Every day of this shoot we've managed to complete the shotlist ahead of time. Granted, there have been shots cut, in one case half a scene (yesterday, when we were running out of Super 8 stock with no shops open and it being UNIVERSAL EAR villain-actress Tuesday Betts' last day on set) but never due to time restraints. If one ignores the fact that we already passed the end of the original schedule last November, one might almost claim we are "getting better". Or at least "getting quicker". This is just one of several worrying trends that suggest the UNIVERSAL EAR project needs a whole new set of techniques next time we tool up. Another being that whether he's dropped into a padded blue-screen studio or fondled by his director, Lockwood is starting to look all too comfortable.

UNIVERSAL EARLog II: Day 4

Lockwood texts in sick. We immediately scale down the production.

When Dr Who gets sick, do they regenerate him as tiny wooden man?

UNIVERSAL EARLog II: Day 3

Wednesday. We mess Lockwood up and Peter Easterbrook arrives to play Harley's brother, Santiago Byrne - the degenerate and Temporal Cubist who Harley reluctantly relies upon for his time-travel needs.

UNIVERSAL EARLog II: Day 2

Tuesday: Today’s guest star has left five grand’s worth of photographic equipment on the tram: fortunately, it is his own gear and is nothing to do with our production, except that in frantically hailing a taxi and chasing the tram across town, Garth Williams has made himself late for work at Universal Ear Studios.

But we have plenty to be getting on with before he arrives. Lockwood is attempting to replicate the sky with blue bedsheets from Primark and a new staple gun which he can’t switch off ‘safety’. Jennifer Jordan is striving on with the mobile foliage unit (MFU), which must go mobile today. And I am scouring the Methodist building above for a filmable door frame. We have just one day to film Williams’ cameo.

All of which playful productivity lapses into a late lunch when Williams, wide-eyed and sweating, joins us underground. It’s somewhat of a relief for me to see him like this as Williams – who had a supporting role singing and dancing in our musical It’s Nick’s Birthday – is an accomplished renaissance man, talented in many fields: actor, filmmaker, vaudevillian, a maker of fine chocolate brownies. Whilst we have a lot of talent involved with Universal Ear, there’s always the fear that someone new’s going to come on set and call my bluff. Primark sky? What are you playing at?

Thankfully, the tram incident has left Williams vulnerable and I’m able to puncture his confidence by bringing up the fact that he’ll have to perform in a fake Greek accent (I had assumed this was implicit in the script). We also put him in a skintight Adidas mono-tard and 80s wig. He is to play Evangelis, a simple but corrupt athlete in the 2112 Olympid games and the first person our hero Harley Byrne meets on arrival. Williams’ Greek accent results in much corpsing and further delays, but he and Lockwood manage to pull it together for the take. This is, of course, a one-take set – each shot is only filmed once and any mistakes are allowed to stand.

The second shot on this location sees Byrne emerge from an desktop tryst, and in order to get the required post-coital glow Lockwood disappears next door with the Nexus teddy bear again. After yesterday’s kicking, it’s proving a demanding week for that toy.

Finishing with that location gives us license to stop for biscuits, and it is only when we realise we’ve twenty minutes left before Williams has to leave that we are galvanised into action. This is the difficult stuff – the climax of the big finale in which Byrne must catch up with Evangelis on the race track and decide whether to complete his mission, or go for glory and win the race. Nexus boss Jenny O. arrives to wheel the MFU behind the athletes as they walk on the spot, creating the effect of them racing along the track without us having to leave the spot. It works!

We also get shots of Byrne tackling Evangelis to the ground, although when it comes to the critical take Lockwood completely forgets to pull Williams’ wig off – which de-robing is meant to be the big ‘reveal’ of the movie. Glancing apologetically at our sound gal Jennifer Jordan, I yell “Hair! Hair!” at Lockwood and he grabs the rug from Williams’ head, possibly just in time to save the shot – it being, as mentioned above, a one-take deal.

Compressing a couple of shots into one and getting others with nary a read-through, the energy of these climactic scenes translates itself onset as a kind of frantic efficiency, and at 17.32 we bundle Williams back out of the studio and towards his next appointment as sweaty and harassed as when he joined us five hours earlier.

UNIVERSAL EARLog II: Day 1

Two years on from our residency at Nexus Art Café, during which we reproduced three episodes of the lost adventure serial UNIVERSAL EAR, we return to the same little back room to do it all again for a fourth episode – Banned Insubstance. After four days of painting, gluing and bending the set and props together, today is to be the first day of shooting, in theory, if we can fight through the mess.

The first figure to join me on set this morning is Jennifer Jordan – sometime UNIVERSAL EAR guest star, and guest runner/sticker-onner/soundie for Banned Insubstance. She takes me by surprise as I am staring, apparently into space, but in fact at our mobile foliage unit, a mass of cardboard leaves attached to a wheely clothes rail, which has fallen apart overnight. The idea behind the mobile foliage unit – or MFU – is that with limited studio space, rather than film the script’s walking contest with a pan or wide shot of the actors in motion, we will have the actors walk on the spot and repeatedly wheel the background past them to create the impression of progress. We will we see if this works tomorrow, when we film the big finale race scene with guest star Garth Williams. Meantime, no-one wants to touch the MFU, its emotional temperament being such that even looking at it the wrong way can cause an avalanche of carefully glued leaves.

Lockwood checks in, then “On The” Mike Cacioppo, but we feel obliged to wait for Nexus boss (and thus our Executive Producer) Jenny O. to appear, given that she knows where all the junk we need to shift should go and it would be rude to sing the company anthem without her. Waiting, the conversation turns to ‘hair’, and our emotional connections with same prove an unexpected ice-breaking exercise. Among the four of us:

One has cut all their hair off partially on the advice of a bodiless ‘presence’;

One has grown a moustache out of boredom and worn it around town for a single day to see how it felt before shaving it off again;

A third has accidentally deoderized their pits with TCP having arrived at a stranger’s party stinking of BO;

And the final one has re-stickered all the creams and potions in their bathroom having grown sick of the brand labels.

This is the core of our dream team for the week.

Jenny O. arrives and refuses to join in the company anthem. But she will fight a few fights on our behalf as the day progresses and her loyalty to the organisation is not in question.

The remainder of the morning is spent wrestling with the MFU and finishing off 22nd century Olympia’s grass (paper) race track. In the afternoon, for the sake of morale, we decide we should definitely film something, so we begin to rebuild Stampy’s – a corner of the postal service’s members-only club, from where our hero Harley Byrne introduces each episode. Part of this intro is to be made up of re-used shots from previous intros, so it is imperative we make it look the same as when we last shot here two years ago. The bike in the background of the shot has since been stolen though, so we decide to take its absence as an acceptable continuity error. However, on surveying the café out front for the comfy chair Byrne previously spoke from, they seem to have grown so as to be impossible to squeeze through the studio doors. Spotting a smaller model of the comfy chair hidden beneath a customer, we decide to wait out her departure. Time is money, but on a £200 shoot we’re only talking small change here.

With a little further difficulty – mainly getting various bits of set to stay where they should – we’re ready to roll, and all that stands in our way is our indulgence of lead actor Lockwood’s new technique, as learned from Brian Astbury. It involves repeating his lines again and again whilst engaged in ‘right brain’ activities – controlled breathing, press ups against the wall, beating the crap out of the Nexus teddy bear – so as to free his subconscious to respond spontaneously to the script’s action. In fact, it makes him a bit cocky so I attempt to puncture his performance with various distractions, such as air traffic controlling Mike’s boom pole into Lockwood’s face. At one point I am paralysed by overwhelming déjà vu, until someone points out that we did in fact do exactly the same as this on the set we’ve replicated two years ago (sans boom pole). The idea is this time we can use all the lessons we learnt last time and achieve a more desirable state of imperfection: having achieved this, we’ll leave our Nexus methodology behind and start from scratch elsewhere for the next episode.

BANNED INSUBSTANCE: All-new episode of UNIVERSAL EAR goes into production

Production begins today on the fourth episode of UNIVERSAL EAR – a lost adventure serial of the future which we at L’Institute Zoom are charged with (p)reconstructing.

Harley Byrne’s ongoing mission is to record and make available for download all the world’s music, ever, for his employers at the Universal Ear record company – using his shed-built ‘Universal Ear’ recording device. In new episode Banned Insubstance, Byrne travels through time to Olympia, 2112 A.D., where Olympid athletes are using illegal motivational music to enhance their performances. Seduced and then snubbed by the corrupt Chairwoman of the National Olympid Committee, Byrne realises if he wants a shot at recording the Banned Insubstance, he’ll have to train for the games – and be strong enough to catch up with the cheats. But does his coach, a reformed ex-ear-doper, have Byrne’s best interests at heart?

Series regulars Stewart Lockwood (Byrne), Tuesday Betts (his arch enemy and mistress of disguise, ‘Being’) and Peter Easterbrook (Santiago Byrne) will return, joined by such luminaries of the Manchester alt-movie unscene as Garth Williams (It’s Nick’s Birthday) and Amanda Belantara (Sonotoki). The Banned Insubstance itself is to be reimagined and re-recorded by artpop misfits Modern Blonde.

Sets are being built in our pocket studio at Nexus Art Café today, tomorrow and Saturday. The movie shoots from Monday 12th-Saturday 17th November 2012, 11-7pm. Interested parties are welcome to drop in to the studio at their own risk. The shoot will be documented online at alltheworldsmusicever.com and in a new zine for the Salford Zine Library, which happens to be immediately next door to our studio.

The Institute has received £200 Micro Funding from Nexus Art Cafe and Artisan Manchester to do this important work.

UNIVERSAL EAR

There were over 1,000 episodes of the original UNIVERSAL EAR and we don’t know what order they’re supposed to be in. In each episode, Harley Byrne must travel to another time and place to re-discover – and re-categorise – someone else’s idea of ‘music’. He always gets his track.

The first reconstructed episode, A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear, premiered at the Abandon Normal Devices festival this August.

Harley Byrne: Library of Postures and Expressions

Readymade emotions

It is not uncommon, in the world of television and the cinematic serial, for the producers of a new show to create libraries of their main characters’ tics and poses, in effect "backing up" a serial's stars in case they should become lost or disfigured before the end of the run. We certainly believe this to have been the case with the original UNIVERSAL EAR, for not only did director Francis Dove place no value on authenticity of emotional performance, he planned to create entire unofficial episodes using just off-cuts, bad takes and whatever other footage he could get his hands on without alerting Harley Byrne (who played himself in the original) to his scheme.

So it is that, one week into the Institute’s short-lived Universal Ear Studios venture, I opened the day’s work with a brief lecture on the science of facial expressions, ahead of a planned afternoon of filming stock emotions for the UNIVERSAL EAR-remake library. Truth be told, I had pretty much thrown the speech together in a bar whilst waiting for Lockwood to get home with the keys the previous night, but all the same I was somewhat put out that he failed to take Duchenne seriously until the latter’s name cropped up in the former’s Acting Basics book a few days later.

There is clearly far more work to be done on this subject, and it is one of my great regrets of the Universal Ear Studios era that we did not have time to spend more days like this – speculating and creating standard parts, rather than zealously pursuing the completion of entire episodes. (A transcript of our ‘therapy’ session from that day’s end is available on request).

The lecture was open to the public without entry fee, but only Lockwood attended. I positioned myself between him and the door:

Faces, Electropuncture, and the Actor’s Craft

“Whilst facial expressions are thought, with a few ambiguous exceptions, to be universal (cross-cultural), the different proportions of an individual’s face can cause confusion. For example, somebody born po-faced might not necessarily be miserable – it’s just the way their nose came out.

As such, we calibrate our own minds to read the faces of people we know – to make minute personal adjustments to the rules their faces generally play by - and this also applies to the familiar stars of a regular adventure serial. We know, as it were, what they can achieve with their face, and we understand their feelings within those parameters.

There are three alternative processes, to my knowledge, to elicit a facial expression:



Above: polished-up diagram of 3 methods for eliciting a facial expression (terms in brackets refer to what can go wrong with each process). Below: two charts to each be considered synonymous with the above.

Concerned as we are here with controlled methods of production, we shall naturally consider following the ‘science’ route, as pioneered by Monsieur Duchenne, who would isolate and faradize the facial muscles of his heroic volunteers in order to learn more about the mechanics of emotional manifestion – face-wise. Duchenne de Boulogne (1806-1875) believed that one could not read moral character from facial expressions - only emotions. However, we can posit that a series of such emotions – frame by frame – in the context of a particular narrative and aesthetic surroundings, allows us to at least attempt a moral or dynamic emotional analysis: and this is Cinema.

The danger, though, is to assume that cinema – or rather, photography – is Truth. It is not. It is  re-presentation, pixels or photons splattered onto a 2-dimensional screen. As such, this is what gives us license to manipulate the human face-image as a collection of symbols that hint at a real human face whilst referencing broader visual codes, from colour and geometry to landscape or circuitry. But we only have so much time today… and given that Mr Lockwood is interpreting Harley Byrne’s reinterpretation of Byrne’s own real-life experiences, we might do best to adopt (however multiply-filtered) verisimilitude as our aesthetic priority.”

So the lecture ended: and indeed, without verisimilitude of circumstances, verisimilitude of emotional expression was no picnic. My attempts to inspire Lockwood’s emotions with a range of condiments (salad dressing &tc.) or with carefully chosen images from a favourite book of mine were controversial at the time and remain a bone of contention between my muse and I to this day. However the results – if they do not speak – sneer, cower, spasm and thrust for themselves.

Please note the music is not our own work but has been shamelessly checked out from Pietro Grossi's Electronic Soundtracks library music LP.

GOUCLog 1

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.

What do we do when our heroes go south?

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.