Recontres Bandits-Mages Program Notes

On Monday, our absurdist cop flick Epizoda ? had its international premiere at Recontres Bandits-Mage. The event's director Isabel Carlier asked me to select some films to play alongside our own, within the themes of this year's encounter. These are the program notes I composed for the event, including some thoughts on my 2017 residency at Bandits-Mages:

The three movies that form the program may not at first glance have much to do with each other. A meta-documentary on love and identity, a post-Tsukamoto monster romance, and a broken-down detective show. But each presents a vision of instability from their surface scaffolding, through their foundations, deep into whatever’s below. In each movie, the potential for transformation is hinted at, but it’s a transformation that is inseparable from destruction. The movies are maintained as much by the volatile portals that open up in the fissures as by the physical substance that weighs them down.

Kaori Oda’s Twitter biography used to read, “Am a camera”. Now it says, “filmmaker / log”. Her identification as a media cyborg does not preclude a profound and troubled humanhood. She watches and she records, but very quietly she also talks. ‘Thus a Noise Speaks’ is ostensibly about gender, sexual and family identity but the video’s mechanical exoskeleton is tangled in these vines. This is the digital human hybrid as a breathing video archive.

Ghazi Alqudcy has a morbid interest in the everyday and a healthy interest in the morbid. In ‘My Parents Are Animals’ we witness degradation, humiliation, excreta and noodles. A park, a kitchen, a doctor’s office become the showgrounds for subversion of the established social, physical and biological rules: yet love, as we know, remains a survival game requiring adaptation, submission, cruelty and affection.

Somehow the free-associating doctor of ‘My Parents’ is a cousin of Detective Inspector Colin Giffard, the English-named Bosnian detective of my own ‘Epizoda ?’. Giffard’s tragedy is that he is the privileged and inevitable outcome of a system to whose underlying code he has been refused access. As with ‘Thus A Noise Speaks’, the generic form and the wet content make for a pensive chimera; however, Kaori’s video nurtures an unpredictable potential for growth, while in ‘Epizoda ?’ we find only rot. Yet, both are processes that require the progress of time. When making ‘Epizoda ?’, I never asked myself if Giffard is searching for salvation: I only knew that this media dinosaur wanted to make it safely to the end.

Residency

When we virtualize our culture it becomes vulnerable to evaporating on a hot day or blowing away in the wind. Decay is history evolving. A stone monument remains alive even if blown apart. Its negative imprint stands sturdy in the memory dust. What do we mean when we talk about protecting our “way of life”? Can it be described as an endless reel of gestures and actions (with periods of snoozing)? Could we reduce it to a choreographic score, save it in scrolls and reanimate it? How different would the playback look if it was scored by Edvard Munch or Charles M. Schulz?

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

Each episode sees Byrne travel to another time and place, where his efforts to find and record humanity’s rarest musics are hindered by his arch-enemy, Being, mysterious mistress of disguise.

It has become my own personal mission to (p)reconstruct these as yet unmade pocket adventures, one by one into infinity.

Inspired by recent developments in ‘virtual heritage’ – hologram Buddhas, hologram dead pop stars, 3D printed replicas of the still-smoking remains of Syrian monuments – I shall follow Harley Byrne to a future Bourges we don’t yet know: a future in which the concrete present overlaps with 3D, hologramatic and augmented reality meta-levels in a manner that is not so much ‘mixed-reality’ as ‘mixed-authenticity’.

What will the great-great-granddaughters of today’s heritage ministers consider important enough to preserve in ever-looping projections, town square battles and beheadings that recur in full digital fidelity each day with sharper regularity than the lighting of the street lamps? Which personal accomplishments and disasters will solipsistic curators make virtual space for in the alleys and byways of a city frozen in the past by the technologies of the future? What hymns to sing in the graveyards we’ll build for our virtual PA’s? What bitcrushed cries will echo through these temporal interstices with musical regularity?

Cf. alltheworldsmusicever.com

Epizoda ?

My Parents Are Animals

Thus A Noise Speaks

Sarajevo-Split Log 3

Twas a dark and stormy night that played host to the first ever public screening of the Unfound Peoples Videotechnic, and the official closing of my residency in Split and Sarajevo (although there are screenings and meetings to attend to in the next few days before I leave). To see the work of the graduating students played out with structural rigour - one after the other with nary a mixtape artist's gesture to mutual complementarity - was to see four cine-voices of distinctiveness chant in startling, dissonant unison. Each filmmaker showed three one minute films, followed by video-manifestos of varying length, and we finished (still damp, only thirty minutes after coming in from the rain) with the rough cut of my own Split 'contemplation'. This is not the place nor the time for a full report on the residency, but those who've followed via this log, Twitter, meetings and presentations, and unprompted confessions on public transport, will know that I've been startled, confused, crushed and re-inflated by the variety of film, video, text and humanity that my research and response to the Kino Klub phenomenon and associated themes has provoked. As such, I find no better way to conclude my log than to publish the full screenplay of my final residency work. Hvala, and laku noc.

“Exterior, stone town - Day

A lone figure, dressed somehow futuristically, wanders the abandoned arcade. The city howls with emptiness. Our hero shivers, although the morning is warm. She takes a communication device from her pocket, pokes at it with her thin, foreign fingers until the WiFi receiver flickers into life. There is just one, faint network available. It is named, in English “Abandon All Hope”. Arching her eyebrow, our hero stabs five electronic letters into the Password field. 

D A N T E

Dante. Password incorrect. Thinking again, our hero enters: 

H E R E

Dialling up an old map application, she positions herself within parallel landscapes, one virtual, one made of the afore-mentioned stone. But the walls and passageways seem misaligned.

She tries a different application. Rather than satellites, it uses the vibrations of the street ambience to create an acoustic fingerprint that can be compared with those kept on a remote database, in a run-down renderfarm, in a forgotten bunker, on a different frequency. According to the application she is in Mirny, Siberia, 500 metres in the ground. But she knows this cannot be in Mirny, Siberia; she took the bus for the city of seven winds. 

She takes a WiFi meter from her pocket and holds it to the air. It is difficult to get a reading, but when the figures emerge, the situation is as she feared. The WiFi in this town is rotten.

Switching back to the map application, she accepts the faulty GPS for what it is. The real and virtual paths match up like misaligned ghosts on an old VHS tape. Perhaps like the offline movie she has searched so long for: the type her electronic eye implants, whose license period has long expired, can watch with impunity. Surely it is here, in the Paradise Video Rental store, as she was promised by the old man on the boat.

A breeze whispers through her soul, and she cannot identify whether it came from outside or within.

Exterior, town - Lost

The streets and monuments now palpably offset from the map, she roams skewed echoes of the routes described by what she now senses to be the deliberately warped cartography of the town.

As in a funhouse, which this is not, she feels herself manipulated by undulating surfaces and tricked perspectives, into taking a new path. But she locates herself yet; WiFi currents, like familiar breezes, define our understanding of a city – if, unlike the winds, they also define the city’s understanding of us. The index becomes the memory, she develops a sense for her position, but still…  

Exterior, day – Paradise Video Rental

Or is it? The letters are five metres wide on the map, but out here there is no sign, no buzzer. Just a door that seems to morph into a giant question mark. And our hero’s answer is, what the heck. She has collected too much dust in her shoes to give up now. This is where the corrupted GPS has directed her. Perhaps, someone even wanted to guide her here.

Forcing the door, she steps into the badly-mapped darkness.

Interior, mystery building - Day

It smells of mould and dust and disparate spores dragged by the wind from seven directions, deposited here and shut in who-knows-how-many years before.

Her heart begins to race, for her highly developed nostrils also pick up something that smells like videotape. Could it be her over-active olfactory imagination, whose development was inverse to the decline of her original eyes?

Interior, corridor - Day

Searching.

Interior, office - Day

Watched by nobody, she stalks the abandoned building.

Interior, locker room - Day 

Maybe there was a moment, long before her time, when each video rental store would have one thousand employees. Perhaps this was such a megastore, staffed with low-paid workers from the underdeveloped hinterland, trained to process the exchange of videocassettes, little suspecting that cables with code were snaking their way into society, ready to puncture the throat of the offline viewing experience with the blunt plastic fang of the LAN plug. Possibly this is the fantasy of a jaded cyborg VJ whose eye implants have long outlived their license agreement.

She opens a locker by impulse, the locker with the Nick Nolte sticker. Treasure! A batch of videocassettes in unmarked sleeves, no rental collection but something else.

She checks the other cabinets for the appropriate machinery, but they are empty.

Interior, laboratory - Desperate

She stumbles upon racks of test air, abandoned miniature thermals. From amidst rows of the desperate scientist’s long-deserted and now highly-valuable booze stash she grabs a vintage tin of energy drink.

Interior, junk room - Soon after

She finds the appropriate machinery.

Interior, locker room - Again

The sound of the machine taking the tape is like a thirsty dog lapping at water.

The first tape is meaningless, but the colours feel good on her eyes. The footage is teasingly short, a throwaway snippet of a council worker in a crane who appears to have been dispatched to rescue a pair of shoes from the high branches of a tree.

The shot is abandoned by its anonymous creator before the action is played out. We can say that it is completely random, most likely never uploaded. To see real live recorded people in a space that she knows to have been vacated, a place she has seen with her own eyes, seen it unpeopled, chills her bones. What is this city, whose only moving parts are the reel hubs in the cassettes she herself has disturbed?

She plays back the short clip again and again, perhaps looking for a pattern, although perhaps she does not know this. Well, one random film by itself can be non-narrative, but as soon as you add another, a narrative is suggested.

The images on the second tape appear to be a curated selection of corrections, each shot framing a focus or aperture adjustment, these fixes arranged rhythmically, the naked sound of the camera’s moving parts whispering candidly of the anonymous author, we will call him Bogdan Sumnja, obsessively, neurotically searching for an ideal setting, a focal length to believe in. A masterpiece in structural ASMR, or the offcuts of the driest holiday video, both or neither, the author – if so arch a term can be assigned such an insecure cinematographer – a dabbler maybe, an amateur in the Latin sense: from the Latin, amore, amator, to love, lover… but a grim kind of love, a determined enthusiasm, hobby as destiny.

Glimpses of the city’s natural zone, the national park, assert themselves, almost embarrassed to be there, the accidental testimony of a space that just was.

Now and then, images of a woman: her identity unknown, unimportant, even as her agency, authority permeates the image, pushing the water and the insects and the leaves down the hierarchy, demanding respect.

And all the time those sounds, too real, too intimate, their presence an agonizing tension between the unintentional and the deliberate. This is the city as a negotiation that cannot be won, a dance with invisible currents, the citizen as slave to entropy, it is video waste matter, a smear of pixels, a stinking byproduct of one doubtist’s near insane contemplation. Vernacular surveillance of a malevolent stillness, the incriminated cityscape frozen in the headlights, dust and butterflies animating the complacent air between buildings.

She is becoming convinced that these videos are the work of a local chapter of the international Random Visual Recordings Club, an unintentionally mysterious cabal of video listeners obsessively gleaning the pixels of found tapes and stolen camera-phones, vernacular realism as Rorschach test, amateur media theorists, outsider psychologists whose day-jobs as architects, engineers or surgeons cultivated vulnerable new understandings of a visual form of whose canonical works they probably had very little understanding at all. They strained against randomness, their semi-abstractions seeming to ask: what is a recording? What is a scene? What is a video, a movie? What should go in? without every approaching a convincing answer, wanting not to be convinced, yet pompous enough to never doubt the importance of visual recordings.

And here is the third tape. Random yet; she begins to trace overlapping materials between the purportedly discrete recordings.

The director of the third tape, a paint technician, we will call her Zorka Glupost, features prominently: she can be recognised from the previous recording, Bogdan’s assemblage of focus changes and zooms, which we can assume are out-takes from another of Zorka’s visual recordings. This is how they worked together, Zorka directing Bogdan’s camera to capture random raw recordings for her to work with, Bogdan using the offcuts to make his own experiments, to declare his own marginality. Between Bogdan and Zorka grew a mythology of the mundane, a private universe of moments and microclimates whose index radically scrambled its referents.

And here, on this tape now, Zorka Glupost disappears into the city through a series of audaciously tasteless video effects, the meticulously documented weather systems in and around their shared apartment crushed, prettied, or – the visitor cannot be sure – perhaps they are legitimate electronic interpretations of the psycho-meteorology of the place. Where are Glupost and Sumnja now, where are their children or their children’s children or the descendants of their friends and enemies? What happened in this city that only the weather remains?

Interior, locker room - Half-daft

The fourth tape. Another anonymous authoress, another paid up subscriber to the Random Visual Recordings Club. The wind traced through clip after clip of the disturbance it leaves in its path. And which of the city’s seven winds?

The recording has a structure, but an idiot’s structure. Only an idiot would film the wind. Take your child to the zoo – you will get your screenplay. This recording has the innocence of a baby photo.

She fidgets on her pop crate, the temperature has shrunk since the wind video started playing. What does she know about the seven winds? The north wind, the 205, brings a chill, but it clears the air; the skies turn blue, rivalries and arguments cool in proportion to the strength of that particular occurrence. The south wind, the 508, an infinite, looping, miserable wind. Countless fine minds have been lost to the 508. The 102 is the wind of waiting and of solutions. It would not have been uncommon to see, on such days, the people of the city standing on corners, sitting on the church steps or riding the orbital bus around and around until the wind should pass and long-sought understandings be reached. It was said to be highly unlucky to remove a pot from the boil on a day that the 102 was blowing. The twin winds, the 300 and the 303, a wind within a wind; these are disorienting winds, contradictory winds, winds that bind, winds that betray, winds in which not to utter a secret. The 208 is the returning wind; a wind that never drops its scent. A wind full of nostalgia and regret, constructed from Proustian gusts. A house burned to the ground in the 208 would shimmer, ghostlike, when the wind returned months later, shimmer on the nasal frequencies of those who smelled the smell the first time round. But the seventh wind, the 404. Nobody talks of the 404. What was this wind? A malevolent wind, a wind that consumes? Is this the wind the random videographers were testifying to, warning of, even? Leaving shoes, unpeopled, hanging from the branches; was it the 404 that Bogdan Sumnja was struggling to expose, rather than landscapes, insects or people?; Zorka Glupost’s study, diary of swirling atmospheres around her nest; and now this idiot’s movie, anonymous, obsessive, a hunter of malicious breezes?

These recordings are neither art nor science; like the former, they are a puzzle with fuzzy edges, implying connections yet impossible to click together; so fuzzy are those edges, you could slip between them and disappear. If these films are a code, a science report, who were they intended for? For Her? History is solipsistic; it makes an Other of those outside one’s specific timeframe. But culture is a waterfall, a flame: it is the shape of the temporary. Was it the wind that took them, the 404, were these their screams, futile, lost in the wind?

Her attention is drawn back to the electronic map; its deliberately warped dimensions disguising the true lie of the city to her, yet guiding her to this unexpected trove of irrational recordings. These young ancestors did not claim to be artists; they did not claim to be activists; but they dressed like activists, cameras in hands, pissing photons in the wind, apolitical post-humans protesting they knew not what, for is it any good to protest the wind?

Exterior, stone town - Day

In a post-digital toybox wasteland, the wind-up mechanical snake is king. Meteorological reports imply a delay of 216 frames due to a pressure system with an existentially suspect codec; digital artefacts lingering in the atmosphere, perhaps even as low as head height; anyway, we know the people here were tall and would have been highly sensitive to the threat of low-hanging doorways, windswept gulls, and the like.

She walks heroically towards the sunrise."

Sarajevo-Split Log 1

"In the time when there was the law that people were not fully responsible for the crime they commited [sic], during stormy weather along Adriatic Coast. (Because there was a southern wind (Yugo) which made people depressive.)"

So reads the .srt introducing the start of the late Montenegrin filmmaker Živko Nikolić's peculiar 1977 little-islander flick, Beštije (Beasts). Coming on like Jean Rollin without the boobs, or even Peter Greenaway without the rhythm, Beštije dwells in uncanny territory, shot on location in the castle town of Kotor, but lit and performed with such artifice that it feels like a claustrophobic chamber play.

I don't think it gives too much away to point out that the only beasts in Beasts are of the humaine kind, a cast of self-interested eccentrics on one side and army of indistinguishable babas on the other, variously trying to shag, lynch, or bury alive a pale stranger who arrives on the island one rainy night (when morning is finally portrayed in the epilogue, the very concept of daylight feels alien). Neither does the wind make much of a an appearance; a relief to me, as I was already discomforted by the introductory lines, having chosen at random to watch this movie on the very day I commenced editing the as yet untitled but Yugo-wind themed video we shot in May as part of my Kino Klub residency.

I've been in Sarajevo for a week, to commence the second part of my Balkan residency (vagaries of scheduling compelled me to switch the Zagreb section of my itinerary for Sarajevo, although I'll still reach Split as planned in the second week of September). My time here will be divided fourfold: the festival; a second, youth film festival; completing the aforementioned wind work ahead of Split; and trying to draw out some connections between the Sarajevo Kino Klub scene and its more celebrated equivalents in Split, Zagreb and Belgrade.

Split Log 8

Two artists doing very different but very good work here in Split are (Kino Klub tech person) Marin Tudor and Hrvoje Cokarić.

Tudor is inspiring for his irrepressible enthusiasm for everything. Introduced to me as an 'actor', all this really seems to mean is that he studied acting and now uses his body as tool, object and subject for a range of freely associative and rarely completed projects - inhabiting an abandoned display case outside Split's United Colours of Benetton, sitting Stylites-style half-way up a wall, creating suites of furniture from discarded plastic coffee spoons, tinkering with this or that to see what it could really do. In some ways he reminds me of Richard Widmark's existentially-stranded Harry Fabian in Night & The City, the description of whom as an 'artist without an art' I return to again and again; except that Tudor is an artist with too much art, a co-puppy frustrated by his inability to get things finished, because there's always something else to do, and never a good reason to apply the brakes. I toast you, Marin Tudor (Marin, tu dor!). He is also more than adept with a projector, creating living slides from chemicals and whatever else he finds; he will come on board as projectionist and smoketographer for my forthcoming video shoot.

Cokarić, he of the robotic Dalmation donkeys, is doing his bit for donkey preservation: meeting him on a tour of the mostly (thankfully) defunct local zoo, up in the Marjan hills, he explains that the particular lineage of asses in this part of Croatia has a noble history but faces its end having been out-evolved by the motor car. With a depth of artistic and ecological insight that is surely not lost on these wise creatures themselves (reader, you are encouraged to delve further hereabouts), Mr Cokarić is working on developing the surviving donkeys - and, hopefully, their manifold descendants - into a super-breed of mountain-climbing video edit suites, generating their own power in the unconnected wilderness, and carrying all a nomadic filmmaker requires to produce artist's moving image on the go (one of the donkeys is named “Marina Abramović”). The Chthulucene will be televised! It would be wonderful to establish an itinerant art residency on a donkey's back, it's only a shame I don't have the time - as my Kino Klub residency draws towards its end - to further explore the blurry lines between amateur, industrial and avant-garde in the context of these gloomy cyborg editing stations.

Hrvoje Cokarić: the carrot and the memory stick.

Kino Klub's Sunčica Fradelić horsing around with a 16mm Bolex.

Split Log 05

The birds are chirping, although there’s no sign yet of the sun. I envy them their circadian rhythms, behaviour as secret information. I have become convinced that my own rhythms have become faulty, my feelings – which perhaps I should have left at home – ebbing and flowing with the unpredictability of the capricious Dalmation winds. Meanwhile, my information sources are wholly orthodox: books, videos, the internet, the flawed recollections of other people. They are reforming as quivering inaccuracies in my mind and, occasionally, as words on the internet or out of my mouth.

Saturday, we officially – but without ceremony – inaugurated the Unfound Peoples Videotechnic at Kino Klub Split (a temporary lodging for a roaming academy). The opening lecture, titled Mythology of the Self, seemed to be well-received by our historic initial cohort. It was a relief just to get through the damned thing without running out of things to say or being assaulted or, worse, called-out. I hope it was of some use, but in developing a total filmmaking education program (indeed, it is billed as a radical de-programming reprogramming program) this first lecture can only be regarded as the damping of the nib. It was far too factual, if my opinions were admirably smeared into the raw information, and with too many references to the ‘real world’. In preparing (destroying) a limited edition .pdf of notes for participants to take away with them, I began to find a greater poetry in omission and deliberate obfuscation; words, as some wise old chap once said, are given to us to hide our true meaning. I’m running an artist’s workshop, not a cooking show.

My own studies, however, focussing presently on the Kino Klub movement, are drawn into a peculiar dichotomy of word and sound-image: the Klubs’ golden era, the hub of their collective thematic resonances, was half a century ago; the movies of the time are largely wordless, but are explained in a tornado of written manifestoes, articles and histories which variously overlap, correct and contradict each other. It’s most inspiring, all this writing, and a curious analogue to what would have been the equivalent had I ‘been there’ – conversation, both languid (lazy young revolutionaries pushing ideas around with twigs on the beaches of Split) and quasi-diplomatic (the minuted, numbered and catalogued ‘discussions’ of Zagreb’s smoky projector rooms). Of course, I wouldn’t have understood a word if I’d ‘been there’. Maybe that would have engendered a more appropriate feeling. Certainly, I’m enjoying (and understanding) the films more on a collective level, starting to feel I know the filmmakers (which I never will) better than I know the films (which I have watched repeatedly). Projections…

Your corrections are welcomed in the Comments box.

Split Log 04

Dazzled by words and light, unable to form the former or comprehend the latter, for now a synthesis of both in the precisely 11,000 as-yet unphotoshopped words below. Logging with words-words is proving somehow unnatural for now. Embiggen for detail.

Split Log 03

Scouting for locations, feelings, in Omiš.

IndieLisboa'13: The jury's long since returned

If you've been following the Institute's other social networking platforms closely, you'll already be aware that at the end of April I was honoured to be part of the international short film jury at IndieLisboa'13 International Festival of Independent Cinema. (Our short musical It's Nick's Birthday received a Special Mention from the Jury at IndieLisboa'09).

Along with my esteemed fellow jurors Inês Nadais and Tess Renaudo, we saw over 70 short films before talking, eating, drinking and dancing ourselves to a verdict. Thousands of € and millions of prestige were bestowed upon our chosen ones: a full run down on the winning films can be seen below, or here.

I elaborated on some of the recurring themes and stylistic tendencies of the program in a fascinating piece over on Neil Young's Jigsaw Lounge. So read that.

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 Part 2: Day 2 (8)

 Above photos credit: Rachel Ravey

Words to follow...

UNIVERSAL EARLog II Part 2: Day 1 (7)

It's always a worry when we welcome new collaborators to the set. I try hard to prepare them in advance for the adjustments they will have to make but only experience truly does the job.

Our new sound recordist, Martin Salomonsen, has also had the luxury of a briefing from his predecessor "On The" Mike Cacioppo, who has fled the country with the episode's guest star Amanda Belantara. (Luckily we already got her shots). Thus, when Martin is the first person on set and I arrive apologizing that it's become apparent he will be working against tremendous noise from our host cafe Takk upstairs, he takes it in his stride. With a bit of schedule re-jigging, we decide we can incorporate the Northern Quarter's chattering, MacBook-tapping hipsters as 22nd century Olympid Games-goers.

Mush, however, who has joined us as unofficial art department head, casually mentions that she used to do this sort of thing "for real" and politely asks if we always just make it up as we go along. Mush's first job of the day is to make the Institute's contract starlet Tuesday Betts look like Ernest Borgnine. Mr Borgnine is the inspiration behind the disguise Bett's character 'Being' adopts for this episode of UNIVERSAL EAR. This is precisely the experience it takes to recalibrate our new artist to the Institute's way of doing things. With a bit of patience, a bit of fleece, a pair of tights and some tit tape, the job is soon a good'un.

Further illustrating for Mush the improvised nature to our schedule, Executive Producer Sugden arrives out of the blue with 5-year old Rudie, the latest in a line of UNIVERSAL EAR child labour. Rudie nearly misses out on his big break though when he proves too short to show up on any of his cameo walk-throughs. Rudie's main role on set today will be to keep our adrenalin up by repeatedly donkey-kicking a rubber ball prop (meant as a punch bag) at our last functioning movie light and at Doris herself, our now legendary Super 8 camera.

We're nearly thrown when I unwrap a brand new, foil-sealed Super 8 cartridge and find it's already been 'Exposed'. Betts speculates that perhaps it contains the missing Egyptian episode despite no mortal hands (outside of the Kodak organisation) ever having touched this virgin film. We'll find out in time as I managed to muddle it with our legitimately-exposed cartridge so will now have to get both processed. 

Somehow, all the above-noted instability is transformed into action and despite not firing our first shot off until halfway through the day, for the first time ever we manage to get every shot on the list made before kicking-out time. Perhaps it was something to do with creative entropy and strange energy. Perhaps because we saved time on hairdressing when no-good sell-out Lockwood insisted on preserving his hair and jeopardising the iconic look of UNIVERSAL EAR hero Harley Byrne in the name of some big-time commercial shoot next week. Either way, we're surely due for a big post-pride fall on Day 2.

It's Nick's Birthday: a glimpse behind the giant pizza-top finale

*UPDATE: the musical is now available to watch in full on Vimeo.*

April 2007, and the It's Nick's Birthday crew reconvene to shoot the big finale of our DIY musical: a triumph-over-adversity-romance on a giant spinning pizza complete with dancing cigarettes, pineapple chunks and Grim Reaper Olive.

The raw unedited footage in the video above is comprised of a single reel of Kodak Vision Super 8 film and seems to capture the joy, energy and mess of the day. As writer/director I felt a bit lost, as much of the focus of the day went on building the set (in the Studio at Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre), learning/developing the dance moves (our philosophically inclined choreographer was Fran Higginson, who would later re-join our crew as Physical Welfare Enforcer on the UNIVERSAL EAR project) and getting the technical stuff up and running - chiefly the rear projection. As such it was a brilliant opportunity to master the skill of looking important and busy but not really doing anything - a vital director skill I suspect they don't teach at film school.

The drawings below are art director Louisa Birkin's visions for the costumes. Following a successful festival run, the film will be online in full from March 4th. Please Like our Facebook page for updates.