As America marks Bonfire Night just as we marked Independence Day, let's let it happen and just crawl down a hole, because it's all okay, look into the screen, closer, I found the hole. Come on. Let's go. Just for now. Into the screen...
Once you're out, don't look up how old Kane Pixels is (no relation) or how he shot this. But do look up parts three and one, especially if you're into horror and into general and zillenial definitions of the liminal (thresholds and corridors) because both The Oldest View and its creator are doing something quite firsty. In fact, look up how it was shot as well, and maybe also look at this video about Utopian Botanist Julien Bercheron and the Vally View Mall, Texas, which mysteriously appeared once in my recommendations, and led me to this hole.
Allow me to present these edited highlights of a tribute to the – apparently – thousands of sound effects artists required to bring a single episode of radio to life, according to this startlingly untrustworthy and increasingly Lynchian "Jam Handy Picture" from 1938 called, for some reason, Back of the Mike. Here are four men recreating the sound of a telephone:
And here, over a decade before The Archers was first broadcast, is someone testily soothing a cow:
I was inspired to do some research into this subject by Margaret Cabourn-Smith's shining turn as The Goon Show's solo foley artist "Janet" in Spike, which I saw at the Richmond Theatre on Thursday with her husband Dan Tetsell who had just finished his own run on EastEnders, completing the BleakEnders trifecta...
To save the kerfuffle of taking down bank details, I had given Dan two sleek tenners for the ticket – tenners aren't "crisp" any more, but is "sleek" the word? – which he then passed on to Mervyn Millar whom we met in the pub afterwards for tickets to My Neighbour Totoro at the Barbican. Mervyn in turn handed these on to Barry Cryer's son Bob who was the fourth at our table – I don't know for what, but it didn't matter, I'd really enjoyed the show and some pints and was now in the mood to find transactions like these immensely pleasing.* Here's the sound of a horse chase:
I talked to Mervyn about how much I'd been considering recently the increasing popularity of puppets in theatre, because I figured he must have played a part in that, and I asked how he got started: Apparently his first puppet had been a judge, built because there simply hadn't been enough time for the actor he was directing to do the full quick change. Here's a rain storm:
Bob Cryer was lovely too, and talked about the passing of his father, and the slight oddness of
grieving alongside a parasocial fan community (Ray Galton's son had
suggested they team up with Rory Kinnear and Lucy Briers to form the "Sons
Or Daughters Of Famous Fathers", or SODOFF.) I had a great time.
Naturally Margaret ended the show doing the splits. More surprisingly, she opened it accidently knocking her enormous gramophone off a trolley. I was very happy to be sitting next to Dan for that – that's the joy of live theatre – and I was also very happy the show ended with a performance of 1985. The tour ends soon, and the final Richmond show is going up within an hour of me posting this so sorry for that, but go if you can.
What else did I enjoy about that night? The pub was giving out free dog biscuits. Eating those took me back.
Here's more research:
* UPDATE: Margaret has just informed me it was for a ticket to Spike. Perfect.
Still in space, The ? Motorist (as I knew it back in the nineties when I was making my rounds of the Museum Of the Moving Image, where it used to play on a loop) is a film about a car made when both inventions were in their infancy, and has the narrative pace and logic of a toddler playing with a new toy, but one can still enjoy with clarity over a century later the surprising precision and ingenuity gone into realising something this stupid on film: Sixty seconds in and we've already run over a policeman, driven up the side of a building, and landed on a cloud. It's only when we reach Handover Court that the pace starts to drag. It's an odd lacuna, that court scene. You start trying to read lips. Who's on trial? Why are their eyebrows so big? I pondered these questions so intently I completely missed the transformation into a horse-and-carriage.
I met Gemma this evening, who's currently having to teach the Theatre of the Absurd. I realised she's one of the best teachers I know and among other things we talked about how, when playing someone simply doing a job, questions about motivation and even audibility don't actually have to apply. I suggested silent movies probably did us a favour by freeing drama from text, and showing how great an actor you could still be without an audience necessarily understanding what you were saying. The Handover Court scene in The ? Motorist is not a great an example of that.
Otherwise the film's a little masterpiece, and thanks to David Cairns for reminding me of it, and also for alerting me to its sequel which has a robot in it.
I've been a little feverish since Monday. Whistling nostrils. Some bug. Not covid. Also, my gums have been playing up ever since I sifted through the dust bag of our Henry, looking for the inmost of a set of Matryoshka, but these two conditions are probably unrelated.
Anyway, I've needed rest and fresh air, so I stay in and I go out and stay in and go out with no real plan or pattern beyond just that, and today in Holland Park I noticed how my subconscious had started regarding all the squirrels as simply different phases of the same single squirrel, like the frames of an old film come to life. I tried to take a picture to illustrate this but, as if in confirmation, never managed to photograph more than one. One would think it might be simpler to just accept the reality of there being a lot squirrels in a park, and those squirrels all looking like each other, but no, my absent mind was working on the assumption it could see a fourth dimension. And that was the state of brain when I turned up Queensway, and saw this...
All the way down the racks, bicycles' shadows had been traced onto the pavement in coloured chalk. Some of the shadows themselves had gone. A day's work.
The unaccommodated artist was still there, outside Sainsbury's. "Tee Em," he said, then his name, which I didn't quite catch. Maybe Gareth. He had company, so I didn't ask twice. He didn't want me stealing his work. Very fair. Noone has cash on them these days, but there was a cashpoint outside Bayswater.
Grey skies as I write this. Finally. The kind of darkness visible that turns all light golden. Here are a couple of frames from Ian Hubert's Dynamo Dream.
I've saved this post for a rainy day. Two years ago I shared Hubert's glorious, minute-long tutorials in how to conjure a city out of nothing, but this is the proper fruit of his time and talents. In the year since Episode One : Salad Mug went out, television shows with bottomless pockets like The Sandman, Foundation and Rings of Power have produced similarly breath-taking scenery for characters to stand around and talk slowly in – and maybe in another year it will seem quaint I was so blown away by this – but I don't think any of the big shows has yet managed to match for imagination, care, or life, the twenty-one and a half minutes of this solo passion project. Isn't it amazing what they can do these days? Hasn't it always has been? That's also part of the thrill of it. Put this on the biggest screen you've got.
Almost as surprisingly, it was filmed in portrait mode.
A single camera/projector shot a pinwheel of light at the subject, and changes of angle were achieved by raising a chequered card behind which actors had to feel their way around with the lights off, using only the panel below for guidance.
"These used to light up as required."
Accompanying music and sound effects were, as far as I can work out, provided by a mixture of pre-recorded 77's and, if you count a second's worth of chimes played out on the guts of a musical top by producer Lance Sieveking, live performance.
"This is my signature tune."
And here's Lance with the rest of the original team extant behind that 1930 drama, The Man With the Flower in His Mouth – an adaptation of a short play by Pirandello about oral herpes – recreating their original publicity shot for a recreation broadcast forty years later.
That's "special effects man" George Inns on the far left with his
checquered card, and on the far right Mary
Eversley the prompter, holding a script, so I guess there must have been
some light to see by after all, although probably not as much as in the
1970 reconstruction below from which these images are all taken.
I did not know neon was pink.
I really recommend subscribing to that BBC Archive channnel. I couldn't find a recording of the 1930 original, but given that the means of both recording and broadcasting it were entirely analogue that's not surprising. I did however find another very convincing, fuller restaging made by Granada Television in 1968made by Radio Rentals for the Ideal Home Exhibition in 1967, so here's that too. It's horrible. What were they thinking?
Here's an Ocado ad I shot last November. That's right, this blog's a cough and a spit archive too now. Although I didn't even have to do that. It was my first interaction with an animated character: off camera is someone wafting a large piece of card to simulate a potentially self-aware articulated table. As with my first advert
I play a dad (although you can't see our kid on the stairs). I'm
sure my moustache was a factor in the casting, even though dads haven't
really sported moustaches since the eighties. Nostalgia, as Don
Draper says, is subtle but potent. The following day I flew to Bulgaria to push a child in a dinghy through a mock up of a flooded town for Deutsche Telekom, but I can't find that online.
The moustache was still around when I shot this ad in April, although who knows whether or not "John" is a dad? Maybe he's from Head Office in Frankfurt. Maybe he's a cannibal. It's a strong look, whatever he is. I love it. Some of these people had to sing "English Country Garden" for eight hours.
Miming the piano is June Hudson. This is very under-dressed for June. The director had used her a lot, and he wasn't alone. One advert she had done called for her to jump out of a aeroplane strapped to a parachutist. She's in her eighties. It was her first experience of skydiving.
Before doing adverts June taught Science Fiction Costume Design at the Univerty of Redlands in California. Before that she was Head Costume Designer on the original no-budget "Doctor Who". Anyone who has been to Angels' costume warehouse in Hendon will probably know her work...
For April the First, my favourite accidental physicists "The Corridor Crew" loose their visual-effects-dissecting acumen on the moon landing, providing typically conclusive, keen and concise insights into its unfakeability. Watch and learn why this shot from 2001 couldn't possibly have taken place inside a vacuum, and why moonwalk footage from Apollo 11 couldn't possibly have taken place outside of one.
(And further confirmation, of course, can be found here.)
Here's a little film I really love, originally made for Door Number 5 of Gemma Brockis' now absent Oddvent Calendar. Like all contributions to the calendar, Shamira's behindery is a study and pause – breath-restoring, rather than breath-taking. It features the voice of our friend Tom Lyall, and just enough special effects to help one lose one's footing in reality. I've put it up because the film I put off putting up on Friday was its opposite: bloated and failing and disengaging. I'll probably put that up next, because it's still of interest; but I wanted to present something I liked first.
By the way, my youtube algorithms uncouthly autofollow Reindeer Lichen with this; I wonder where yours will take you. It's still winter in the corner of some gardens. Apologies again for the delay in posting. I have been meeting for walks this week, and it's possible I am exhausted.
Last night, I looked through oldish photos that Google had saved without me noticing and, coming across this image taken or uploaded on the twentieth of the tenth Twenty-Eighteen, I felt like I'd found a photograph of Atlantis. Or of Lord Krishna revealing his true, planet-munching self to Prince Arjuna. How had I managed it? Photoshop? Or had I photocopied thousands of people, then cut them out and stuck them on cardboard and pins like the Cottingley Fairies? Was I even aware, in twenty eighteen, that I wasn't taking a photograph of Trafalgar Square at all here, but of a crowd?
I couldn't have been.
Somehow, this was normal.
I've been a little worried recently about how many people I've seen out and about. I'm less worried now.
Basically, what these depictions of the blinding of Polyphemus prove is that it's hard to paint a cyclops from the side. Representing the physical world in two dimensions, like impersonating Christopher Walken, is something we can only to do it once we've seen how someone else does it, and at the time these vases were painted, 27 hundred odd years ago, clearly nobody had yet drawn someone from the front. I'd love to know what anxiety, if any, was felt by the artists who had to depict a famously one-eyed creature under these restrictions. Once the first Cyclops had been attempted, was the heat off, the precedent set? I can't find out which of these vases was the first though, nor whether the artists had seen each other's work, or simply decided independently to stop bothering.
Gorgons were painted face on! And they date from as far back as the vases! So artists did know how to paint a face from the front. But only if it belonged to a gorgon? How did that work? And is this actually a face seen from the front? Or is it...? Let me just cover up one half with my hand... Is it just two profiles stuck together?
I wonder if the ancient Greeks had fun making these with a mirror.
This is the third of four posts beginning with the confession that I'm posting them all on the evening of Saturday the seventh. The London Dungeon Gang's fortnightly Friday quiz has been maintained into Second Lockdown, during which time Peter Davis of our number has wrotten, produced, and released an entire comic synth musical based on one of his old rounds (British History, 43AD-1066D). Peter also stars in it, as both Professor Thorny Buckshaft, and performance artist "The Angler". It is haunting and cracking and you can download it for free HERE.
For my round this week, I knew I wanted to do something with this beautifully illustrated seventeenth-century special effects/actual science handbook from 1634, I just wasn't sure what, and it probably shows. As The Mysteryes of Natvre and Art were split into four "tretises" – "Water Works", "Fyer Workes", "Drawing, Colouring, Painting etc." and "divers Experiments" – and as it was the first two of these which had the oddest illustrations,and we were all waiting for absolute conformation whether or not Biden really had won the US election, I decided to just focus on "Water Works" and "Fyer Works". So, which of those first two treatises do the following images come from? Waterworks or Fireworks? That's the quiz. The answers, which are probably more interesting than the questions, are, as ever, in the comments below...
"Sassy Justice" might be the most futuristic thing I've seen. So it's terrifying. But it also reminds me how much I've missed the work of Matt Stone and Trey Parker and Peter Serafinowicz, and comedy which makes my jaw drop. So it's also nostalgic. It's so good. Enjoy reponsibly.
This, gloriously, is the scene we filmed the day Terry Jones died.
I can't think of a better way to honour the man's memory. The blow that
initiates the cacophony was
achieved by digitally removing Jim Howick's fist as it nears my body so
it looks like it's passing through. We're not as close to
each other in the still below as it looks, in other words, there's a false perspective
or something, I think that's how it was done anyway, it's... Does that
look right? It was back in January, I've no idea now. Welcome to Behind The Scene with Kieth Darren Dean!
I definitely remember that when I walked through Jim in the next scene,
after leaving the stump, I passed him on the
right and this was then digitally shunted to the left to overlap him, but
you probably guessed it was something like that. There was a green
screen set up outside the house. The weather was perfectly overcast,
although there was no snow. It looked like this. That's frost on the ground.
Spot
the chancer on the far right. Each
of us ("us" – Get me!) had to walk up the strip of white plastic
alone, pause at the end, then walk back in front of everyone else
without giggling, like a shy fashion show. It was in its way the
silliest thing I
witnessed all week and I felt blessed to have a seat at it. Actually,
it wasn't so much like a catwalk I now realise, it felt more like -
Have you seen The Ususal Suspects?
And in other notices, continuing the Hallowee’en Countdown through Universal’s Frankensteins, here is the one instance of proper scholarlship I managed in the entire run - a piece of sleuthing that will change the way you watch 1943′s Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man FOREVER!
Ian Hubert's youtube channel hosts beautiful minute-long performances – "tutorials" in the same way that watching someone make balloon animals is a tutorial. Comparing him to a guest on The Paul Daniels Show is meant as a compliment by the way, but I'm sure bafflement isn't Hubert's chief aim and that for anyone with Blender who understands what he's saying, this patter's packed with practical advice. Still I just enjoy watching him.
I wonder if there's something in these shortcuts which might help to answer a question about the human brain that's been bothering me for decades: how every single place we go to in our dreams, from the old bedroom that's not quite our old bedroom, to the cities we're driven through and the crowds we're passing, are fabricated night after night, without gaps or repeats, for just a second. Let alone why. Here's Ian building a city:
If people didn't love special effects we'd never have had the Renaissance. Leonardo and Michelangelo didn't study the sciences out of idle curiosity, but because mastering their art meant fooling the eye, and that meant understanding perspective, light, physics and biology. Even John Dee started out in special effects at Trinity College. I arrived at this conclusion after a couple of days down a rabbit hole with Los Angeles-based Visual Effects youtubers, the Corridor Crew. I'd come to them through their "stuntmen react to stunts" videos, which led me to their "VFX artists react to VFX" videos, and I was just enjoying the clips and vicariously getting off on their work ethic, but then realised I was also beginning to learn some science. The penny dropped when they were reacting to 2012. I knew from Helen Czerski's zero gravity reports over on the Cosmic Shambles Network that physicists have been after a general theory of granular material, but it hadn't occurred to me that CGI artists working on disaster movies would also be after exactly the same thing. Here. (I think all these videos begin at the appropriate point)...
And it's not just a one-way street. Instead of producing concept art for the black hole in Interstellar for example, an astrophysicist was approached to provide equations to feed into a
purpose built rendering engine, and the resulting visualisation produced two
research papers...
I've also learnt from these videos how light acts beneath the surface of the skin, and how
important an understanding of this "subsurface scattering" is in
producing non-gummy-looking CGI humans. (I've also learnt that far too
many artists think there's a muscle linking the filtrum to the upper
lip)...
Less universally applicable, but still fascinatingly, I've learnt that being set on fire as a stuntman is surprisingly feezing...
And that for all the battle scenes in which you may have seen a flying arrow sliced in half, it turns out you
shouldn't actually try to intercept a missile with a weapon specifically
designed to pass through things (that's my conclusion, not
theirs)...
These are just examples of the science I picked up by the by. The Corridor Crew also produce more traditionally educational videos, and they're also superb. As Visual Effects Artists the Corridor Crew are first and foremost communicators, so they don't just understand the science that they're explaining, they understand how people receive information. For example here's a very simple idea that's hard to communicate: the scale of the Universe. As a potentially unfair comparison, here first is Arvin Ash, zooming in and out a lot, wasting our time on how a shrew is bigger than an ant, and throwing in a weird amount of stock footage of blondes in their underwear.
And now here's the Corridor Crew's contribution. A problem has been identified and addressed, and fun has resulted. First scaling down...
Then scaling up. (In summary, if the planck length were the diameter of a tennis ball, an American penny would be ninety thousand times wider than the entire universe)...
There's such a glorious clarity to all their stuff, and I really can't recommend their channel enough. And it reminds me how much I love Los Angeles. The city's a workshop, and as was true in the Renaissance, the polymaths are all there, working in VFX.
