My first attempt at a film - it's basically a "road movie" patched together from bits of hand-held video footage from inside my car. The music is part of my "sine-wave" period and takes its point of departure from 'Carmen of the Spheres' - it is far less of a coherent concept-piece than 'Carmen' however and much more chaotic, complex and heterogenous. There is considerable obsession with the 'Golden Ratio' and with the biological/environmental basis of aesthetics. The piece is influenced primarily by Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works", Susan Blackmore's "The Meme Machine" and Jared Diamond's "Collapse". I was also reading Jamie James' "The Music of the Spheres" at this time and the piece is a reaction against some of the negative stereotypes of modernist approaches expounded towards the end of that book.
Two very low-fidelity clips available here and here, and a slightly better quality early out-take clip here.
ONLINE COMPLETE AT ARCHIVE.ORG - download for free in WMV format (long download).
The film is in four scenes:
1. A long driving-clip montage to sine-wave accompaniment in three sections: planetary, ritualistic, planetary
2. A shorter, jazz-based walking clip with the camera swinging to give rhythm to the carnage
4. A long driving-clip as a passenger, from March to Cambridge via Ely and back again.
3. A finish-up clip based on longer, more coherent driving clips to subdued winds over disturbed sines: a summary of the piece including its early death, cutting to the poster just as the sine-waves begin to solidify.
The film was shot using a handheld digital camera with 32MB of card memory. I didn't really "look" whilst I was shooting, and the main method for making effective footage out of the randomness is just to trust chance and combine the clips at random. There's a lot of layering in the film, plus occasional titles appearing where the film becomes very dark, and at other times. The text is from 'weird spam' that's arrived in my email inbox over the past couple of months. Basically spam-writers now use random text-generators to try to fool spam filters. It's a classic memetic arms-race and the results are often highly poetic. I've read a load of them out over the top of the soundtrack for the film and layered that too, so that the visuals are matched by equal measured of confusion in the soundtrack. I've taken onboard a number of innate preferences in humans, such as the famous 20% redundancy principle, the love of the golden ratio (highly prevalent in this piece including some transpositions and metrical modulations along phi lines, plus a tune made from golden pitches and golden durations) and the need for movement, natural scenes and a focus on knowable experiences. For example the camera appears to be walking down the March bypass at one point.
The film's all based in March, Cambs, UK and generally reflects my daily movements. (LOL) There IS a toilet in the film, but no túrds, you'll be pleased to know. Also I appear briefly in the film and my father immediately assumed that was "how I saw myself". You may of course draw your own conclusions but certainly the film's not in any way a conscious attempt at self-expression. Many of the things which DO seem uncannily 'apt' were arrived at by applying the same procedures used in the music and film to stills. Anyway I've waffled enough. It's 90 minutes long across three scenes, is available on Region 0 PAL DVD or high-quality PAL WMV. It's free to download but I'd imagine that's inconvenient for most people. The DVD seems expensive to order (compared to the other things here) but on it you can request as many of the CDs as you want, in mp3 format, so it's pretty good value really. You could be getting 20 hours of music as well as the hour of film.
Oration in 'Incarz' is by me.
The DVD is £12 anywhere in the world. Total time: 90m of film - you also get the mp3 versions of the soundtrack in various versions plus the workings, on the same DVD disk and any of the other albums that you'd like, in mp3 format (to access just put the DVD in your computer and go to the audio_ts directory)
To order a hard copy of the film click here to pay via paypal: