While the Iraq war continues, a day's sightseeing and the features of a German hotel provoke a stream of thoughts about events large and small. Museum Piece is the second video in the Hotel Diaries series, a collection of late night recordings made in foreign hotel rooms which relate personal experiences to contemporary world events.
Other works in the series currently include Frozen War (Ireland, October 8th 2001) and Throwing Stones (Switzerland, November 13th 2004).
One of Life's Players is an experimental short which I shot on Super8, a format that has intrigued me for a long time, it is based around a prose I wrote a few years ago. Written in the prose are a number of quite upfront and powerful statements. 'in the circle of life we co-exist with an assemblage of unadulterated attractions and fascinations'. Through the diverse and haunting beauty of film I wanted to depict images that an audience can relate to events in there lives and the surrounding world we live in. It has not plot and perhaps to some it might be hard to understand.
One of Life's Players will be reminiscent of films such as Baraka (Ron Fricke, 1992), Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1983) and Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929), which don't really have a traditional narrative drive. These experimental masterpieces rely on the use of stunning cinematography to allow the audience to create their own story. One of Life's Players portrays images such as an empty room with just a fireplace, and a photograph spattered with blood to depict how life can often take a turn for the worst. Sometimes a lifetime can often feel like the blink of any eye, One of Life's Players depicts this by using images like a young woman's eye, which transforms into an old woman's eye and other similar juxtapositions. Although some of the imagery isn't always blatantly obvious. I'm hoping perhaps One of Life's Players will fuel thoughts about how at times we as a fast moving species tend to take the planet and its abundant fascinations for granted.
Orpheus the greatest musician ever. A Rock star like no other he has gone into hiding. However, stirred into a search for his wife Eurydice. He embarks on a quest that will take him to and through the land of death itself.
An actor from the East Midlands is starring in a Panto down in Croydon. He is sacked from the production in suspicous circumstances.
Sensing his theatrical career is over, he hires a z-list video director and his crew to make a showreel about him - as he wishes to reinvent himself as an action movie hero for the millenium.
As the action unfolds we see that the movie industry is an industry of egos, tears, tantrums and poverty.
AL and AL's grandfather is a retired engineer and inventor. The film simulates his lifelong endeavour to create a perpetual motion device and supply free power for the people. During a telephone call with the Lamb of God, Britney Spears sabotages the project and sets in motion her own drive for infinity.
Lying on the bed in her sexiest underwear, her television on and head on his lap, she looks at him and wonders 'Would we still be together if I couldn't get BBC2?'
Think Ambridge. Think The Archers. Then think again!
Late 21st-century Scotland. Joe and Maddie, new techno-age farmers, are protecting their land from a 'rogue Pharm' - a genetically engineered commune of humans who meld their DNA with the latest biotechnology to form marauding, morphing amoeba-like collectives. And this monstrous moving Pharm is one of many, roaming the land looking to plant 'stage trees', ferment rocket fuel and blast off leaving the pull of gravity for a new life on Jupiter.
An adaptation of Charles Stross's amazingly original science fiction piece and a groundbreaking animation, Japanese anime meets cyber Scotland.
Filmed in a caravan park at the end of the season, Sea Change reveals a landscape dramatically transformed by light and time, and resonating with the transience of human presence.
The old caravans that fill the site are soon to be removed and crushed to make way for a new housing development, so the film also acts as a kind of document for an unusual place on the brink of disappearance.
