I don’t care much for vacations. I find them dull, boring and usually unfulfilling. I’ll vacation when I’m dead. I much prefer adventures. Jordan Manley makes me incredibly jealous and inspired all at once with this adventure. The story telling. The visuals. The hardships endured to create something beautiful are bound together perfectly. Every shot is breath taking. It makes me want to pack up my bags today and head north.
It’s videos like these that keep my spirits alive. They keep my dreams burning. What Jordan Manley has done here with a talented group of athletes is unlike anything that I’ve seen or felt from a sports video. It’s not the standard issue helicopter pan shots of Valdez or Chamonix. This is hours upon hours of hiking in extreme conditions. Putting their lives at risk to create a beautiful story in a place most of us have never heard of. Talk about passion.
Hopefully this video will inspire a few of you to take an adventure somewhere crazy this summer.
Rarely does an artist’s work speak to me on such a profound level that I must own, at least try to, as many originals as I can. In this case, Danny Heller brings that sensation to me. I can’t explain how Danny’s work speaks to me. Danny’s work floods me with nostalgic memories of very specific moments in my life that have happened. They weren’t epic moments of anything crazy. Just life. There’s a calm, simple, serenity to his work that reassures me that the choices I’ve made living in Southern California couldn’t have been better. The above examples are mostly studies of Palm Springs, CA but it’s his LA Visions series that first won me over.
Danny Heller is an oil painter (yes, painter) who was born and raised in Southern California and it clearly shows in his work. Check out his impressive portfolio or drop by a gallery and have your mind blown at the near hyper realism of his paintings in person. If you’ve lived in the San Fernando Valley, you’ll probably have experienced a day like one of Danny’s paintings. http://dannyhellerart.com
Chicago is the lucky one here, the film and photos of Tim Navis + Kim Holtermand’s trip to Iceland will premiere next month along with music performance from the artists listed below. Also this trip will be coming with a soundtrack on DVD, head to the soundcloud links to get a glimpse of the sounds and artists Deru compiled.
Film Premiere & Live A/V Event in Chicago July 10th, Lincoln Hall
Outliers, Vol. I: Iceland featuring…
This past October, Chicago film collective Scenic traveled to the Icelandic countryside alongside photographers Tim Navis + Kim Holtermand and music composer Deru to create a series of improvised, collaborative short films. The resulting documentary – entitled Outliers, Vol. I: Iceland – will be released in June, along with a companion soundtrack compilation featuring thirteen contemporary classical composers and electronic music producers.
To celebrate the release, Scenic will join Deru onstage for a live, multimedia A/V performance inspired by the journey. Soundtrack contributors Shigeto (Ghostly International), Loscil (Kranky), and Sweatson Klank (Alpha Pup) will perform full sets, and the first 200 ticketholders are invited to an exclusive live screening of the film and Q&A session with the artists in advance of the show.
I stumbled on this film the other day, I’m a little late to the scene sometimes… Its a film made from 80,000 video clips that were submitted to YouTube on a single day, July 24, 2010. There were 4,500 hours of footage from 192 nations to sift through and edit into a 95 minute film. This wasn’t completely spontaneous and had some direction but still captures a very personal glimpse of a day in our world.
In the summer of 1968 three men and good friends, climber and surfer Yvon Chouinard, climber and skier Doug Tompkins, and champion skier Dick Dorworth, set off from California in an old van to surf, ski and climb their way down to the southern end of Argentina, where they were met by a young British climber, Chris Jones. Their goal was to climb a mountain that had been climbed only twice before: Cerro Fitz Roy.
Little did they know, this journey would not only have a tremendous impact on their own personal lives, but would also help launch a movement by inspiring (and continue to inspire to this day, like the film 180º South) many other outdoor lovers, as well as set the tone for many future expedition/adventure films and documentaries.
Mountain Of Storms was shot on a 16mm Bolex (drool Charles Bergquist) by Lito Tejada-Flores, and is narrated by Tom Donahue.
An incredible short documentary on Ian Ruhter and his work with wet plate photography in a camera that is literally a truck. What I love about this, besides the astounding photographs, is the dedication and investment that he’s poured into this project. The piece above explains a lot about how much of himself he’s put into this, at a cost of “$500 a photograph”. Check out the Facebook page, as he’s touring around the country shooting and wants people to get involved and photographed.
This is photography.
Equally as impressive as the project itself is the video below of captured motion.
Keir Dullea encounters a mysterious object, in a scenario reminiscent of the penultimate scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey that he appeared in over forty years ago.
For the 2001 : A Space Odessey fans that we probably all are, the faux trailer or commercial, Immersive Cocoon. This piece has been out for a while, but I recently came across the Making Of video. It really gives great perspective on not only how this was made, but the large amount of CG work that was done in the piece. Have a watch of Immersive Cocoon above, then the Making Of below.
With everyone heading to or already at SXSW this week and next, I thought this would be a good time to post about the location aware music apps that Bluebrain has been doing. They’ve already done one for The National Mall and Central Park ( Listen To The Light ), the new one The Violet Crown is based around Austin and SXSW. Basically it’s, as Bluebrain describes it, “a musical composition, available exclusively as a free iPhone app, that uses the phone’s built-in GPS to alter the music as the listener traverses the area – each street and intersection is tagged with various pockets of sound, turning the festival grounds into a musical ‘choose-your-own-adventure’.”
You can download the free app here through iTunes.
It’s a really cool concept and as of yet, I haven’t been able to try out the other versions from The National Mall or Central Park ( Listen To The Light ), The Violet Crown will be the first.
For those that can’t make it out to SXSW this year, I dug a little further to get some more of the background on The Violent Crown app and some process. Ryan Holladay of Bluebrain went over the technical info and he sent me a few screen grabs and a map from the programming end of things. He also did a breakdown of how it works, which I think is really interesting.
“What you are looking at in these shots is the app simulator running running on our desktop — this is a way that we can remotely test the music without having to be in Austin and simulate the experience of, say, walking from one block to another and hearing how the music changes. As you can see, there are many in a single area, often with so many overlapping that it’s difficult to tell visually where each of them are located. The crosshairs in the middle represent the location of the listener, the various circles indicate the size of the audio track and the colors the state the audio is in: Blue, as you probably guessed, is playing, while yellow is cued and red is disengaged.
Because, by design, the app basically has to be ready for whichever direction you move, what we have is a system that prepares the audio to be dropped in at any given point and at the correct interval by preloading audio in every direction within a certain proximity. So, for instance, if you were to begin walking from Frontage Rd towards Congress Ave, halfway up 4th Street it will have prepared the tracks waiting for you when you arrive at Red River Street. But, when you reach an intersection, the audio to your left and right is also waiting for in case you chose that direction. Once it’s realized you’ve moved on, it drops those tracks to save processing power until you turn around and re-approach.”
To see what it’s all about check out the Making Of video below, which gives you a detailed explanation of what it does and how they actually built the one for Central Park ( Listen To The Light ).
