Research
Projects/ Ideas/ Thoughts/ Writings and other interesting stuff
photo by Jon Clark - my last band Club of Rome playing live circa 2004.
A HYPETV/MESHMINDS WEB INTERVIEW FEATURE ON ME - Oct 2008
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS:
Getting work funded, supported and seen is always a highlight. Otherwise I equate reflection to retirement… and retirement to death.
WHICH CREATIVE PEOPLE, PLACES AND THINGS ON YOUR RADAR RIGHT NOW?
Matthew Barney, Harmony Korine, Werner Herzog, Federico Fellini, David Lynch, these people are the real deal, not just their work but the connections their work makes, how it challenges and changes our perceptions, and how they choose/chose to live their lives - an inspiration.
Places and other stuff on my mind are Madagascar, Arctic regions, open borders/global equality and the last two unexplored places on earth - underwater regions and consciousness.
WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE DAYDREAM?
I am lying down on my back looking up at the sky and a part of me falls from the sky into my body and then the whole of me gets sucked into the blue yonder - I don’t just fall to earth, I also fall the other way, like falling off the earth – a kind of personal rapture - it feels like nothing on earth… very therapeutic.
WHAT WAS THE LAST RULE YOU BROKE?
I have worked illegally in a few countries, and shot films without shooting permissions - these are the kinds of rules I don’t care about, otherwise I always buy a train ticket and always stop at red lights on my bicycle.
IF YOU COULD ASK A QUESTION OF SOMEONE YOU RESPECT, WHO AND WHAT WOULD YOU ASK?
Power corrupts… and absolute power corrupts absolutely… how do we not become corrupt? I am not sure who could answer this question.
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FIGHTING THE SAHARA - Good news from Africa - a success story - docu/drama
On the arid margins of the Sahara desert, communities are fighting and winning back farmable land that was previously Sahara desert and this re-greening of the Sahel is defying the experts.
Despite global warming - over the Sahel (border or coast of the Sahara desert) - satellite images over the last 20 years are showing that dunes are retreating right across the Sahel region. Vegetation is ousting sand across a swathe of land stretching from Mauritania on the shores of the Atlantic to Eritrea 6000 kilometers away on the Red Sea coast.
“Where 20 years ago there was barely a tree, there are now 50 to 100 per hectare. Production of cereals has soared” - Chris Reij of the Free University Amsterdam in the Netherlands - who has worked closely with farmers in the region over the last 30 years.
In Niger alone, an estimated 200 Million trees have been planted over the last 2 decades. These trees protect their crops against the winds, stop the sands spreading, prevent soil erosion, provide fodder for live stock so farmers get more manure for their fields and the leaves and fruits provide food.
Communities who fled to coastal areas 25 years previously, during the severe droughts of the early eighties, are now moving back to these arid lowly populated areas where they are able to form farming communities. This takes strain off the already overpopulated cities, creates jobs and generates much needed food surplus.
BAN KI-MOON, SECRETARY-GENERAL, THE UNITED NATIONS: The rapidly escalating crisis of food availability around the world has reached emergency proportions. The World Bank has estimated that the doubling of food prices over the last three years could push 100 million people in low-income countries deeper into poverty. - April 2008.
Vegetation also creates climatic feedback loops which increase the amount of rainfall. Analysis of satellite images and rainfall in the Sahel between 1982 and 1999 show that 10 to 20 per cent more rain falls when land is green
The documentary will visit places like Niger where this story has not yet been documented by any documentary makers to my knowledge, and offers hope to a continent fraught with drought and famine.
Interviews with local farmers, people in the communities, and experts on third world development, development agencies like the UN, agricultural societies, global warming scientist’s, anthropologist’s and other interesting related sphere’s, - will make up the narrative to the documentary which will be edited like a audiovisual postcard - driven by Ariel cinematography, satellite images from NASA and a fitting soundtrack.
The documentary aims to encourage governments, NGOs and international research organisations to re-examine their practices in the light of this remarkable success and support these new developing sustainable communities.
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OPEN BORDERS - What would a world with Unrestricted Movement look like? - docu/drama
An over the horizon, forward-looking, liberal critique at the restriction of movement for individuals from the Developing countries and Philosophical Premise as to what a world would be like with an International Open Border Policy.
Just as we have seen the anti-discrimination act on Gay rights some 40 years ago, Women’s right to vote, and the abolition of slavery in the 19th century. The next frontier is surely the Freedom of Movement of all people. We are part of an ever growing state of Global Apartheid, where the first world Westerners are pretty much allowed to go wherever they please, while people from poorer countries are expected to just stay on the small bit of land they where born on.
What impact would Open Borders have on issues like terrorism, humanitarian crises, brutal regimes, food shortages, global unrest, economic instability, literacy levels and future generations? How effective is Aid and Fair Trade compared to an International Open Border Policy? Where are we currently heading with the current border crises - between Mexico and the US, Africa and Asia and the EU - are we running out of barbed wire?
When we have an intelligent debate on these important issues - be it Gay Rights, Women’s Rights, Refugee Rights, Enforced ID cards, etc - humanity always wins. As we walk towards the light, things get brighter – we believe an International Open Borders Policy will be looked back on from future societies a monumental leap for humanity, as the Abolition Of Slavery, Women’s Right To Vote, Civil Rights Movement in the US in the 60s, Gay Rights and all the other differences we are no longer legitimately allowed to discriminate against. Migration has always been about actively wanting to make a better life – we know that it brings challenges but more importantly it brings vitality, new ideas, fights stagnation and is the hallmark of a progressive, liberal and forward moving society - the opposite of a closed stagnated society or old boys club.
A world with open borders and unrestricted movement, where people have the right to live and work where they wish and to engage in relationships with whoever they decided to - what would this world look like? - is this not the world be should be moving towards?
And finally I would like to conclude the documentary with the idea that the kind of change we are aiming for sometimes seems impossible, but when change does happen, it happens very quickly. So many things that seemed impossible have changed almost over night due to vigorous campaigns. We believe an intelligent debate about the movement towards an International Open Border Policy needs to be had.
[Most of these ideas come from the work of - Worldwrite, Spiked and Philippe Legrain]
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FUTURE DAYS - South Africa - NOT another Zimbabwe - Docu/drama 2009
A South African led motion picture about South Africa’s Future - Docu/drama for broadcast - March 2009 Pre SA elections.
An over the horizon, forward looking, cautious optimistic forecast as to what the future holds for all of us and how we can choose to fail or succeed.
CORE CHALLENGERS:
Corruption - the fight for power, losing the Scorpions
Solving crime and the causes of crime
Poverty and especially child poverty
Education - literacy levels
Employment
Health System - HIV/aids
Migration & Immigration
Science and Technology, Sustainability, agriculture, renewable
resources (forestry/ agriculture) vs. nonrenewable resources (gold/
diamonds/ Coal/ gas)
Arts and Culture - Music, Film, Theatre etc. and their role
Building a new Value System or shared Core beliefs - social cohesion
Citizenship
Happiness
The film will address the choices we have and what the right decisions might be. Lets think 2010, 2020, 2030 and beyond, what are the big issue’s that are going to come up? and how can we make a preemptive strike to make things better. The narrative will be made up of short sound bites/ interviews from fellow South Africans, against a fitting backdrop of their choice.
To get involved join this group, and leave your comments here - we will accrue the interviewee’s from this pool. This is phase 1 you are welcome - PLEASE PASS THIS ON>>>
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=31361129889&ref=mf
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UAV - 0001789 - A DOCUMENT FROM THE FUTURE
“Surveillance fosters suspicion. The employer who installs keystroke monitors at workstations, or GPS devices in service vehicles is saying that they do not trust their employees. Social relationships depend on trust and permitting ourselves to undermine it in this way seems like slow social suicide.” - A Report on the Surveillance Society - Public Discussion Document - Edited by: David Murakami Wood and Kirstie Ball
TREATMENT FOR THE DOCU/DRAMA
Set in London in the not too distant future - the new cold war between populations and the governments has began, every aspect of daily life is recorded in every possible conceivable way and entered into a secrete database that stores these details for all time.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) - introduced for the London Olympics of 2012 - litter the sky and it is from this perspective that the film is shot. Inverted, night vision and X-ray vision make up initial set-ups with a bombardment of audio until the UAV manages to tune into scenes on the ground. It is from this mechanical hovering perception that we tell the human stories through a 24hour duration – a company specializing in shooting from remote control Hovercams will help with some of these shots.
ID cards have become mandatory, people without papers are ostracised and locked up by undercover operations. We see truck loads of people being driven away to detention centres. While more and more land on the shores of the UK via submarines, planes and freighters. A closed border policy has made life in the UK a tinderbox various cults and splinter groups, suicide levels have sky-rocketed, the global population has reached it’s peak and is now steadily declining, not through disease or natural causes but through choice, people are having less children.
Scenes will be connected by strange jumps and associations, contradictions, wild ravings and rantings. A Japanese tourist tries to take the perfect picture of his wife, while a money man is hit over the head repetitively with a baseball bat in a security van heist gone wrong. A young couple have sex in a nearby park. A graffiti artist is busy defacing a bank cash machine. Cyclist courier is hurling abuse at a taxi driver for nearly driving him off the road. Amusing scenes of naked people on the rampage during what seems to be a stag night gone wrong. Lovers getting loved up, drunken brawls outside local pubs, girl on girl punch-ups. A reconstruction very loosely based on the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes case could make up the the grand-finale (perhaps).
But its not all doom and gloom against this backdrop some people have found an even more meaningful existence, whether they are fighting for the resistance or fighting against it or just living out their lives regardless. This human part is where the stories focus on. Perhaps some text in places could set up scenarios – e.g. Mark refuses to get an electronic chip implanted in his cheek and wrist, coming from a Christian family he believes it to be the Mark of the Beast, and therefore is finding it hard to get into University and a part-time job.
Vigorous casting will include many untrained actors and scenes will be written for these actors in mind. The Production will be shot with a very small crew over a 30 day period at a low cost. The films anti-structure will be bound together by the life and imagination of these characters, strange jumps and associations, contradictions, wild ravings and rantings.
DIRECTOR’S VISION FOR THE FILM
The language of film needs to constantly be changing to keep cinema relevant. I choose to work in a Mike Leigh style, characters are created by the actors and encouraged to grow by the director and writers through workshops and drama experiments. This brings life to a film, I am more interested in life than some linear story telling, for me this takes fabrication and imagination and for me there is a deeper truth in this method and something for everyone to get really excited about. Allowing actors this space to breath, brings life and an emotional investment in the project, I feel this is how good independent film is made.
The aerial shots shouldn’t represent too much of a muchness. I think we can use vertical shots from a helicopter pointing straight down over the heart of the city, before setting up shots, then go into
and steadycam shoots– remote control helicopters. I have worked with this team before using a helicopter and a remote control helicopter and found the experience so exhilarating, the possibilities are astounding, all this within the confines of a city, city roof would ideal for this work and the London skyline will make a fitting backdrop. A fly on the wall, floating camera style form initial high angles to lower head height angles, stories will be told in a docu/drama style. Scenes will be connected by strange jumps and associations, contradictions, wild ravings and rantings.
A fitting soundtrack would be something like the Scottish band - Mogwai, the music is largely instrumental, paints a thousand pictures, forward looking and emotive. The film 28 weeks later has a starkness between picture and soundtrack which I feel is also very fitting for UAV.
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[AN ESSAY ON MUSIC RECORDING AND STUFF]
INTRODUCTION
“To fall in love with uncertainty, is the only way through… creativity flourishes in the land between certainty and doubt.”
CAPTURING KRYPTONITE
All creative/ artistic endeavors are surely something to do with capturing energy and storing it in some kind of container - e.g. canvas, bricks, mortar, bronze, CD, DVD, MP3 - and when someone looks, listens, smells, touches, tastes or feels it’s pull - (Note: there are more than 5 senses - depending on how finely tuned you are) - that energy comes out and is transmitted.
METHOD
We encourage bands throughout the recording process to play on the edge, of their ability, knowledge, influences, how they think music should sound and what they think will be acceptable. It’s on that edge just before everything feels like it’s going to fall apart that bands are most interesting to me. Bands sometimes need to be directed away from safety-zone and go on a journey and keep surprising them self’s on what is achievable as a band.
This takes a lot trust and faith, but this is what keeps the music alive and keeps bands together.
RECORDING
IT ALL BEGINS AT THE SOURCE - In a time when most recording studios have closed down, I feel something has been lost, the sound of a recording with the colour of a room and the phase relationship between the drums and guitars in a space can not be recreated in an inferior location like a bedroom. Not even the best mics in the world could make it sound better; in fact the opposite is true as they would moreover reveal the nastiness like comb filtering or boxy ness. HOME RECORDING IS MAKING MUSIC - But it’s too often a world of hyper-compressed over produced records, that just want to be louder than the next one, it’s great to be able to work on stuff at home, but you need a place where the bass doesn’t change each time you move your head. A surgeon wouldn’t do surgery outside on the lawn… and it’s the same when you come to recording and the final stages of mixing and mastering a record.
GROOVE
Something is ether grooving and swinging, or not. There is no such thing as in or out of time. This is why we don’t like to use click tracks if possible. Music marches to its own clock.
RECORDS
Music is math.
It’s kind of like a game of TETRIS, in a 3 dimensional space. You building a house, it needs a foundation and structure that everything can sit neatly on, too often with VST instruments and software you are allowed to change the sound continuously as you go along, at some point a band has to make a decision and commit, THIS IS LIVE RECORDING and this is what a studio is for, and it should therefore be an inspiring place to work and create.
MINIMUM VOLTAGE – MAXIMUM ILLUSION or THE BIG PICTURE IS GREATER THAN THE SUM OF THE PARTS
“In the studio you can make a pin drop sound like an Atom bomb and an Atom bomb sound like a pin drop.”
Great Music and Great films are all examples of great illusions. A sound is not loud unless it is next a softer sound (it has the colour of a sound being played loudly in a room). As producers we are using the same slight of hand that tricksters, illusionists and magicians have used for thousands of years.
IN A WORLD THAT DEMANDS FREE MUSIC
Karl Marx said something is only worth what it takes to make… HOW DO LIBRARIES WORK? Surely this is a massive success story - free information for the masses, heavily funded by the state, here you can learn anything from how to build your own house to the metaphysics of time travel and other interesting stuff, this is a great working model, the internet and everything on it should be for free.
MYSPACE
Myspace is a business card, a really good one but that’s all, it’s great that you can now stream mp3 and even video in real time, without any worries this can also reveal perhaps a lot more about your music or filmmaking that cuts through all the bullshit, good for some, not so good for others.
MP3
So successful are i-pods 90million have been bought in the short years since their release and they are getting ever more popular. They have even managed to convince the population that mp3 sounds better than CD. NOT THE CASE! NOTE: MP3 IS 1/TENTH THE QUALITY OF CD
That means you are paying full price for something that is 10% of the original quality. The rest has been truncated or chopped off.
THE VOLUME RACE HAS BEEN LOST
And the cost is over-produced, brick walls with no transparency, if you cant hear the reverb tails on snares and vocals, your recording does not reflect a 3 dimensional space and is 2D.
PHILOSOPHY
Follow your bliss - Joseph Campbell
To have a creative relationship with all aspects of my life, including my problems – to grow and learn as an artist, seek out wisdom and knowledge… Feel it… and pass it on…
KEEP DOING IT
Music loves you… and you, and you and you…
Despite global warming - over the Sahel (border or coast of the Sahara desert) - satellite images over the last 20 years are showing that dunes are retreating right across the Sahel region. Vegetation is ousting sand across a swathe of land stretching from Mauritania on the shores of the Atlantic to Eritrea 6000 kilometers away on the Red Sea coast.
“Where 20 years ago there was barely a tree, there are now 50 to 100 per hectare. Production of cereals has soared” - Chris Reij of the Free University Amsterdam in the Netherlands - who has worked closely with farmers in the region over the last 30 years.
In Niger alone, an estimated 200 Million trees have been planted over the last 2 decades. These trees protect their crops against the winds, stop the sands spreading, prevent soil erosion, provide fodder for live stock so farmers get more manure for their fields and the leaves and fruits provide food.
Communities who fled to coastal areas 25 years previously, during the severe droughts of the early eighties, are now moving back to these arid lowly populated areas where they are able to form farming communities. This takes strain off the already overpopulated cities, creates jobs and generates much needed food surplus.
Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary-General, the United Nations: The rapidly escalating crisis of food availability around the world has reached emergency proportions. The World Bank has estimated that the doubling of food prices over the last three years could push 100 million people in low-income countries deeper into poverty. - April 2008.
Vegetation also creates Climatic Feedback Loops which increase the amount of rainfall. Analysis of satellite images and rainfall in the Sahel between 1982 and 1999 show that 10 to 20 per cent more rain falls when land is green.
The documentary will visit places like Niger, Namibia, Botswana and South Africa where this specific story - to my knowledge - has not yet been documented by any documentary maker, and offers hope to a continent fraught with drought and famine.
Interviews with local farmers, people in the communities, and experts on third world development, development agencies like the UN, agricultural societies, global warming scientist’s, anthropologist’s and other interesting related sphere’s, - will make up the narrative to the documentary which will be edited like a audiovisual postcard - driven by Ariel cinematography (shot from a hired plane), satellite images from NASA and a fitting soundtrack.
RE-GREENING THE DESERT - good news from Africa – Is an over the horizon, forward looking, cautious optimistic forecast as to what the future holds for all of us and how we can choose to fail or succeed. Given the gloomy food crisis’s that scientists are predicting in the coming decade, Africa will no doubt be hit the hardest. Supporting these new developing sustainable communities and spreading the word of new technologies and more suitable and sustainable variates of crops among these communities and farmers, is the documentary’s key objective. This new emerging scientific understanding, can have a real impact in growing and safe guarding precious food surplus and natural water transportation through Climatic Feedback Loops.
When the Europeans arrived in Africa, they told African farmers to chop down all the trees to maximize farming area, despite this being against old African wisdom, as there where serious penalties for doing this before the Europeans arrived. The documentary aims to set the record straight, Tree’s increase farming production, release nitrogen into the soil, protect crops against the winds, stop the sands spreading, prevent soil erosion, provide fodder for live stock so farmers get more manure for their fields, the leaves and fruits provide food, and most importantly for arid dry regions, trees increase rainfall through Climatic Feedback Loops.
It is only very recently that scientists have began to understand convection currents, clouds, the weather and precipitation. Climatic Feedback Loops are fascinating and still very mysterious to scientist’s but we know they are very powerful, due to satellite recorded images and how re-greening the land increases rainfall by up to 20%. The cold Atlantic sea currents running from Antarctica up the south western coast of South Africa and into Namibia, are very slow to vaporise and form clouds, this is why this area known as the Skeleton Coast is so dry. But now with the phenomenal rise in small plants and low lying shrubs in recent years along these coastal regions, the area is re-greening itself dramatically. Some experts say this is because of global warming, but exponential evidence suggests Climatic Feedback Loops are at work here, previously one of the driest regions on earth. Plants are far more efficient at creating vapour - which causes clouds - than cold water oceans.
CASE STUDY 001 - Zimbabwe - once the Bread Basket of the world – is now turning to desert, Satellite images over the last 20 years shows once green farmland, now turning to dry arid regions through soil erosion and possibly due to the loss of the Climatic Feedback Loop phenomenon.
The budget of 15000GBP means I can take off much of the year to prepare the trip, interview scientists and do much more needed research. The small crew will include myself as Camera person, Director, Producer, a sound person, and a local guide in each area. The Documentary will be shot using the new phenomenal Red One Camera, shooting in 4K HD. I have all my own gear and will edit the film myself and compose the soundtrack.
The documentary aims to encourage local farmers, governments, NGOs and international research organisations to re-examine their practices in the light of this remarkable success and support these new developing sustainable communities - who are fighting back the desert and winning back new farmable land - through new technologies, science, information and innovation.
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