The Years Will Run Like Rabbits/ nagwa rahman

paddymcgowanvideo:

A little trailer for the Manchester School of Art Degree Show where Burnside, Bette Davis, Great Lake Predator and Greyhound along with others will be shown. Screenings on the 19th and 25th of June. Message me for details.

Edited by Mike J Scott

The images above have been taken from Joseph Radonich’s film ‘Greyhound’ (2012)which I worked on as a colorist. 

The images to the left are graded while the images to the right are the original images. The biggest challenge I faced was correcting the skin tones and highlights for the indoor footage (mostly the party scene) while also maintaining the gamma heavy , dark look I had created for the rest of the film.

For the indoor party scene , I lowered the saturation in the secondaries tab enough to take the yellow Bart Simpson look away from the skin. I then lowered the blue curves , then added to the red curves in the primary tab and repeated this process till I had found a nice even look. To get the dark , deep blacks I lowered the master gamma , master gain and master lift.

Above are a selection of images taken from a experimental film/tests which have eventually morphed into a short film titled ‘Bette Davis’.

I created the images by meshing together archive footage of vast American landscape, skylines and pioneer filmmaker/illusionist George Melies early silent films on top of portraiture of dis-formed photographs of old Hollywood starletts such as Ava Gardner , Hedy Lamaar and Vivian Leigh.

For this piece I wanted to created an eerie form of nostalgia , almost in order to have the viewer wonder if this is a homage or parody of old Hollywood and its starlets.

Last June I attended a preview screening for Mike Mills’s second feature film ‘Beginners’ starring Ewan McGregor and Melanie Laurent. After the screening Mike Mills and Melanie Laurent sat down for a Q&A at the Ritzy in Brixton.

I really enjoyed the film , it was quite beautiful and it perfectly captured the feeling of how exciting a new romance can be. The beginning (no pun? intended) was no doubt the strongest part and if the rest of the film could have matched this , it would have perhaps been one of the finest films of 2011. Towards the end of the film I found myself drifting off , it could have really been cut down.

The Q&A was great , I got to speak to both Mike Mills and Melanie Laurent after the Q&A. I spent quite a bit of time talking to Mike Mills about his artwork for Air and Sonic Youth as well as his music videos and his wife Miranda July’s work and her upcoming film (at that time) ‘The Future’ which I was really excited about seeing. He told me she was in Australia promoting the film and would be heading to London after to do promotion and a couple of Q&A’s …what a lovely green jumper.