Wednesday, 18 January 2012
EVIL #1
"Listen, if trouble means something that makes you catch your breath, if trouble means something that makes your blood run through your veins like soda water, mmm, Adam my man, give me trouble!" - Eve (Mae West)
Wednesday, 11 January 2012
Sunday, 8 January 2012
Lucy Dyson
from The Pictures #5
We first encountered the work of music video director, artist and animator Lucy Dyson when she moved into our flat a couple of years back, having travelled to London from her native Melbourne. In the past half decade she’s produced scores of music videos, working with acts like Gotye, The Drones, Still Corners and Lanu, and in a variety of mediums. But whether film, straight animation, collage or a mixture of all three, her work is marked by a talent to take these disparate elements, bring them together and animate them not just in the sense of making them move, but imbuing them with life, polemic and meaning rarely seen in the medium of music video.
Her video for Gotye’s Thankys For Your Time starts with mild satire, kitsch workplace elements that suggest lighthearted smalltalk complaint at the world of work. But as the video progresses, concentric circles of telephones and macabre dancing co-workers reveal something altogether darker and harder to dismiss. As the images on screen dance uncontrollably around our field of vision we enter a state of Kafkaish panic. Similarly, Pussy Got Your Tongue is a Hitchcock Blonde nightmare presented at first as harmless retro fetish. The bright colours and every day objects given mischevious rule on the screen often reveal a hidden darkness. In many of Lucy’s videos, the inanimate objects and cut-out characters take full control and gleefully steer us into discomfort.
Lucy has mixed film and animation throughout her work but has recently produced videos for fresh Sub Pop signings Still Corners and Australia’s Teeth & Tongue that are based almost entirely on film and video image. Wish by Still Corners was shot on 16mm Bolex, double exposure to allow singer Tessa Murray to wander as a ghost amongst her bandmates. The video for Teeth & Tongue’s Sad Sun kaleidoscoped colour-rich Canon 7D
video of singer Jess Cornelius across an animated group of yetis on a mountain quest.
Narrative features heavily in Lucy’s work, be it effectively simple as in Wish or with a sense of historical storytelling as in her Laika the space dog animation and the video for All India Radio’s Persist, which tells the sad tale of Topsy, a circus elephant condemned to death. Her narratives are imbued with a keen attention to detail
and particularly design that is found more often in cinema than music video.
The world of the videos is meticulous, cut out and built from Lucy’s far ranging and enthusiastic influences – encyclopedias, soviet ephemera, the space age, retro interior design, children’s partworks, Hammer Horror, advertising, How And Why books. Her videos explore feelings and issues using the visual grammar of these influences, revealing their ideas through the metaphors and implications of those influences when
placed in a modern context – the 50s housewives, the astronauts. There’s a naivety to these metaphors but Lucy’s work is all the more striking for it – for all the depth and complexity, her videos are no less entertaining, funny, bright or energetic and, in that sense, she is pushing the music video format forward into something more and more interesting.
THE PICTURES: How did you start out as an animator? Did you always intend to make music videos?
LUCY DYSON: When I finished highschool I really wanted to study painting, but my parents (an artist and highschool art teacher) persuaded me to do a BA in Media Arts instead, which was basically art school but with a focus on animation, video and sound art. I guess thinking it would possibly lead to a more lucrative career than a fine arts painting degree. So at uni I specialised in experimental animation. There was more of an emphasis on conceptual development than how well something was technically executed. I didn't initially set out to make music videos, I recall that during semester reviews at uni, if you presented a music video, and it had any "band shots" it would rarely be well received by the lecturers, but a confused video art piece would fare much better, and I'm not at all critical of my art school experience being that way, it pushed me to make considered and interesting work.
I started making music videos towards the end of my honours year at uni. I've always had a lot of musician friends, and that's pretty much how I got started. My early experiences shooting live action was that I didn't know what the hell I was doing, I didn't even know how to properly operate a video camera, these days I know the value of a good DoP.
Music videos do take up most of my time, but I don't feel like I've had a breakthrough with any of them. I don't see myself making a career exclusively from music video directing, but it works with my art practice at the moment. It would be great to be repped by the right company, work with a good producer and have more money to work with, but most of the time I'm too busy to be phased by these things. As long as I'm busy and there is interest in what I'm doing, I figure I'm on track.
TP: What would you say the influences on your visual style are? Would we be right to say that you reference movies a lot? And maybe aspects of interior design?
LD: I spend a lot of spare time collecting and poring over 1950s-70s Home Living magazines, then taking out all the elements I like the best and collaging a new room from these. I'm obsessed with mid 20th century interior design, but over the last few years, having moving from Melbourne to London and now Berlin, my own home interiors hardly reflect this. I've owned and have had to leave behind a lot of nice furniture. When I start collaging interior scenes together for my animations or art, I'm creating rooms I would love to live or work in. Which is often how I feel when watching Hitchcock films. I think I'm also influenced by Richard Hamilton's work and Dexter Dalwood's painted interiors, I love how they both play with perspective, I struggle with interior perspective, I usually tend to frame animation scenes as though they are being presented on a stage, I'm working on loosening up this approach, I'd like to make some future work exploring really warped interior spaces.
TP: Do you often work with collaborators? How important is collaboration?
LD: I love to collaborate when it comes to executing a concept. But I like to come up with initial ideas on my own, and then when I feel excited that I have a strong idea, I like to bring it to someone else, (usually more skilled than me in either animating or filming) and work out the logistics. I don't think I'm technically skilled enough to pull off everything myself, though when you have no money to work with you sometimes have to. I think it is important to learn from other people. I'm not a natural animator, I find animating really difficult, but I love it and I have been lucky to work with other people like Isobel Knowles and Joseph Jensen who are naturals. Like with any medium, if you're inspired enough to hone it, in the end your own hand is all over it and that gives it your touch, people can pick my work. I'm not too uptight about my own wonky animation style these days, I've worked hard and long on it, but it is so good to work with a really talented animator who with a deft hand, can bring naunce and emotions to characters and scenes.
TP: There's often a strong sense of narrative in the videos. Do you hear the song and find an appropriate story, or do you choose the story before finding a song to illustrate it?
LD: It depends on the song, with the Topsy animation, I had been researching that story before I was approached by the band (All India Radio) about making an animation for them, it was something I was thinking of making a short animated film
about. The band said they wanted something animal themed, and I thought the Tospy story was a good match for the sombre tone of the song (Persist), luckily they agreed, and it worked so well that US animals rights organisation Born Free, used it as the central focus for a campaign against circus animal cruelty. It also worked so well that when it was first screened at Melbourne International Film Festival a few years ago, unlike with every other music video screened in the program, when the video ended, not a single person clapped, I guess they were too sad too (I hope).
With Still Corners, the song itself (Wish) inspired the music video concept. The band had said from the start that they wanted the film clip to be shot on film, so with a bolex camera and a couple of rolls of 16mm as a starting point, I came up with the idea of shooting double exposures based on the specific lyrics from the song; "I had dreams I can remember and you've had them too". It was such a fun experiment, I don't think the narrative was very clear though, it wasn't obvious if they were all just sleeping and dreaming or actually dead, but we structured the edit that way on purpose.
I'm always filing away stories that I feel could be told in an interesting visual way,
but mostly they are sad stories, I'm drawn to pathos, when it comes to narrative.
Sometimes I adapt these stories for music video concepts, but it all really depends
on the song, and often what the artist wants. I've had a few treatments knocked back on the grounds that the concepts I've put forth are too sad for an indie-pop music video. I have a short list of stories I'm waiting to turn into short animated films.
TP: Do you have a favourite way to work?
LD: I like to mix it up as animating can be such a tedious and boring process, and I like experimenting, it's a given if you're making something with next to nothing. At the moment I'm really happy with the animation style Joe and I are developing, combining his animated illustrated characters in my collage scenes, my strengths lie in background art and directing and Joe's in character animating. This has been a great development, it looks slick and smooth, yet still retains the idiosyncratic qualities of my work.
TP: What's next?
LD: At the moment I'm working on a crazy animation for an ipad App, and Joe and I are also completing a music video we started last year, that was initially dropped due to time contraints, but has since been picked up again, we are really excited about it, it's all illustrated and a lot of work, it will be nice to see how people respond to it. There is also a mysterious experimental film clip featuring a wonderful LA actress, it's a love project, it's taking ages to pull together. Later this year hopefully Joe and I will get on with the short films I mentioned, we'll have a long
winter in our studio in Berlin, I'm looking forward to it. Also, I have a new video for Still Corners ready to drop anyday now, it's a bit sexy, and creepy, I can't wait to share it.
Lucy interviewed late 2011 / lucydyson.com
Wednesday, 2 November 2011
Tuesday, 1 November 2011
so who wants one?
Issue 5 featuring
ANGELIQUE BOSIO
LAWN-DARTE & STEELE
EMMAALOUISE SMITH
TOM MOORE
DAVID WOJNAROWICZ
BRUCE LABRUCE
LUCY DYSON
ALICE SAINT
& REVIEWS, PICTURES, STUFF THAT WASN'T IN THE FREE DOWNLOAD
Available now direct, or this weekend (5th) from the usual and unusual stockists. Sells out fast, no hesitations!
Monday, 24 October 2011
LAWN-DARTE & STEELE
from The Pictures #5, photo by LD&S
Becky Lawn-Darte: One day me and dang were sitting on my floor pulling out individual strands of my hair to attach to bread and I thought “we are obsessive”. We are obsessive and this is the best day of my life. The props are cult objects, the edits are weird conversations. We have a hard time letting go. After AB dang had probably huffed too many things and I was thinking about seriously stalking people. Tim & Vice could have gone on for a long time. Way longer than any of my real relationships. We get attached to shit is what I mean. By which I also mean there is a sequel.
Ambient Bummer, the doomed romance of Timothy Ziglar (Dang Steele) and Vice Magazine (Becky Lawn-Darte) is the second major picture from Lawn-Darte & Steele Productions, a duo of self described Manson Family Revivalists whose lo-fi distortion dramas are the best things we've seen grow out of the Columbus, Ohio art/film/music scene since one Bang Wash Productions (Becky L-D is half of Bang Wash too). Tim loves Vice, Vice loves Tim and together they live on warm beer in a crappy apartment where Vice dreams of travelling away on a v-a-c-a-y holiday. Desperate to make his girl's dreams come true, the solvent-addled Tim turns to lottery tickets and crime. How will their love survive?
The Pictures: How did you come to make films together?
Dang Steele: good question. i sort of had this crush on BANG WASH.
BLD: I think it started the first time we hung out. We were making a floor collage from disco glass and I left my glasses in Dang’s room. Then we were listening to ELO. Then we made movies. Our first one is called “strange magic”. It was kind of just like that. You did have kind of a crush on BANG WASH, though.
While Becky cut her film-making teeth with the legendary Bang Wash Productions, Dang was working up his own movie science experiments - see the likes of Gypsy Issue and The Big Wedding on youtube channel ‘danzotelevision’. The two first came together to produce RETINABALL!, a trip through mind altering spectacles that features a Ciccone Youth style take on Phil Collins’ Susudio, drug wine and an active volcano. The marriage of Lawn-Darte’s fuzzed out romance games and Steele’s knack for science, on a palette of kitsch special effects and nosebleeds was an immediate fit. The chemistry was obvious. Karina and Belmondo gone shitgaze.
It wasn’t to last. Steele’s relocation to San Francisco placed 2000 miles between the pair. Somewhere on Vimeo a sign was hung: ‘Lawn-Darte & Steele Productions (Now Defunct).’ Becky ventured out solo with horses in Romanticulticom IV, a comparatively angry film about selling work and being hit by a van to a scuzzy Righteous Brothers cover. Steele returned to his own work. But as Becky said, the the pair are nothing if not obsessive, and the internet has no care for distance. The two got talking movies again, and Tim and Vice were born over ethernet cables.
BLD: Our cursers hangout in a google document. Sometimes we just sit there. Sometimes reading the transcripts back I forget which one I am. We send pictures. We send songs. We video chat, but his camera is so blurry he looks like he’s wearing a him mask. It’s kind of sad in a good way, like the simplicity of it. We used to do most of our business over champagne brunches, which I miss quite a bit, though.
DS: i prefer the champagne brunches. i think its pretty good for being 2000 miles apart.
Very few scenes in Ambient Bummer feature Becky and Dang together but you might not have noticed if you didn’t already know. The film is a conversation and a love story in a classic Hollywood way, with each actor delivering their final monologues (read from a Motley Crue biography) in that old-time 50s style. Lawn-Darte and Steele play almost all the roles - the audience, the protagonists, the music and the police in wigs and costume. Still photos, collages, junk shop arrays, ambitiously handcrafted effects (see Vice’s stop-motion 2D tears or Tim’s hallucination of vacay seaside), hazy colouring,audience reaction shots, home-made Godard titles (FLOWERS ARE FOR GRAVES), chemistry how-to demonstrations - nothing in the film comes from outside of their pastel-graded world, including the DIY soundtrack.
BLD: the music in AB is my band when I'm singing, and Dang’s band when he is. Or when no one is. My band is called Albanian Mob Murder. We don't play out and we don't practice. We just drink and record. I sing and play the Xanax. The band started because I had some songs written that I wanted to record for the movies, but we got kind of fond of each other. Regs Tonti, the redhead in the movies does backing vocals. Jawsh is our main drummer, but we all play drums sometimes. Whichever of my ex-boyfriends I dislike the least plays the guitar, so you know... it changes. Oh right, there’s a 7 inch that exists that eastern-watts put out. I don’t have a copy, but the cover is me taking my pants off with a bad tambourine bruise.
DS: I dont really have a band. its just me. one day i got completely obsessed with hobos while staring at a wall, so i called it hobo seance. i kinda picture singing while standing in front of a barrel fire under a bridge. this is the future of my “band”.
Ambient Bummer is Spector heartbreak pop through filthy colour-correction filters. Tim and Vice pine for vacay and eachother, ever loyal when it all falls to pieces. In Vice’s solo protest for Tim’s freedom she’s Peggy Angel before her boyfriend came back; she’s Lesley Gore and this is her crashed party. Lawn-Darte and Steele are Danny Zuko and Sandy after the flying car and on a comedown. It’s feelings like this made us fall in love with their movies and we can’t wait for the sequel - 21st century rock’n’roll romance, with style and hearts they’re not afraid to use.
BECKYTP: What are Steele’s best/worst qualities?
BLD: best: disguising narcissism
worst: sensitivity
TP: What is your favourite film?
BLD: I really liked our JCVD new years marathon. Also Point Break. They say that Keanu Reeves doesn’t look for the camera, he let’s the camera find him. We could all learn from that, except I am not really sure why anyone in a movie would be looking for the fucking camera.
TP: If you could take anyone to see one of your movies, who would it be?
BLD: Probably Dave E McManus. I don't know why but it it just seems right. Or Crispin glover. He’d probably bring some kind of weird snacks. Both good options, I think.
TP: What is the first thing you think when you wake up in the morning?
BLD: Well I usually put my credit card and ID in my bra in case I get mugged, but don’t always remember to take them out and put them back in my wallet. So sometimes the first thing I am trying to figure out is where in my apartment I took off my bra. Then I check all the paper that’s all over the wall by my bed for any notes I may have written myself while half asleep.
TP: What would be your perfect Vacay?
BLD: I’ve been thinking about cruises a lot. I think I would probably either love or hate them. I’d be making a movie, someone else would make the cocktails.
TP: What's your favourite scene in an LD&S movie?
BLD: Definitely the scene in RETINABALL! Where Dang and I are sitting around the volcano.We were surrounded by dry ice, but we still kept forgetting we were filming. You can tell because we are holding glasses of colored vinegar for the volcano and Dang's lips are blue because he kept accidentally drinking it. Later he made the music which was this perfect fake jukebox first date lovesong, and I edited the scene and turned him into a creepy talent agent drug pusher type. He wasn't mad. Everything was just about perfect.
TP: Politics?
BLD: None. Not because I am disillusioned or distrustful of the system or anything, but because I just don’t really care enough to stay up on it. I’m pretty self absorbed, you know.
TP: Would you rather have to spend a whole day acting, in public, as if you were the lead in a musical or be at a good party and have your parents turn up and hang out?
BLD: I actually wouldn't mind the musical thing. As long as I could bring a drummer. I'd probably just hangout in a laundromat all day. That's the perfect place for that kind of shit.
TP: Do you believe in ghosts?
BLD: Nah, and it's partially because I'm a materialist, but partially the
same answer as the politics question. Self-absorbed. Life is for the living.
DANG
TP: What are Lawn-Darte’s best/worst qualities?
DS: best: obsessing
worst: moving on
TP: What is your favourite film?
DS: In an imaginary world id say Electric Dreams. i saw it when i was a kid but only remember the theme song, so i just make it up in my head. its insanely romantic. surreal. soul shattering. Ive never seen Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence either.
TP: If you could take anyone to see one of your movies, who would it be?
DS: Becky. seriously. maybe the girl from Domino Dancing.
BLD: Ima punch that domino bitch if she’s a real person.
TP: What is the first thing you think when you wake up in the morning?
DS: i heard iggy pop does fifty pushups right when he gets up, thats why he looks so good. i dont even know if that story is true.
TP: What would be your perfect Vacay?
DS: wall papering my yacht followed by serious clam diving.
BLD: Remember when you wanted to get a gambling problem because you thought somehow you would get a yacht out of it? and you made a to-do list? I think having a fundraiser was on it. Eff cruises. My perfect Vacay is on Dang’s gambling yacht.
TP: What is your favourite scene from a LD&S production?
DS: aside from the telepathy. broken noses, endless skittles, car chases.
BLD: Yeah, I don’t take any pictures so in a weird way these movies are kind of my
fucked up photo albums.
TP: Politics?
DS: this party is lame. you wanna get outta here? im a photographer.
BLD: Oh yeah, and we’re shallow. Like disco shallow.
TP: Would you rather have to spend a whole day acting, in public, as if you were the lead in a musical or be at a good party and have your parents turn up and hang out?
DS: the reality of my public persona being an act already is somewhat crushingly sad. my mom would have cheap beer in a cooler that looks like a purse.
BLD: Let’s actually do this. Bring drums. And your mom.
TP: Do you believe in ghosts?
DS: when i get lonely enough.
BLD: Sell-out.
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