The Storyhunters take Malmo

A collaboration between Storyhunters (myself & Joe Collins) with Ola Stahl and the fellows at FASAD in Malmö, Sweden

FASAD have a window space on the high street and use the space to tell stories to the people of the city.  Using paint, vinyl and objects we dressed the window in a way that showed the ten dimensions of reality, then put a show on in the evening that illustrated this concept from physics in an accessible way – as related to stories and the ideas of the Storyhunters.  Stories define and make sense of our lives.  That’s pretty much what the Storyhunters project is about.

 

D&AD Judging

Been a daft busy month starting with a week in London filming kids jumping off buildings, a week off so I could actually see the family digging the garden and painting walls @ home, then a week back in London for D&AD awards judging in the website category.  A chance to meet some great people and check out the cream of website work from around the world.  There were 500 website entries, plus more digital in advertising and virals.  Overall there were 20,000 pieces of work that made it to Olympia and 500 international judges visiting over the four days.  Check out theThe D&AD Blog  for more…

D&AD entries at Olympia, London

storyhunters – LIVE!

We had a great first Storyhunters gig on the 15th October.  The advertising must have worked because we packed out the theatre at SEVEN arts in Chapel Allerton, Leeds.  The show is a mash up of storytelling, storytelling with guitar, video, music, story graffiti and general nonsense about quantum physics all rolled together in an hour and a half two man show. 

I’d been interested in the storytelling stuff Joe Collins was doing, but also excited by things like Penguin’s We Tell Stories and especially in things like the use of semacode / qr to link real world locations with virtual world tales.  So, encouraging Joe (who doesn’t take much encouragement) we set out to create something different and the Storyhunters was born.  Essentially being a way we can mess about layering stories upon the world it has taken the form of story graffiti in the woods (putting up warning signs about fictitious, story based dangers), leaving fake photos in train stations and creating objects (like alien babies) which are left places for people to find.

The show kind of came later and its content fell out of a developed Storyhunters mythology.   

It was a great success, so we’re looking to develop it – bigger, badder, better!  Here’s one of the agreed highlights of the night – the Fairy Dance…

punk rock sock

The Punk Rock Sock project is well underway.  Featuring a facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/pages/punkrocksock/45641102792?ref=ts, YouTube video (below) and wordpress blog http://punkrocksock.wordpress.com - it’s totally for fun.  The idea started as an alternative Christmas present that was recycled, zero carbon (ie. downloaded rather than shipped), tapped into the hand made / thrifty vibe, low cost and was put together with love.  So punk rock sock was born.  The music and video were created with Paul Mallett and with $100 free Facebook advertising from the Visa network we’ve been testing who are the most reactive audiences.

fun…

I do appear to be pissing off 14 year old punk rockers on YouTube though..  ‘Oi! Oi!’

Panoramas gone digital

I was slightly ashamed after my usual messing around with constructed panoramas on holiday, when a friend said he’d been doing the same and gave me this link:

http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=02dbdd97-6cea-4bf9-8594-3a5369e7e585

If you’ve never seen photosynth it’s an awfully clever bit of software owned by Microsoft which calculates where views are in 3D space based on what it sees in the photos.  It’s really impressive when you see it do things like ransack Flickr for loads of pictures of the same place and stitch them all together.

It’s not new, but I thought I’d share my shame at not being “digital” enough to clock that I could have done all my panoramas like this.

Not seen it being used much for product viewing, but having spent the last 5 years working out innovative ways to rotate a football boot in 3D in a way that’s not been done before (for Umbro) then it’s got to be on the cards..

Castle Envy

Bamburgh Castle by Andrew Brown

I’m back to work after my holidays today.  I’ve just got back from a week in the north east, staying in Bamburgh.  As well as having some of the country’s best beaches this part of the world also boasts some fine castles such as the Norman castle at Bamburgh, a very cute castle (in comparison) on Lindesfarne Holy Island and the mighty Alnwick Castle which also boasts the impressive Alnwick Garden. 

Whilst visiting these places I appear to have developed a peculiar condition – ‘castle envy’.  I found myself wishing that I had been born Lord Wassname of Thingummy and spent my time wondering how most philanthropically to invest the squillions of pounds I’d inherited.  Check out the Garden particularly as a very modern project.

To paraphrase Neal Stephenson we’re all here because we’re descended from “Bad M*therf*ckers” who managed to claw and battle their way to survival over billions of years of ‘only the strongest survive’ laws.  Theoretically those whose families have power and money come from the baddest mf’s of them all, the majority of whom having gained their status through ancestral violence.

Maybe that’s why envy is a deadly sin, because greed breeds violence.

Song stages

We write songs in the band (x:am) in different ways, sometimes they’ll start out as guitar tracks, sometimes as electronica straight from the computer, sometimes there’s just a bassline, occassionally the words come first…

Seeing as I’m often (although not always) responsible for the words loads of the songs have a version where I’m doing the singing. Here’s a current track in production before Ally’s re-sung any of the vocals:

Song development by x:am

Anniversary present

It was my 10 year wedding anniversary this year and my wife Nicola gave me a great present.  One of her best friends (and half of the two people who are the reason we met in the first place) Ellen’s mother (Kate Stewart) is an artist who works with mixed media and does a lot with textiles.  She’s based in Bradford (which has a rich history in textiles).

Nicola commissioned her to make us this piece.  The scene is from Brimham rocks in Nidderdale (where we were married) and features poppies, which you don’t see alot at Brimham, but is a recurring flower in our relationship.  Thanks Nicola:

Brimham Rocks Picture

Brimham rocks is a 320 million year old natural sculture park of millstone grit and features some crazy natural formations.

Idol rock at Brimham

For more information check out the Wikipedia page or the Brimham Rocks Website.

Here’s a few photos I took at Brimham back in 2003 (that’s my son Jay in the first picture) and here’s a panorama of the view over Nidderdale.

Tree trolls

Creative people spot things.  Like faces in nature.

Here’s a tree troll that recently turned up in our garden.  I think he appeared when we built the tree house on the tree he was hiding in.  He doesn’t look very happy about the fact that we used his head to stick the tree house on.

Secret Weapons

The key to being exciting and unique with your creative ideas and the execution of them is to make them as uniquely ‘you’ as possible.  One technique to explore this (as it’s a nice pithy concept to say, but sometimes a more slippery beast to practice) is to explore your ’secret weapons’.

Your secret weapons are combinations of your skills or talents.  Each talent you have is shared by a pot of people globally (yeah, sorry, you’re not the best drawer in the world).  When you combine talents you’re suddenly in a pot that’s much smaller.  For example, the ‘I draw quite well’ pot is pretty large.  The ‘I animate my own drawings’ pot is smaller, the ‘I make flick books of my animated drawings’ pot smaller still.

Here’s another example.  I like to paint.  When I started having children the time I had available to me was limited and I was a little worried that painting would go out of the window.  Pretty much as a result of this and urged on by some work we were doing at the time with a graffiti artist Sickboy I started stencilling, mostly because it was quick to impliment (the painting bit at least).

When I started I was trudging along a boring line of two colour faces of Bruce Lee etc.. the sort of cheesy ‘loft art’ IKEA crap of iconic people.  Then I got quite into landscapes, doing a big commission of the (not completely unrecognisable probably) Leeds skyline.  I had a friend at the time who gave me a beautiful etching she’d done of some feathers, so when I got home I started making feather stencils, then spray painting my hands, which produced more interesting results.

But I was after something that other people wouldn’t be stencilling, so I looked towards my other skills.  3D graphics seemed like an interesting way to generate stencils and I’d been doing a bunch of stuff with greebles at the time; an extruded greebled landscape in monochrome kind of looks a bit like a skyscraper stuffed urban landscape with buildings on buildings in a sort of Sin City style.

 

Greeble painting

I’m not claiming the use of greebles to be totally unique in stencil art, but as a way of exploring a technique it’s a hell of a lot more interesting than Audrey Hepburn smoking a fag.