Stop Motion

This is such an easy technique of making short films. With a bit of time, effort and thought it can be such a clever and unique way to advertise. An idiots guide to the process is: taking loads of photos of objects that you move slightly in every picture, then add all the frames together in a film. I'm sure every British person has seen episodes of Pingu as a child!? Here are a few stop motion videos that are worth seeing:

Something that is a bit less dreamy and more trippy is this music video. The Swedish band Rymdreglage produced this '8-bit trip' that consists of a gazillion hours of footage and countless lego bricks. (I lie...it was actually 1500 not a gazillion) Be warned - it is reeeally trippy!

This music video Her Morning Elegance by Oren Lavie was created on a larger than usual scale moving objects on a bed as someone sleeps. There is also an equally amusing and far less graceful 'fat guy' parody.

This Western Spaghetti video took a bit of doing involving household objects as ingredients to cook up a pretty tastey looking dish! This won several awards including being voted #2 in TIME Magazine Viral Video of the Year.

I have made a few including one 40 second drink aware advert including sausage rolls, dancing wotsits, beer and a tin of vegetable soup - it was a bit messy!

Crack on the Street

This is a continuation on from the recent blog about Doris Salcedo's 'Shibboleth' at Tate Turbine Hall in 2007. This is a brief photographic exploratory study of 'crack on the street' and where inspiration for the installation could have come from.

Shibboleth...

...the title of Doris Salcedo's installation in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern 2007.

This Hebrew word ‘shibboleth’ is part of a plant containing grains. The correct/incorrect prounounciation of the word was used in biblical times to distinguish between one group and another. This was also used in WW2, where American Soliders used knowledge of baseball to determine who were fellow Americans and who were German infiltrators in American uniform. Today however it is a word to describe a popular group or in-crowd.

Doris Salcedo is an artist and sculptor whose work is influenced by her experiences of life in Colombia. This piece was the 'first work to intervene directly in the fabric' of the museum and a brief explanation of it can only be described as a long 167 metre crack along the length of the concrete Turbine Hall floor.

It raised so many questions: What lies beneath? What made it? How small did it start off as and how big will it get? It also holds a lot of meaning such as what it is supposed to represent - a division, a problem? She said her work "represents borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred. It is the experience of a Third World person coming into the heart of Europe".