More Photographs of Boston

Boston

Had a great trip to Boston during Easter to attend the Popular Culture Association Conference. It was superb conference and I really enjoyed Boston, meet lots of great people and took lots of photographs. I spent the Tuesday evening in London and wandering around the city taking photographs with my new camera just to see how it work with in low light. I ended up taking very touristic photographs of sites around London which I had seen so many times but never felt like photographing. I have just posted some of the photographs I took during the trip for now and will write more about Boston when I get the chance.

I liked the effect of the London Eye, but it was the CCTV sign that made the image more interesting.
I took this on my flight back to London.

Animation Exhibition

In one of my previous postings I mentioned the work of Paul Berry in particular his film The Sandman. It is a truly beautiful film and a must for anyone interested in animation in particular stop motion to watch.

A few weeks ago I visited McKinnon and Saunders with Dave Jones to collect some puppets for an exhibition Dave had organised. It was a great to look around the workshop and talk to Nick Roberson as he finished packing the puppets. Dave spent months planning the exhibition and arranging collecting the puppets. The exhibition was excellent and worth all the hard work Dave put in, but not sure if it was worth him damaging his back. The highlight for many was the puppets from The Corpse Bride. I will post some of the photographs of the installation of the exhibition including the displays put up from Jud from Hot Entertainment. A great exhibition which I hope all those who got to see it enjoyed. The exhibition also included a puppet from Mars Attack which Curtis Jobling famously worked on. Such amazing puppets and creative use of materials, such a shame they were never used in the film, but I would still have loved to have seen some test pieces of animation of these puppets if there were any done.

Film and Television Archives

It’s been a very busy period the last few weeks with lots of interesting things happening. Over the past few months I have been watching the BBC 2 programme Nation on Film . The most recent episode was a collection of corporate and amateur films of car production and driving. What was interesting was the established visual language of car advertising that we see today was being used so early in amateur and professional film making. The most notable showing how robust the suspension systems were. A former film maker for Ford note that the most important issue was the conservation and archiving of these films are they are a record of the past. It does ring true for me having worked in an archive and using them for my work. Although I am not interested in cars it is historically interesting how the visual language in different media evolves and in the case of car advertising a certain generic sub-genre of advertising language develops. If you are interested in comparing the visual language of car advertising from different countries have a look at Internet Archive and compare them with come of the new CGI, special effects car commercials which can be found on Stashmedia. These are good examples of the future potential of internet based archives in particular Internet Archive which is full of wonderful films.