mini reflection + budget/copyright/health 'n' safety

I'd say my product goes pretty far out of the realms of normal products. For starters, the name of the collective who made the track - Fukkk Offf. I dont understand the choice of name, it's probably for controversy and therefore recognition, just like a band called "Fuckbuttons" or "Tits n Clits" - neither are good... They're managed by Coco Machete (Sean Holland) and this track (more than friends) has incorporated various artists from the label, allowing them to publicise the DJ, the rapper and the singer via any promotions made (posters, magazine articles, web banners, pop ups, music vids, etc.)

It challenges the idea of using personally filmed footage by using footage taken from youtube and royalty free websites - this could be a good example of "bricolage", the concept within post-modernism were you utilize the things around you exactly in your product while keeping originality e.g. the modern Psycho shot by shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's version, OR, Alien Versus Predator's mimicked shots/scenes from both films. My bricolage uses the fact that the things around me were Youtube videos.

This form of mash-up video was inspired by Daniel Swan, a video editor/artist who only uses footage from Youtube, trawling through for ages to find aesthetically suitable bits of footage:



You can see, he has taken highly generic footage of someone filming out the window of their car on a high exposure (making the sky white), keying the sky out and then finding footage of space which he has stuck rotation on for the background. It's created a simple illusion of a spinning planet - It was a very big inspiration for me.

I developed this mash-up technique by using far more footage, some of which I filmed myself and had rendered on 3D software for me (the spinning planet and me walking). It was mostly sourced from suitable clips though. A video post I posted before this one of The Proxy's "8000" video has a practically identical idea, but instead of internet sourced footage, they'd used archive sourced footage, from Russia.


The budget was absolute zero. This was purely because i'm an independent filmmaker. had I been in a production company following protocol, I'd have needed to use royalty free, creative commons footage instead of illegally ripped youtube footage. However, with the ripped footage, although it does technically belong to Youtube, was so heavily edited and modified it often hardly resembled what it used to be - I sometimes combined around 15 different pieces of footage on youtube to create something entirely different, hardly resembling something you could recognize as your own. It makes it interesting an amalgamation of that many clips was republished on youtube... 
I've had zero copyright issues in this project - although what I did was probably on some level illegal, it's arguable as something different was created - maybe it was just the editing stage that could have friction as the clips remained as the raw files downloaded of youtube...


Health and safety really wasn't an issue at all. Unless you count looking at a screen for 7 hours - it probably wasn't great for my vision. I didn't go on location at all really, apart from just a few shots we did at the junction but we had technicians and supervisors to make sure everything done was safe - they needed to as they were working with a college unassociated with them. 

9 Key Frames

(FROM RIGHT TO LEFT):

The Lyrics say: "In the club, shakin' shakin'. I decided to link the imagery with this by inserting footage of old-school 1990's acid house ravers as they suit the scene of the music and demographi. It also just fitted perfectly, creating an apocalyptic rave theme like the world is ending and everyone is celebrating their last seconds on earth - come to think of it, maybe this is how we'll end on 2012.

I thought this shot would identify the label as a geek-sheek, indy, electro, retro-mad collective (which they are) by showing this kid in glasses going crazy to the beat - a similar example would be:

The kids in this video (of the same genre and scene) are all just as speccy and nerdy.

The 3rd image work in a similar way to the first, using acid house dancers and artwork to demonstrate the genre. The reason is because nowadays, unlike older electro music inspired by 1980's synths is now going for 1990's instead (drum loops/samples/art work and more).

The Intertextual reference is from Romain Gavras' video for The Last Shadow Puppets' "Age of the Understatement" Video, demonstrating a dystopic soviet russia - I turned it slightly to a dystopic planet, because the walking has destroyed so much and the armies need to retaliate.

Not many shots (created by myself) have much camera work - for the scenes with me green screened, I just had a static, tripod mounted camera.

The Shots in in the clubs and the sparks n explosions were all used instead of strobes - the clubs had dancers which synced to the beat. The explosion flourishewd across the screen for transitions when solid cutting would'nt do.

My mise-en-scene is simply the world being destroyed, both by the giant and the people trying to retaliate with nukes against him. I wanted the youth of the planet to be celebrating their fates by raving in a club, being blown up in the process. Overall, the apocalyptic themes were inspired by the viral concept of judgment day on 2012.



I have inspirations from Godzilla and Beastie Boys when it comes to the stepping/giant business. Armageddon, 2012 and old disaster movies gave me the inspirations for the tidal waves n volcanoes - they all feature a lot of pyro to create nice transitions.