Car park video #2: Gavin Prior

Brigid Power Ryce Underground 23-10-11

Underground Gathering 23-10-11

We did a gig in the car park tonight for the first time. It was ace. People came to it and everything!

I flipping forgot to take photos of Brigid singing, but Alice got some amazing footage of her so it's cool. I forgot to take many photographs, but there was too much to look at and hear, to have spent half of it looking at just-taken photographs on a little screen would have been a waste. There will be sound and video to follow soon in the future.
It was weird being in the car park with so many people at once, but great too. Today will make an excellent memory.

Broken Camera Scene

One of the perks of working in a camera shop is that occasionally a person will drop in a camera to be recycled. Normally the cameras are broken beyond (reasonably priced) repair, and won't even switch on. But sometimes the camera will switch on, and its "issues" become highly erratic quirks that are completely encouraged if you love a good bit of broken equipment that doesn't do quite what it's supposed to.

Under the Ground

One of the colleges I applied to (and probably, in time, all of them) required a mini-portfolio of work, so I decided on the car park project. It's one of the more consistent projects I've embarked on so was a bit easier to compartmentalise and explain than some of the other bits I've done. This particular college also gave the option of submitting a video piece as part of the portfolio, so I used this clip of Alice and Aaron playing down there one chilly October evening. We recorded loads that day, and I'm itching to go back down now the weather's not so apocalyptic.

Kitchen Roll

 

I left an old camera with a roll of out of date film in the kitchen for about a month, to be on hand for the various small occurrences in and around the kitchen table.

Then I finished the film and proceeded to leave it about month before getting it developed; typical.

The Pixels Underground

A still from video played back on my bug-ridden laptop shot by Alice McDowell.

Under the Ground - Aaron and Alice

 

Tunnelling

FairyFortFour Photovideo

At lengthy last, with the help of Michelle's computer, I've stitched together the photos from the last Fairy Fort night and lined them up and made them play. After much frustration with my own technological limitations I'm relieved to have finally done this. I'm afraid the quality is a bit poor, I tried doing the highest quality at every step but still it ended up pretty blocky. Which is annoying as it really doesn't do Aaron's projections justice at all. Oh well, for now it'll have to do, til I figure out how to make it better (or someone else lends their expertise...)

The song is Yawning Chasm's 'To the Void' - from his 'The Shadow is that Hidden' EP - which is an effortlessly gorgeous tune.

Fairy Fort Four

I've been putting off uploading these photographs cos I've been trying the last few days to make them into a sort of animated video thing, which was my original aim of displaying them but my computer just will not comply. So I'm putting a selection up. Hopefully I'll have figured out before too long how to make an animation using Ubuntu that doesn't practically require me to learn how to write code. Also my computer's pretty broken at this stage.

Basically what I did was set up the camera on a tripod (thanks Aaron) at the back of the room, put it on a long exposure with the remote shutter setting and took photos with the little wireless remote during the course of the night. I think there's something like two and a half hours between the first and last photo and about 2oo photos in all. I should have taken more, and annoyingly managed not to get any photos of the first act of the night - an improv set made up of Alice, Takashi, Tony and myself. But Suzanne video-recorded the performance so there'll be that, and it looks excellent.

Aaron offered to project his slides throughout the evening, and a couple of people took turns pressing the clicky to advance them. Amazing photographs. The projector was aimed at the intersection of two walls and the ceiling, giving the already slightly otherworldly images a further disjointedness. And the colours! Beautiful; really and truly I felt privileged seeing them. The selection of photographs posted here generally have a different one of Aaron's projections in each, though I don't think I photographed every slide change.

Music for Dead Birds (Jimmy solo with Alice McDowell)

Yawning Chasm (with TakashiCarré)

After the music

The exposure spanned two slides in this one, hence the nice double-exposure look to the image on the wall.

Towards the end I went around setting off the flash by hand

"Stance gives you Power"

Tony's kiss goodbye

The last one; Tony's holding up a piece of drum equipment, I don't know why. I like that Liam and Takashi are talking to each other in this one, being the two people who created the best music events this city's seen in the last few years. They're even wearing similar jackets!