New film: 'In Motion'

With over 200 exits and used by millions of people daily, Tokyo's Shinjuku station is the world's busiest train station. It serves as the rapidly beating heart of the city's commercial districts, and is the main hub through which commuters pour in from across the Kanto plain and beyond every day. This makes for quite a sense of bustle to the passing observer. 

'In Motion' (the film viewable above), which aims to capture a slight flavour of that sense of rush, busy-ness and movement that characterises much of the capital, is the second in a planned trilogy of short films about Japan. The first in this trilogy is 'Makes The World Go Round' (issued in 2010 and now with over 2,000 views on YouTube), with a final film due at some point in 2012 and based on footage taken at Tokyo's Shibuya Crossing.

Shot with a Flip UltraHD pocket camera in late 2010, much of this film centres around a sequence captured by placing the camera on the floor of a station walkway. This had the effect of representing the rhythm of hundreds of shoes as people passed by the eye of the lens. The remainder of the film was assembled from other footage shot in the same station. 'In Motion' was largely produced in iMovie HD, with opening credits put together with PowerPoint 2010 (in the absence of Flash).

The film also makes use of a Creative Commons-licenced song as its soundtrack. The track is called 'Machines and Muscles', an appropriate title for the main factors of motion in the film, and is by a psychedelic drone band from Chicago called Cave. An instrumental number originally featured on the flip side of the 7" single 'Butthash', the song has a certain 'Baba O'Reilly' feel to it which contributes well to the groove of the footage.

Feel free to check out the new commenting system on this blog by dropping by with a word or two about the film.

New film: 'Station To Ocean'

It's been in the pipeline for a few months now, was initiated before winter began and is coming out now that winter is ending - the latest short from Globalism Films.

Titled 'Station To Ocean', this short film was produced in response to a call for video from across the globe from a single day, known as 'One Day On Earth'. As with the hundreds or thousands of other films captured in different corners of the planet, it was shot on 10.10.10 - a great day for binary code and for standing up to say 'Hello world'. I don't think that many other Brightonians picked up the challenge (if any), so I was glad to be the person representing my city in a worldwide initiative.

The film starts in Brighton station with the view that new arrivals to the city get as they walk through the ticket gates. It then takes a journey from the station, through the main streets to the beach and the pier, ending up with sea and sunshine - as good an introduction to Brighton as any. It does, however, come with a viewing warning. That real journey can take up to half an hour and the footage in the film is sped up so that the journey goes REALLY FAST. If this kind of thing makes you queasy, look away now.

I found a couple of great drum 'n' bass tracks to go with it for the soundtrack. The first is by Hektor Thillet and is titled 'Tarzan and the Jungle Furies', the second by TopNotch and is titled 'Sooner Or Later (TopNotch Jungle/Drum and Bass rmx)'. Both were found on ccmixter and are issued under CC-BY-NC licence.

The footage was shot using a Flip UltraHD camera and edited using iMovie HD. I had a little bit of trouble getting the right export settings from iMovie to produce an optimum file for uploading to YouTube, so may well publish my findings here for anyone else tht would like to know how to get their video file just right.

The One Day On Earth global video archive has a silent version of this film without titles.

New film: 'Makes The World Go Round'

What do love and sushi have in common? Well, they both kind of make things go round. They say that love does it for the world and sushi...it's the reason for those belts drives that spend their working days in perpetual motion, serving up fish and rice for the hungry.

'Makes The World Go Round' is a short film shot in Tokyo during my visit this summer. It is the first in a series of shorts to use field footage filmed with a Flip UltraHD camera and Creative Commons-licensed music. The camera is roughly the size of a mobile phone and takes surprisingly good quality pictures. The action, if you could call it that, focuses on a kaiten zushi restaurant in Kokubunji, that Western Tokyo suburb where I used to live.

For the uninitiated, kaiten zushi (also known as 'conveyor belt sushi' or 'sushi train') is where sushi is placed on a conveyor belt that winds around the restaurant and delivers the food to customers as they sit. They are one of those uniquely Japanese things that a visitor has to experience to get a little further under the Japanese soul. The restaurant in the film became a local favourite, and I often spent a lunchtime there with a bunch of Australians, Americans or Canadians getting their fish fix. Having also seen other footage shot in such restaurants on the Web, I also couldn't resist this time dropping a camera myself onto the belt as it went round and round.

This short is soundtracked by an ensemble called The Years, with a wonderful track titled 'Let's Stay In Love'. It's got a real vintage soul groove to it, coming at you like an early 70's Al Green or The Family Stone as they're just waking up. Issued under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence, the track seemed to perfectly fit the pace of the train. It's also the kind of tune that, like a 7" single you'd have spent a month saving up for as a kid (am I showing my age here?) and end up wearing out from overplay, has been getting some serious action on my hard drives.

I usually try to be quite picky about the standard of images I put out, but there were some features of this clip - the camera itself making a cameo, jerky movement as the belt navigates a turn - that just seemed to fit, so I kept the editing to a minimum. Stay tuned for more in the Japan shorts series from Globalism Films.

Raw like sushi. Yeah.