Geoff Rigden

On Sunday, my wife Wendy and I went down to Deptford to the APT gallery to see a talk by the artists Geoff Rigden and Norman Toynton. Visitors to our office will have seen a few of Geoff Rigden's paintings placed strategically on our walls to give us (me at least) little sparks of joy each day. Cameraman Chris Morphet and his partner Johanna Freudenberg were at the talk too. Johanna met Geoff in the sixties while he was at the Royal College of Art painting school. Morphet, who was at the RCA film school at the time, made a film about harmonicas called "Playing The Thing" (a cult classic) in which Rigden made an appearance along with Sonny Terry, James Cotton, Duster Bennett and other "blues harp" luminaries.

In the talk on Sunday, Geoff didn't say that much but what he did say was both funny and enlightening - someone asked about the two artists working habits and Geoff related a story about the American Art critic, Clement Greenberg who had told him that Jackson Pollack had quite long periods of not painting, some days were made up of going to the store to buy beer and then drinking it, followed by sudden flurries of painting activity. I think Geoff's point was habit doesn't have too much to do with creativity, it's more a state of mind, - make your painting when you have decided what to make wherever you want to. Geoff's current favourite location to work being the kitchen table. Wendy asked whether the two artists had a special object that had stayed with them throughout their careers - Geoff remembered visiting the V and A while he was at the RCA to look at the Indian miniatures (the V and A was right next door to the old painting school) - he loved them so much that he bought a repro from the shop for "thirty bob" and its been with him ever since.

It's quite difficult to define Geoff's work, he came out of what might be called the "Abstract Expressionist" movement but there is something very startling about what he does - startling because of it's honesty, which in turn gives the paintings a magical quality. They are fascinating to look at but apparently effortlessly made - he's not laying a big idea on us, he seems to be going for something deeper and human. In the talk he told us about his annual visits to Cyprus where he spends quite a lot of time looking at ancient art - designs on ceramics, frescos and mosaics, presumably with mystical or pagan messages which he finds inspiring. Anyway Rigden's work has a similar effect on me - Geoff's treasured possession is his Indian miniature repro bought in the V and A all those years ago, mine is a 1977 drawing made by him in Cyprus hanging on our kitchen wall at home.

Photocopyright © Chris Morphet

Parachuting into Berlin

I could pretend that it was me in the white jumpsuit; the truth is I was standing 5,000 feet below the helicopter wishing I had not given up smoking in 1995. We had one chance - a little over 3 minutes of jump time - to capture the footage we needed to make our film. The client, South Korean electronics colossus LG, was excited about seeing their logo (and their latest washing machine) on 2 massive banners. But we only had one jump, the type on the banner was never going to be easy to read and we were running out of time - pulled down by the massive weight of the banners, the jumpers were hurtling to earth far faster than any of us had imagined.

The team of jumpers - 2 carrying the banners and 2 cameramen - were fantastically professional. Ice cool before the jump and good fun after it, they drove all night to get to Berlin from the Midlands, did the jump and drove straight back home again. Their landing was pinpoint perfect, right in the centre of the prescribed landing zone. If anything their camerawork was even better - they captured everything we needed on their helmet-mounted HD cameras while managing not to plummet to their deaths. The lead jumper, a dare-devil with more than 14,000 jumps to his name, declared it the scariest thing he had ever done in his life.

It took a long stroll around Berlin's beautiful, thought-provoking Holocaust Memorial for my heartbeat to return to normal. It was a crazy, scary day and a totally new experience for me. We are delighted with the result and I am ready to do something similar soon.

And next time maybe it will be me in the white jumpsuit.

Beef Curry £3

So farewell then, Bruno's. We will miss you, even if your display of ingredients made us feel queasy. And even if we believe that most of the food poisoning cases in the Clerkenwell area over the last decade can (probably) be directly linked to you. And even if you were a typical whingeing Tottenham fan. We will miss you. Not many places can offer Beef Curry for only £3, and a generous portion, too. And we will miss your Mum.

Wild Tracks

It appears that sound engineers seem to be working less and less in the TV industry. Anyone who has watched TV next to my mum knows that being able to actually hear what is being said during a TV programme is important. During an episode of The Sopranos she once asked if a slick suited man who had just killed someone next to Newark Airport had said, after a solemn pause, "butter bean". If my mother had really considered the context of the utterance she would surely have come to the realisation that the more likely candidate was "Badda-bing" (say it out loud in an Italian American accent).

The Sopranos, of course, did use sound recordists and this particular problem was with the hearing of the viewer, but for many productions the fault lies with the budgets that are given to the filmmakers.

Canvas TV at the Serpentine Summer Party

We've been busy.....last week we had a crew of ten (our biggest crew so far) at The Serpentine Summer Party. It was two long days, finishing past midnight on Wednesday and Thursday but ultimately rewarding and fun. We were filming interviews taking place in a set designed by Zaha Hadid for the announcement of Canvas TV, a proposed TV channel specialising in design and the arts. The idea was that the celebrity laden guest list would be guided to our set where either Lauren Laverne, Rory Bremner or CNN's Monita Rajpal would conduct light-hearted interviews. Thanks to Rebecca King Lassman's excellent team of "celebrity wranglers" this actually happened. Grayson Perry, Pharrell Williams (Hannah tried to touch but failed), Damien Hirst (hugged Chris the cameraman to be explained in another blog) Mario Testino, Zaha herself, Thandi Newton, Sir Peter Blake, David Bailey, Phillip Green and many others looked great and were wonderfully framed in Zaha's set. I was really the only person who could hear what was being said and it was interesting to hear a bunch of major artists talk about what they had been doing that day - Grayson making a giant tapestry, Damien a new show of paintings at The Wallace Collection coming up, Sir Peter Blake working on the graphics for a new movie about Ian Drury and Mario confessing he wanted to make a film. I was a bit knackered the next day but felt charged up by these art dudes and their energy.

Argentina's underside

Every country has its Skegness. Just 4 hours by car from "Bs As" (as the trendy Buenos Aires seems to be called now), past Fray Bentos and just south of Bovril is a little town called Nogoya. Proudfoot had gone there to make a documentary about a film maker who had chosen the town as a location because of its unique qualities, namely inertia and a tendency towards bad weather. As we met people from the town and visited their houses, characters and stories seemed to unfold before our very eyes. Our film maker had found a rich source of inspiration. Old crumbling houses with silver spoons hung from the walls, and well-used rifles left on mantle pieces each projected a new scene or shot onto our film makers internal cinema screen. Nogoya, like Skegness, is not a town likely to be on page one of its country's holiday brochure, but, again like Skegness, you learn more about the culture and psychology of a nation going to places away from the global spotlight than their better looking, glitzier cousins down the road.

The Children's Shoes

Last week Simon and I had a lunch with quite a senior person in one of the cable/satellite channels. She is a charming, but pretty forthright sort of person, doesn't suffer fools gladly and may even be described as "tough". It just so happens that she was at the Dubai event at which our films for the Rolex Awards For Enterprise were being shown last November. This lady is not the first person to have mentioned to us that Eddie's film about the AIDS orphans in South Africa had her in tears.

The film is centered around Andrew Muir, an amazing guy who runs an holistic training programme for young people affected by the AIDS crisis in South Africa (because of AIDS, SA has a huge amount of child-headed households). The country's burgeoning eco-tourism industry needs skilled workers and the young people benefit by having stable incomes. Andrew has set up the training scheme, Umzi Whetu to make the link.

For the first time in a long time at a Rolex event I was not running around worrying about the projection being in focus, I was sitting at a table having dinner and being part of the audience. Eddie's film from the first viewings in the office had brought a lump to my throat so I wasn't surprised to see less jaded souls than I with tears streaming down their faces in Dubai. The film is only four minutes so there is a lot of information to get across and engage the audience emotionally with the subject.

I found myself thinking the other day, "what was it that moved people so much in this little film and why is it so efficient at drawing people onto the subject matter?" Firstly there is a music track which is one of Muir's trainees singing an improvised song at a slightly out of tune piano. There are some aerial shots of a township - one storey homes stretch far into the distance. Then we are on the ground in the township and can see these are very basic dwellings. We move inside one of the homes and see their simple interiors, minimal furnishings, soft toys on beds. All the while Andrew Muir is telling us in voice over about what the AIDS crisis has done to families in South Africa. The sequence is very carefully edited by Andreas Torner who cuts back to the trainee singing at one point and a piece of Andrew's in-sync interview. Then there is a shot that is neither beautiful or epic; no fancy pulling of focus or clever panning or tilting - its even a bit gloomy lightingwise. The shot is a close-up of a pair of children's sandals carelessly kicked off beside a bed - for some reason this is the one that always tips me over the edge, it's somehow deeply symbolic whilst being brutally real. I'm not sure if Eddie said to our excellent cameraman Mike James - "look over there, some children's shoes, somehow deeply symbolic whilst being brutally real" or whether Mike just saw it in his thorough harvesting of the scene. Either way, "the children's shoes" are one of the big moments in the films we made last year.

You can see the film here

Bank Holiday Moustaches

The Proudfoot Company spent their bank holiday weekends growing moustaches.

Hi-Di-Hi Campers!

I imagine that lo-fi indie rock, post-punk, and doom metal probably aren’t the first things that spring to mind when you think of Butlins, but for a couple of weekends a year the seaside holiday resort becomes a Mecca for alternative music fans when it plays host to All Tomorrow’s Parties music festival.

This weekend at All Tomorrow’s Parties: The Fans Strike back in Minehead, Somerset, it struck me (ahem) that this apparent mish-mash of cultures actually makes a lot of sense. Although most of the largely young, trendy middle class crowd would no doubt turn their noses up at spending their summer holidays at a British coastal holiday camp, ATP offers some pretty appealing advantages over other festivals. While the accommodation may have been "basic", the addition of a roof, bed, heating, hot water, cooker, fridge, kettle and tv is certainly a step up from traditional festival slumming, and there wasn’t even a glimpse of any sludgy brown stuff in any of the three indoor venues with their clean, flushing toilets.

But it seemed to me that a large part of the appeal of ATP was the “quaint” little Butlins touches. There was something quite refreshing about seeing pretty girls in vintage floral dresses and skinny boys in tight jeans totally immersing themselves in playing on 2p machines, visiting the waterpark, playing bingo or (in my case) stuffing their faces at the all-you-can eat Pizza Hut buffet. What Butlins essentially offers is the chance for everyone to act like a big kid and have some good, clean, simple fun. And regardless of your age, class or taste in music, no one can turn their noses up at a round of ten-pin bowling or a ride on the waltzers. Plus I’m sure I saw Beirut munching down on what looked suspiciously like a battered sausage. It’s not every weekend you can say that.  

Art, Fragrance and Excess baggage

The pleasures of filming on location seem to diminish with each passing trip. Last week cameraman Chris Morphet and soundman Paul Nathan and I flew to Berlin via Heathrow's Terminal 2 and Tiegel airport.  Terminal 2 is now about as glamorous as Doncaster bus station but not as efficient.  At Tiegel passengers were herded through passport control in a way my father wouldn't have allowed his cattle to be treated.  We then waited thirty minutes while the single baggage handler got our luggage on to the carousel. 

The reason for our trip was to film the japanese artist Masanori Handa and his mentor, the famous sculptor and performance artist Rebecca Horn.  Masanori is living in the Turkish quarter of Berlin in what looks like an old music shop. Rebecca Horn arrived and we proceeded to film the two as they discussed Masanori's work.  In one room there was a huge decorated palm tree and in another a pile of waste cardboard up to the ceiling with a water sprinkler on the top - the water trickled down the side of the cardboard sculpture.  Masanori expressed slight concern about the weight of the wet cardboard and the strength of the floor the whole assemblage was sitting on.  After saying what a great piece it was Rebecca said that the smell of wet cardboard was quite overpowering,  Masanori agreed and said this was all part of it.  I asked Rebecca whether she had ever worked with smell, she said  "Not exactly but a well- known cosmetics company once asked me to develop my own fragrance....they came to my house in Spain and with a special fragrance catching machine captured the smells of certain plants in my garden....the perfume was never available commercially, I am the only person with a few bottles left".  Rebecca has worked in just about every medium from sculpture to performance and even feature films but I hadn't expected the fragrance, she is truly a three hundred an sixty degree artist who continues to exhibit startling new pieces.  Horn's energy and continual wonderment at the world around her, keep on fueling the work.  She confessed in our interview that she makes art mainly for her own enjoyment.  

In the evening Rebecca very kindly invited us to dinner at a fantastic Italian restaurant near Checkpoint Charlie, Sale e Tabacchi where we drank numerous bottles of her favourite wine with Gunther, the photographer, Patrick, her cleaner and her friend, the artist Kimsooja.  

I realised I had been in this same restaurant before with a miserable John Peel in 1996 (Liverpool had lost).  Anyway all in all I shouldn't complain about airports and travel, it was a pretty life-enhancing trip.