Ottoman Art: new Arts/History Documentary Film

I'm especially pleased to have just delivered a new film to support a major exhibition of Ottoman-era artwork taking place at the Palazzo Lomellino in Genoa over the next three months. I was commissioned by Hali Publishing Ltd. (on behalf of the Bruschettini Foundation) to create the eight and a half minute film to introduce the exhibition at the prestigious gallery space in Genoa.



The film is an arts/history documentary piece taking viewers through the era 1450-1600, a time when the Ottoman empire rose to become the dominant power in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.


The cultural artifacts on display in this exhibition are particularly impressive, encompassing  a stunning collection of silk textiles, ceramics, armour and of course, fine carpets.

The film combines still imagery of such artifacts, archival illustrations and motion graphics to tell the story of the growth of the Ottoman empire and the important role that fine arts and crafts played in this era.



The script for the film was written by renowned US scholar Walter B. Denny and for this exhibition the story is narrated in Italian with English sub-titles. Currently the film is not available online, but I can thoroughly recommend a trip to Genoa to see it, here are the exhibition details.

New Directing Showreel: Summer 2014

Please enjoy this new show reel cut. These are all projects I have directed, and in many cases I'll have shot, animated or composited on these jobs too. You will see clips from some of my short films, plus extracts of many of the commercials and promotional films I have made. Some of this work is from my time as a Director at TANDEM and some from freelance projects too.

Serving Fine Web Pages For 17 Years

Big thanks to old friend (and painter of visions) Nicholas StHelier. He's dug out an old postcard I made back in 1996. It's a calling card I used to give out to people to invite them to come and see my website.

Those were very different times...

The Tall Story Hotel was hosted on the free webspace I got with my dial up internet account from Pipex. Thus the snappy URL you see here. Looking up my record on whois.com it looks like I didn't register the chrisgavin.com and chrisgavin.co.uk domains until a few years later (May 5th 1999.)

Of course the link on the postcard is long dead now, but the page you are reading this on now is the descendant of that first site. The code, graphics and hosting service have been changed many times since of course. The current version of www.chrisgavin.com isn't really a proper website at all in the old sense; since August 2005, this has just become a sprawling collection of Blogger pages.

It was quite exotic to have your own website back in 1996. I must have been quite an early adopter. A year or two later I bought one of these too. Quite the dotcom boomer!

Back of the postcard, yep there it is ... 1996 !!!