Here's some 16mm cine film I shot and DIY processed around five years ago. I then lost the roll of film and have only just found it again!
Meanwhile, I've been playing around with DIY film scanning methods again and have hacked-together a system for digitizing 16mm film frames too.
So this video above may look like a grainy and blotchy home movie ... it is ... but ... I built my own spiral tank to process this, developed it at home in coffee, then digitized the footage using a home made film scanner. DIY film-making doesn't get much more DIY than this,
You wait ages for a blog post to come along and wehey, another one ... Here's a low-fi motion graphics video I just made for Virna Lindt's new track "Avant Garde".
For this track I was asked to make a simpler kind of music video with a tighter production schedule. I only had the vinyl record and a couple of still photos of the artist Virna Lindt to work with. The track has a certain pulsing shuffle to it, so I used lots of 'dust' and 'noise' in the graphics to keep the imagery buzzing and alive throughout the track.
Well it's been bloomin' ages since my last blogfession; over a year it seems! I've been pretty busy in the meantime, scrabbling around making a living and not always making things I can write much about.
However...
Here's a music video I just made for musician, gallerist and novelist Tot Taylor. The track 'Featurette' is a somewhat autobiographical number, in which Tot addresses his teenage self circa 1973.
When I first met Tot a few months ago, he told me a story from his teenage years. Like me, (as it happens) he grew-up in Cambridge. As an aspiring pop star, Tot bunked-off school one day with his teenage bandmates and took the train down to London. Armed only with a demo cassette and an AtoZ street map, Tot's band tracked down all of the record companies they could and proceeded to 'knock on doors'. After many rejections Tot's crew ended-up at the offices of Island Records where miraculously they found a sympathetic ear... Amazingly, Tot and his band of schoolmates recorded a session for the legendary Island Records label. But then and there, the dream kind of hit the buffers. Cut to the present day and Tot decided to revive his song 'Featurette' and rework it as a wry 'message to his naive but ambitous teenage self'.
For such a story of retro pop ambition, I decided to make a film in the style of a naive 1970s era teenage film-maker. The animation is rough and wobbly and the live action footage is mostly shot on 8mm and 16mm cine film. Not such a leap as it turned out ;).
Here's a new video I've just made (directing/shooting/editing) for Simon's Cat Ltd. This episode explores the issues around moving house with your cats.
This 2018 showreel showcases some of my more recent compositing and motion graphics work. I have been working professionally in animation production for over twenty years. I've been employed for A LOT of that time as an animation compositor.
In around 2002 I switched from Animo and Toonz, to working in Adobe After Effects. All of the work seen here has been comped in that software. Some of the work is from larger projects at studios such as Nexus, Lupus, Tandem, Not To Scale etc. and other clips are from smaller projects I've undertaken independently as a freelance commercial film-maker.
If you'd like to hire me to work in your animation studio, or work as a director/producer for your next video, please do drop me an email at chris@chrisgavin.com
Here's a promo video Kaspersky Labs are using online to launch and promote their 'Secur'IT' competition for students. This link shows the movie as it is now published over on the Kaspersky YouTube channel.
I delivered this video a couple of weeks back working for agency 90Seconds. I helped the client to helped edit their script, then created this cut using stock images/footage.
Well I've been at home this last month and sorting through a lot of old things. High on a shelf in my studio I found a plastic box with my abandoned cine film digitizing project inside; so I dusted it off a bit and decided to see if I could get it running again.
Amazingly it DOES seem to be working!
I documented this project a bit back in the day. I stopped working on all this cine film stuff around 2014 when I had more pressing work/life commitments to attend to.
So not only have I now got it up and runnig again, but I've even made some small improvements! I've got the device working now with my newer Panasonic GH4 camera rather than the Canon 600D DSLR I was using before. I figure that the smaller micro 4/3 sensor is better for this application requiring less extreme macro magnification than the larger APSC sensor needed. Also the GH4 has an 'electronic shutter' mode which should be a lot more durable than the all-mechanical shutter on the Canon DSLR.
The electronic triggering circuit of my device needed a slight modification to trigger the shutter of the GH4. But I got it working after some web searching and a few hours of further tinkering.
So to show the world the current status of this project I've made this short video...
