Eye Candy
Hungry Hungry Eat Head from Bren O'Callaghan on Vimeo.
It's tough when you're in competition with 2098 shows in 265 venues in a city that for a month each year becomes home to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the largest arts festival in the world. Tough, but not impossible. Thanks to Hudson-Powell, Joel Gethin Lewis and the leap of faith required by City of Edinburgh Council who were very polite about my asking if they wouldn't mind if we beheaded their citizens and placed them in a giant cartoon for the afternoon.
After this, our beta launch, we went on to delight the city of Liverpool during AND: Abandon Normal Devices Festival of New Cinema and Digital Culture. If you too can find a way to step into your daydreams and earn enough to get by, I definitely recommend it. Read more about Hungry Hungry Eat Head here.
Weapon of Mass Hypnosis
Hungry Hungry Eat Head
Despite standing beneath God's own shower nozzle for two days straight, the skies cleared and the sun appeared for a perfect three-hour stretch to allow us a (mostly) dry premiere of Hungry Hungry Eat Head at the Edinburgh screen. Despite competing with 1,200 other events in the biggest cultural festival on Earth, we attracted some 500 participants from passing footfall alone. As only four persons could take part at any time due to a compromise between marker size and camera position, which dictated how many we could fit in the screen frame at any one time, we hit an average of 40 'players' every 15 minutes.
Hungry Hungry Eat Head
I say players, but one unexpected effect of the mesmerising soundtrack from Sound & Sons was that many just stood hypnotized, transported to a beatific state of retro TV bliss, rocking on the spot - staring - pacified and oddly becalmed by the sight of furry cuboid with fangs in place of their own fair mug. This was a beta version pending further development prior to the next appearance as part of the AND Festival at the Big Screen Liverpool on Saturday 26th September, which will be fully pimped out with further enhancements (responsive animated features overlaid upon the public video feed). Not one person queried the purpose of what we doing. If they had, I would have asked them: when was the last time you just played for play sake?
Joel Gethin Lewis and Jody Hudson-Powell
Once again, as I witnessed during the delivery of Glastonbury Village Screen, the self-imposed barrier between adults stepping into the same lungspace as children reared it's boggle eyed, Daily Mail-mache head. At one point, a group of a dozen young adults took turns stepping up one at a time as there were children upfront, until one of those present said "For Chrissakes, they're only kids, they're not gonna bite!" So effective is the exclusion zone around a child-not-your-own, that a sign reading Beware of Unaccompanied Minor would be more effective on a garden gate than the traditional canine threat.
Favourite moment - the American lady who ran down from the penthouse suite of the adjacent Sheraton Hotel with her daughter to join in after spotting us through the window, then asked if we were bringing it to New York. If you have the sofa ma'm, we have the passports! Again, credit due to Joel and Jody (and the absent Luke). You bring shame upon we mortals.
Bad head day
It's coming! It's less than a week to go until the one-off play based event at the Big Screen Edinburgh on Saturday 15th August, Hungry Hungry Eat Head. Graphic markers will be distributed on site between 2pm and 5pm with replacement participants every 5 - 10 minutes. Jody at Hudson-Powell has just sent across this sneak pic of one of dozens of bizarre, animated character heads that continue to move and change during the live experience.
As Leslie Crowther would say (if you lived in the UK during the 80s and watched a lot of TV)... "Come on down!"
TV Interruptions
David Hall: TV Interruptions 1971
Video artist David Hall confusing the living hell out of the Scottish public during the 1971 Edinburgh Festivals with his seminal TV Interruptions series. Broadcast unannounced as part of domestic television schedules, those at home on the couch were suddenly faced with the perplexing sight of the goggle box slowing filling with water from a tap, ablaze in the middle of a field or switched to fast-forward in a communal viewing room to the sound of background screams...
David Hall: TV Interruptions 1971
In celebration we are showing these again on the Big Screen Edinburgh by kind permission of REWIND, a research and preservation project for early video art at the University of Dundee. Thanks are also due to Edinburgh Art Festival and curator Lucy Keany, for baffling a new generation of unwitting observers. Appearing daily from 5th August to 5th September, at purposely unknowable timings...
The sweet smell of success
They came, they saw, some 300+ of them... but from where I still have no idea. At 4.55pm with 5 minutes to go, I'd say less than 20 seats were taken, but by the time I nervously gripped the mic for introductions ("...there is a scene of brief nudity at the start, blink and you'll miss it - so don't blink..."), the audience had multiplied like an outbreak of botulism in a student kitchen. Johnny, our volunteer Penguin-with-the-placards, was an instant hit as soon as he waddled into view with children lining up after the film to stare in wonder at this new species of bearded bird.
Speaking to audience members afterwards, most realised that each of the three female characters had a signature scent, but as the numbered cards didn't state what these were everyone had their own take on each. I can now reveal that Dorothy was vanilla, Madelaine pear drops, and Susan - for the snogging scene - strawberry chapstick. By far the most popular scent was of course the worst, with grimaces and gag reflexes rippling through the crowd for no.6... boy's toilets! Three cheers for Scratch 'n' Sniff Cinema!
Sniff my finger
Above is an exclusive preview (but not pre-fume) of the scent cards that will be distributed at my forthcoming collaboration with Bompass & Parr: Scratch 'n' Sniff Cinema presents Gregory's Girl. The whiffs have now been chosen and confirmed, and believe me, it's a whole new experience to sit down and watch a film with a pen and notepad to identify where an odour might seep in. Try it and see, not just with this title but any. You'll be surprised at how creative you can be!
The stink will remain a mystery until the night, but I can reveal that the object of Gregory's affection - female footballing ace Dorothy - will have a signature scent of her own. Something feminine but not too adult or complex, reminiscent of first love, of girls, of breezing past a crush in the school corridor and catching a breath of... well, wait and see!