Bren O'Callaghan » liverpool

Tooth collection points

bren — Sun, 08 May 2011 10:09:19 +0000

These tooth donation points for the Palaces project have been recently competed by Barry at the Bluecoat, with a bit of steady-handed help from project assistant Sam on the vinyl lettering front. These two here are earmarked for the Bluecoat, home to artist Gina Czarnecki's forthcoming exhibition and the first public appearance of the palace sculpture in December, and The Centre for Life in Newcastle - newly confirmed as an exhibitor for late 2012. As the teeth are starting to trickle in, work on the beautiful fairytale animation to accompany the international call for milk teeth is nearing completion from the talented folk at Design by Day. I can't wait to share it with everyone...

moves10

bren — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 12:11:58 +0000

From Liverpool to Manchester and across the UK on screens, on site and online, moves celebrated its 6^th successful year by reaching out to more audiences than ever. With nearly 500 submissions from over 40 countries from around the globe, this boutique festival’s impact is greater than ever, encouraging even more talent from across the region, UK and around the world to discover and exchange new methods of telling stories centered around movement on screen through films, installations, forums and live events.

Hot Circuit: Christina Corfield

This year’s theme Framing Motion explored how practitioners choose to frame movement through their choice of setting and context to define the boundaries for screen-based works. These could be real worlds or imaginary, abstract, impossible or augmented environments defined by a specific visual intent. In looking at methods of capturing a sense of pulse and energy, the curatorial outlook also addressed definitions of stillness: the pause-and-relinquish through which motion occurs.

When We Meet Again: Clara Garcia Fraile & Sam Pearson

For the first time a series of installed works studded the halls, rooms and courtyards of Liverpool’s creative hub the Bluecoat, from Charlotte Gould and Paul Sermon's tasty AR buffet Urban Picnic, to the one-on-no-one intimacy of video goggle installation When We Meet Again (Clara Fraile & Sam Pearson). Christine Corfield’s Hot Circuit told the 10-screen tale of a 2D teenage pregnancy while viewers automatically flinched and stepped back from the violent crack of a rope pulled with gunshot force through an urban assault course, curling and lashing like an angry electric bolt (Space Drawing No.5, Sai Hua Kuan).

The Colour of Pomegrantes (Sayat Nova): Sergei Parajanov, 1968

Nowhere was the festival theme more apparent that within the rare, feature-length screening of Armenian auteur Sergei Paradjanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates. A useful and highly accessible introduction by Daniel Bird, co-lecturer in Russian and Eastern European Film at Sheffield University equipped us for what lay ahead by encapsulating the life and career of this persecuted visionary, warning us not to expect a story, sense or understanding. Instead we were asked to allow the images to wash over us, like listening to music or the view from a train.

The Colour of Pomegrantes (Sayat Nova): Sergei Parajanov, 1968

The colour-drenched stream of static tableaux that followed quite legitimately justified the movie’s claim in Cahiers du cinéma’s top 10 films of all time. A biography of Armenian poet Sayat Nova’s life told in visual and poetic form, rather than pursuing a literal course, Orthodox iconography and Persian miniatures blinked into life. Newly dyed wool is slopped from steaming cauldrons, animals pour through a hive of catacombs, quasi-religious figures glow with an unearthly light, books lie scattered across impossible surfaces, pages turning in the breeze.

The Colour of Pomegrantes (Sayat Nova): Sergei Parajanov, 1968

At the heart of all burns the arresting image of Parajadov’s androgynous muse, Georgian actress Sofiko Chiaureli, playing no fewer than six roles, both male and female. More of a cultural spa experience than a standard visit to the cinema, watching The Colour of Pomegranates is a visual feast that we can pick at or gorge upon, a precursor to Derek Jarman’s rich visual style or Matthew Barney’s super-stylised filmic orgies (see The Cremaster Cycle).

Like a butterfly cupped in the palm of a hand, this painterly dream is the very definition of movement suspended, an intake of breath before release.

Tales of Two Cities

bren — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:27:48 +0000

With an OCD fury not seen since the woman in the Shake 'n Vac advert ground her Valium and mixed it with a glug of Bacardi, I've been plugging the cracks in this site and pasting up former production duties with a vengeance. My personal favourites A Wall is a Screen now have a page to themselves, as do the rapidly expanding MegaPhone team - flying the flag for those of us who see no reason why computer games should progress beyond the Atari era. Once upon a festival, The Light Surgeons conjured up a storm in a Gothic salon and The Royal Opera House treat us to no fewer than twelve outdoor relays in the past five years.

Into The Woods

bren — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:23:53 +0000

You can never have enough magic capes, as I discovered earlier last year. Shamefully I have only just got around to documenting this particular project for the Big Screen Liverpool from Charlotte Gould in partnership with moves, although thanks are also due to my friend Mandy Tolley for creating the most intensely red cloak with the biggest button I have ever seen. Yes, even bigger than Kirsty Allsopp's secret cache.

Portrait of the Artist by Proxy

bren — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:07:29 +0000

Alison Jones: Portrait of the Artist by Proxy

If you could never see your own reflection again, would you trust others to describe your appearance? Alison Jones has done just that for DaDaVisions with Portrait of the Artist by Proxy. Originally commissioned as a sonic artwork by the Bluecoat in Liverpool, we recruited the talents of Sparkle Media to create a deliberately offbeat approach to standard subtitles. The end result maintains a key emphasis upon the audio emitted via the screen speaker system.

Alison Jones: Portrait of the Artist by Proxy

In this way the viewer/listener has to switch sensory emphasis just as Alison must as it is impossible to follow the descriptive portrait by reading the text alone. The point-of-view dips, spins and curls across a landscape of 3-D typography, lingering upon key words as multiple voices share consensus, or becoming impossible to scan as the soundscape dissolves into whispers.

Pixie Dust

bren — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:26:46 +0000

Gina Czarnecki: Pixie Dust

Gina Czarnecki's films and installations are informed by human relationships to image, disease, evolution, genetic research and by advanced technologies of image production. Pixie Dust blurs contemporary methods in scientific research – specifically, limb regrowth in salamanders and the harvesting of embryonic stem cells from pigs for use in human medicine.

Gina Czarnecki: Pixie Dust

Taking the form of a scientific televised report, observers will be drawn by the implicit ambiguity that appears to suggest the future has already arrived. What if those missing limbs through birth or accident were able to regrow, augment and fine-tune their bodies… becoming super-able? A DaDaVisions commission.

Who Do You Think You Are?

bren — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:37:19 +0000

So Many Excuses: Who Do You Think You Are?

...here comes DaDaVisions, a brace of opinionated new screen commissions developed right here in the North West and soon to appear upon TWENTY giant outdoor screens across the UK. Launching as a new strand of DaDaFest, four new artist film and video projects will face-slap shoppers with subversive and alternate interpretations of disability. I'll be posting further information upon each as the week progresses.

So Many Excuses: Who Do You Think You Are?

First up is influential agit-prop trio No Excuses, once fond of chaining themselves to buses to chant "Piss on Pity" and now reformed as So Many Excuses. Mandy Colleran, Mandy Redvers-Rowe and Ali Briggs (who some may recognise as Freda in Coronation Street) have revisited the classic Frost Report sketch from the 1960s featuring the Two Ronnies and John Cleese.

Then a comment upon the British class system but now playfully adapted to explore the stereotypes and labels that the disabled place upon each other, Who Do You Think You Are? is written and performed by SME, produced by Asta Films with vintage styling expertise by Maria Lloyd.

Wave Your Hands In The Air

bren — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:36:25 +0000

Thanks to friend and collaborator Sam Meech for riding to my rescue, a blonde knight upon his horse Isadora to deliver title animations for Unsilent Night tomorrow. I have blisters on my hand from carrying the 'portable' AnyCast vision mixing desk over from Manchester on the train (the approximate weight of a drowned man wearing flannel pyjamas) and just over 24 hours to remind myself how it works again.

Chess pieces of the Gods

bren — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:53:35 +0000

Hand from Above from Chris O'Shea on Vimeo.

Inspire Mark

bren — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:05:20 +0000

After sitting on this like a constipated hen for the past few weeks, I can now go public that Unsilent Night is one of the projects granted the London 2012 Inspire Mark which recognises exceptional and innovative projects inspired by the 2012 Games.

In this case, the association is through our work in throwing open the cupboard upon a wealth of archive film, pulling off kid gloves in fusing old with new and encouraging investigation of early cinema by stepping outside (literally) of the multiplex experience.