Back in December during my 2 day stay in Berlin for Nina Kraviz’ music video, I met up with my good friend David Shapiro who introduced me to a young upcoming film director called Hakan Can. Hakan had a few weeks downtime before his next short movie, so he had been asked by The Avant/Garde Diaries to direct one of their next episodes and to feature someone of his liking. Over our impromptu lunch he told me he was interested in featuring me, so within a couple of hours I found myself in the K-MB meeting room discussing the logistics of putting this episode together.

A month later I went back over to Berlin to find Hakan and his team had built a great set in a studio in Berlin, with a couple of actors and a few interesting props. My videos were playing on 3 screens in the background, and I was supposed to talk about myself and about who or what I found avantgarde these days.

Unfortunately I’m not the most natural speaker in the world, so it took us far longer than expected for me to spit out the words I had prepared. But the topic I chose (“the artists’ revolution”) is something I feel strongly about: the term avantgarde these days is widespread and has almost lost its meaning. Becoming an artist is far more achievable than it was years ago, with technology and the internet we’re discovering that we are all gifted with something or other, and we each have the power to use that talent and to show the world what it is. This is just a modern day phenomenon: years ago becoming an artist was something reserved for the elite, for those who really committed their whole lives to a dream.

Obviously there’s the bad side of this (no need for names), but I just ignore that and just enjoy the fact that I can find so much inspiration a few clicks away, and I can find so many relatively unknown people that I admire and can work together with.

You can read the full article on The Avant/Garde Diaries website and check out the other far more interesting people!

The model is Viktoriya Sasonkina

The second little project that happened during my 10 day stop off in London (here’s the first) was for the guys from Bloc, to create the promo for this year’s festival which will be finally moving away from their usual Maidenhead resort and relocating to a really cool spot in the Far East of London: an abandoned industrial site with a humungous old factory in one end, a silo in the other, and a hard-edged canal down the middle. Apparently people are thinking that the event will take place inside the factory, which is not the case.

The move is a pretty big deal for them, and they figured it should be the focus of the advertising campaign. They got their lighting crew to come along, who brought a van full of all sorts of gear, and spent a good couple of hours arranging all of it around the building. My brother Adam Docker came along to take care of the filming (using both the 5D and his Sony PDW700), working alongside Bloc’s art director Stuart Hammersley.

I also made the Bloc sting, both audio and visuals, which from now on will be inserted at the beginning of all their video pieces.

If you fancy some reminiscing, check the video promo I made for their 2011 campaign.

New tune using my brother’s little spanish guitar (it’s tiny!). I wanted him to record some solos as he’s pretty good at those arabic pentatonic scales, but he didn’t have the time, so I’m just left with a basic solo that’s a bit rigid. I was just spending a couple of nights at his place in London, and as I’ve been longing to pick up a guitar I started messing around with his while he was at work and came up with this riff.

I also recorded some humming vocals and repitched them to create the harmonies.

The recording quality is rubbish (half of it done on my macbook’s inbuilt mic), so I figured it be a good idea to just destroy the sound even further, hence the distortion effects.

I also made the soundtrack for this, helping give it the twist that we usually like.

I’ve never had a passion for skateboarding, but using one as a camera dolly was rather exciting.

It’s over a year since I made this video, I’m very happy to finally be able to release it.

This tune has been very special to me from the first time I heard it, back in my London days when I didn’t really have any dealings with Minus, and since then I became a huge fan of JPLS, even more so after hearing “The Depths” album.

At the period when I first heard Spooker, I was starting to edit Lydia K, and for my initial test I actually used Spooker as the soundtrack. You can check out the test here: Lydia K / mood 1. In the end I went with some other music and ditched the first version.

So by the time last summer arrived, two years later, I had made some contacts at Minus (thanks to my Minus Embed video), and I remembered about this test I made so I sent it to JPLS, who I’d never spoken to, and asked if he’d be ok with me making a longer version, and he said yes. That’s pretty much the story, and since then we’ve been keeping in touch via ichat and a few weeks ago in NYC we got to meet up for the first time which was really cool.

And now for the overrated schpiel on the video, which is what video art is all about. I’ll try to avoid using terms like “exploring” or “boundaries” or “connection” or “discovering”. Instead, let’s say I just slowed down the footage and I really liked it. Then I mirrored it and I liked it more, but thought it was a bit obvious. So I dropped some distortion effects on top of it, it wasn’t obvious anymore and it became quite creepy so I really liked it. Then I added some grain, and did some funky things with the curves… NICE. I tried to do some funky edits, but it just didn’t go with the music. I just like the simplicity of the cuts, it’s not pretentious, and it goes with the retro feel of it.

I’ve been submitting it to various video festivals all over the world, and for each one they ask me to fill out a synopsis or a description. Any suggestions as to what I should write? I always leave that part blank. Probably why no-one ever picks it up, apart from Video is the Only Constant in London and then at Digital Graffiti in Florida who both screened it.

In other news

TUMBLR
As you may know I’ve been populating my tumblr account with all sorts of videos that I like, usually a mixture of acid video art, dramatic fashion videos, or just underground music visuals. The other week I built a flash player that loads up the entire feed so that essentially you can play all the videos back to back in fullscreen without having to navigate, perfect for those times when you just want to sit back and watch some cool random stuff. Also great for parties if you have a projector. Check it here.
Also, with the launch of my company FALKOHAUS we’ll be upgrading this tumblr to something more official, calling it NIGHTHAWKS. But for now just keep tuning into the tumblr account: davidterranova.tumblr.com

PLASTIKMAN FILM
Still going. Almost there. Yes I know. Shh.

BLOC
This week the edit for the BLOC film begins. Featuring Laurent Garnier, Matthew Dear, Visionquest, Magnetic Man and other.

SECRET!
Something pretty cool has come up.

FASHION FILM
I’ll be travelling to London in a few weeks to work for a couple of days on a extremely cool fashion film with James Mountford.

KRIX on The Creator’s Project
My visual/music got talked about here.
Read my original blog post about the piece here.

Last night I got to experience my first ever broadcast on TV of my work. Growing up in an era where Vimeo and a possible festival screening is the only outlet to show my works, having something go on TV is another level of excitement.

I wrote a lot about this project when the trailer got released, so please head over there if you’d like to find out more about this project

But when I started producing REBELRAVE, a video series for techno label Crosstown Rebels, my career took a turn as I began making more and more video works for clients ranging across music and fashion, some of which have been screened at festivals or featured in magazines.

Apart from Flash and video, I’ve been making music since I was a kid. This is something I still do and I use my knowledge to enhance the audio side of my visuals, wrapping each piece into what some might call “audio-visual experiences”.

Recently, I’ve teamed up with Corvin Dhali to create a new agency to release our works under, aiming to expand our horizons further. This is FALKOHAUS.

On the side I am starting to build a new video blog, which will be rebranded soon. For the time being you can find it here.

You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, Flickr, Soundcloud

Drop me a line: david[at]davidterranova[dot]com

Flash: Some time ago I built an engine called “Random Shape Generator” that generates random polygons and moves them around (I also made a screensaver based on it)

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Music: Last week I made a track called Krix.

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Video: Yesterday someone sent me this video by Haythem Zakaria, so I decided to try something similar out using my Flash engine, I dropped the shapes animation into Final Cut and played around with them, using Krix as the audio baseline.

I spent 4 days with Orlando, first at his home in Oxford, and then on the road going from London to Dour (Belgium) and then to Berlin, capturing the happenings around two of his gigs, one of which was at Melt Festival.

Working with someone with such true talent and with so much to say made things very easy for me. I find that most docos on musicians and performers today are a bit contrived, simply because being an artist and generating hype has become so easy and widespread, most of the time you find yourself watching an overly elaborate story that is trying to make someone average appear to be above-average.

TEED however doesn’t fit into this category, having grown up in a family of classical musicians, touring in a renowned choir from the age of 7, being multi instrumentalist, knocking up jungle/jazz beats from the age of 13 on Reason, and now producing a wide range of dance music that no-one knows how to categorize, and being able to turn a tent full of hundreds of bored people into a mass of roaring energy that sends people into bliss (or tears). On top of that he is someone who’s pretty opinionated on the state of dance music, and presents his ideas eloquently without sounding like a knob, for the lack of a better expression.

That said, I found myself struggling to cram all of this into an 11 minute edit. On top of his quotes I had to feature his music, his performances, his dinosaur costumes, the dancers, the crowds. It became clear straight away that this was meant to be a much longer documentary. I had to cut so many golden moments out of this, and had to cut down on my usual experimental moments in favour of maintaining the story line which was just overflowing. I played around a little bit with the audio, working on the flow of his music, going from one track to another. Orlando sent me the stems for a few of his tracks and I was able to use some of them to create an abstract backbone of his music.

This was a FALKOHAUS production, my new company together with Corvin Dhali, who came with me on the trip and helped out immensely. I wouldn’t have been able to make the edit in time for the deadline if it wasn’t for the help of Bryan Cosgrove, who has been working with me for the past couple of months.

Broadcast on 21st October at 1:15 AM (Thursday night), on Channel 4.

My second video for Fabric (the first one is here) is for Dave Clarke’s “Fabric 60″, put together during a period of several overlapping projects. The cute dancing girl is the talented Sonoya Mizuno, filmed in a small studio in Tokyo.

With the release of this video I am finally able to launch my new brand FALKOHAUS which I’ve been planning since last year together with my good friend Corvin Dhali. For now it’s a temporary site, with just a small collection of my past works; however the aim is for it to grow into a hub of audio-visual works from myself and other like-minded people, a resource for cutting edge visual works. You can subscribe to its news on Facebook and Twitter, over the coming weeks there’ll be lots of interesting stuff happening!

I started this tune in between renders and finished it on the plane.

RECKONER (RIPPLES MIX)
The first one is what I entered into the Radiohead remix competition a few years ago. I made it in Ableton when I knew very little about mixing and mastering, but I don’t have the source file anymore as I made it on someone else’s computer which eventually got trashed. So I just have a badly produced mp3 file that I have now just re-mastered.

REFLEKXS
The second one was made in Reason, when I was 20 or 21, and again I can’t open the source file as I don’t have the app anymore. I’d love to rebuild this from scratch and fix those synths!

It’s possibly the longest blogging gap I’ve had and it’s making me twitchy. So here’s the latest.

Autobrennt Interview
The amazing Sigu from Autobrennt (who gave me my first brief tour of New York when I landed for the Marcy RR episode) is running a series of interviews with people behind the scenes, and he picked me as one of them, asking teshno.com founder Krystan J Caryl to give me a phone interview. Very proper, check it here.

Plastikman movie
It is in its final stages. 70 minutes long and the toughest beast I’ve ever worked on. I’ll be wrapping this up before going off to Burning Man, so not long to go now. Very excited, but very exhausted also, it’s been 9 months in the making, much longer than planned. My girlfriend says I can now imagine what pregnancy feels like.

Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs
No matter how many times I’ve written it, I still have to go and google it every time to check whether Extinct or Enormous comes first. Luckily we’re allowed to call it TEED (pronounced “teed”) which makes life easier. I spent four days on the road with Orlando from TEED, including one day at his house in Oxford. The whole experience was unforgettable, this guy’s talent is hugely inspiring. I’ll be making a short doco about him which will be broadcast on Channel 4, part of the 4Play series. Very exciting indeed. Check TEED here: FB | YT

Bloc
Not sure how much I can say about this: www.blocweekend.com

Falko Haus
This too actually, can’t say much. But please remember the name, it’s going to be around A LOT in the near future

Spooker (JPLS)
This still hasn’t been released unfortunately. It’s sitting on my Vimeo waiting for me to click the Unlock button.

Tumblr
I started a tumblr to archive videos that I like: davidterranova.tumblr.com

Lots of things in the pipeline and nothing to show unfortunately. But everything will start moving in the next few weeks and hopefully I won’t have to post another photo of myself.

This is the first episode in the REBELRAVE series that I had to outsource. Luckily some time ago I came across Jocie Cox after she made this video for Mulletover in London, who I immediately got in touch with when I decided I wasn’t able to make it to Miami for the Get Lost party due to the Plastikman film (which I’m still working on).

We kept in touch via Skype while she worked on the video from her base in Ibiza, and once the general edit was built, I got my hands dirty by working on mixing all the music and audio together into a single track.

I was nervous at first about handing an episode to someone else, but seeing the first cut was really exciting, and I’m really happy we can keep the series going in one way or another even if I’m tied down with other work. Love the slomos!

Check out more of Jocie’s work here.

The video I made for JPLS‘s track called Spooker (on Minus) will be shown at Digital Graffiti, which is an outdoor projection art festival in Florida. I made this video quite a few months ago, but as it’s for an old track that JPLS released a couple of years ago, Minus decided to wait for his next release to combine this video with. JPLS is working on his next release so the video coming out should be imminent.

http://www.digitalgraffiti.com/2011finalists/