Well, Vimeo announced their winning shorts from their 2010 Video Awards (judged by an extraordinary array of cinematic names including David Lynch, Roman Coppola and… erm… M.I.A) and the winner was Last Minutes with ODEN. I’m not afraid to admit (having a similar hound myself, 16 and going strong) that I was fairly close to big slushy man-tears while watching, even if the dude is a mega-hipster.
Others commended included ‘Between Bears’ a favourite of mine and worthy winner of best animation (see below). See all winners here.
Mike Diver and Pedro Aguilar from DMB have painstakingly recreated some of Caravaggio’s most famous paintings in a set of rich, lustrous photos for the Italian Moda Magazine. They seem to have hired a motley bunch of roadies and bike couriers to add extra menace to the pictures.
After a couple of months of reduced activity here at ShellsuitZombie towers (holidays, work commitments and suchlike) it seems appropriate to kick back into gear with this intensely claustrophobic spot for the treatment of psychosis, asking how long you would wait. They say:
“A bit like being under water, for someone experiencing psychosis things can seem different, but it can be hard for them to understand, explain or even notice. They might look the same on the surface, but underneath their world is changing.“
Check out the accompanying site here. Design and website by Venn Creative, based in lovely Cornwall (lucky bastards).
Eric Tesroete is a 3d Artist by trade – you wouldn’t have guessed it eh. He created this head for a Halloween party out of 370 triangular planes of card before taking these beautifully lit photos of him in it. If he could make a service out of this I’d totally pay to spend some time in big-head mode (despite the fact that after a recent dusting off of our studio N64 it turns out I’m the WORST GOLDENEYE PLAYER EVER).
This post comes from the heart. If you are at all interested in print, independent magazines or free bloody speech then you need to subscribe to this service; it has, quite frankly, changed my life.*
The concept of Stack is to promote independent press by sending subscribers one (or quite often several) independent rags a month. This can range from Eye (RRP £17!) to Little White Lies, Bad Idea, VNA, Anorak, the list is endless. If you’ve heard of these then you’ll know what a good deal this is, if you haven’t then you, child, are the most in need of it.
Strangely though, for me at least, it’s the other ‘free’ magazines you get with the featured title that make it all worthwhile. One example is Manzine, an outspoken reaction to mens magazines written by some of their editors. Reading-on-the-bus-kudos aside, it has helped to reinforce my confidence in the power of a print mag, however home-made – No-one else will own my copy of Manzine, I’ve spilt coffee on it and dog-eared the corners, it’s truly been a journey. I still pick it up months later and it’s as ball-splittingly hilarious as it was the day I got it.
I can’t recommend Stack enough, it’s a bundle of joy landing on your doormat every month, a constant in a world of wars, politics, doom, gloom and digital media. Plus they delivered issue one of our magazine last month, getting them a gold star in my book.
Jonny
*well maybe not changed my life but it’s definitely been the best £40 I’ve spent this year
Definitely worth looking at, Lukes site, not only for the quality of work (bloody LOVE the cupboard woodcut) but quality of presentation. A bit of nice photography goes a long long way, and I wouldn’t expect luke to have too much trouble getting through the door of a studio with this bunch of work (unless he’s an arsehole. You’re not an arsehole are you Luke?). He was also partly responsible for the Nottingham Trent 111 identity that we posted a while back.
Can it be true that I hold in my mortal hand an issue of purest AMMO?* With issue three, the cutest little inspiration mag in the planet brings us words and pics from Peskimo, Jam Factory and a favourite of ours Jessica Hische (cue glow of envy due to epic typo-crush) as well as loads of others. You can fit this baby in your back pocket but it’s jam-packed with artists that will make you quiver (ie. Pat Perry – never heard of him before but my is he good…) and is well worth picking up from the AMMO store.
*You’ll be pleased to know that our propensity to shoehorn content into barely-relevant quotes is as yet unabated.
Ashwin is a London-based designer with a very nice collection of work in his portfolio including this poster called ‘The Bare Essentials’. Often a self-congratulatory ‘design about design’ concept combined with the student classic ‘poster over face’ pose will bring me out in a rash but this piece overcomes that by being really rather pretty with some intricate use of colour (The clock has a red second hand for example). You can buy it an’ all.
£2.50 for 64 pages, an Eboy cover and fold-out poster, articles by creative types including Adrian Shaughnessy, Sanky, D&AD, Glug, Eboy etc. Want it? Buy it here.
Some of you may remember our post on the winner of last years Rooted exhibition, ‘Skeletor the Cutlery Skeleton’. Well now the guys that run the event have created their first publication (see above for the page featuring our plastic friend). We were honoured to be asked to judge the event and are even prouder (like leave-it-lying-around-so-people-see kind of proud) to be in the book too.
Along with Skeletor there are some fantastic pieces displayed within a sleek 70 page tome and they are selling out fast – at £10 (a snip) it’s well worth picking up this limited edition bit of ephemera, no doubt featuring the early work of some of the future masters of the design world.
We first met photographer Christine Donnier-Valentin as she was snapping the judging of D&AD New Blood last year. After we discovered she was a reet laugh and she realised how … ahem … photogenic we were, we all got chatting, some time during which she mentioned a project documenting abandoned sofas. Here is a small snapshot of her ever-growing collection.
Her work has recently been featured on the Eye blog where Christine says ‘I ask everybody I meet to contact me if they spot a sofa in the street. I write the day, time, location and – most importantly – who recommended it to me. It has become a networking connection. Friends and colleagues based in London and abroad send me pictures of sofas taken on their mobile. I call them my ‘sofa spies’.’
So if you happen to see one lying around (or you’ve fly-tipped it yourself, tut tut) holler and you never know, it could become something beautiful again.
On Saturday night ShellsuitZombie were kindly given three tickets to what would turn out to be one of the more surreal evenings of our social calendar so far this year. Mercy, the same Liverpool and London based agency that creates 12 Angry Zines, held the sixth of its incredibly successful (and oversubscribed) nights with Liverpool-based pop experimentals The Wave Machines at Shoreditch Church – ‘Wave if you’re really there’.
This one, entitled Baptism, featured a host of talent in the fields of spoken word, music and performance, with brilliant (and hilarious) vocal performances from Nathan Jones, Ross Sutherland, Salena Godden and David J, Music from Eugene Mcguinness and the Lizards and of course The Wave Machines and some bizarre performance art from a troupe, one of whom kept putting her head in the font (church, not typographic). Everything combined (as well as a BYOB policy resulting in excessive wine consumption) to create a great atmosphere, helped of course by the Medieval/Palladian style architecture of the church itself (yep damn right, wikifuckingpedia).
Moment of the night had to go to Dave O’Dowda from Table on piano accompanied by a choir which popped up out of nowhere (like in Love actually). All in all a memorable night, please for gods sake go to the next one.
Been meaning to post this stuff for ages – busy times (the freaking print mag/New Blood prep) have led to somewhat of a backlog in ye ould inbox – Better late than never.
The last couple of years have seen a spate of collage-based illustration, lo-fi is very much in. However, the fact that you can’t move on ffffound for lazy ‘shapes-with-bits-of-space-in-them’ knock-offs doesn’t mean there isn’t still some interesting work going on. Stone and Spear (AKA Simon Peter Frank Cook, Nottingham-based designer/Illustrator) is producing a little chunk of it in fact – utilising negative space, composition and cut-outs of wrestlers rather better than most.
