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Mike Dempsey on visual culture

~ While Alistair is away cycling the length of Great Britain, we’ve invited twenty disgustingly talented people to each write a post for our blog. Today’s post is by the brilliant graphic designer Mike Dempsey, who has done a ridiculous amount of incredible design during his life, and now runs Studio Dempsey. ~

Hmmm, visual culture. Something we, in this funny old business of design, are submerged in. We see stuff when others don’t. It’s what we do. It’s what we love. But somehow in this increasing digital age, our visual dexterity is being diverted…

Have you noticed how many people walk straight out into the road or onto a zebra crossing without looking because they are texting or chatting on their mobile? Or others having half engaged conversations with friends because they are too distracted by their emails or texts? Maybe you haven’t, because it’s exactly what you are doing right now reading this?

Yes, we’ve all got one and spend more time looking at it than our surroundings. SMS, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, and I’m sure many more new kids on the block, have taken us over like those big pea-poddy things in ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’.

As wonderful as these innovations are, they come at a price. And it’s not just financial. They deprive us from being in the ‘here and now’. For a so-called ‘visually aware’ community we are losing our sight and the protocol of real social interaction.

Digital has accelerated our world. Freddie Mercury’s, ‘…I want it all, and I want it now’ is a reality. Bookshops, music stores, fashion outlets and many more are closing down in favour of virtual shopping; and the recent demise of Design Week has brought it closer to home.

Many years ago I conducted a workshop in order to help Royal Mail discover how they could improve the accessibility of their stamps for the partially sighted and blind community. The meeting was held at the Royal National Institute for the Blind in a rather bland room in the basement. As I watched this small group with their heighted tactile sensitivity navigating perforations, size, shape and Braille, all in minute detail, I suddenly realised that I was the only person in the room with something very precious. My sight. And that day in that soulless basement has stayed with me, and I never undervalue the gift I have. I look everywhere and anywhere and resist being mesmerised by that irritating, but necessary, little gadget that we all carry around.

So slow down, put your phone away and look around you. And engage with those passing moments. They can be a joy to behold…

Like this…

Or this…

Or even Alfred Hitchcock on the 38 bus. And what is he up to?…

If you need a primer to get into the zone of the beauty of our world, take in Terrence Malick’s stunningly shot The Tree of Life photographed by the brilliant cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki – a man who truly uses his gift…

Take a look here:

 

~ Alistair is raising money for Cancer Research UK during his ride – please wander over to his Just Giving page and donate a little cash. ~

Mike Dempsey

6 September 2011 | No Comments

Test Pilot

Sticking with yesterday’s space theme, and since today marks 50 years since Yuri Gagarin became the first man in outer space, we figured we’d post this rather fine collector’s card, featuring a Test Pilot, from our Adventurous Lives set on Flickr.

And check out this rather lovely film, First Orbit, which recreates what Gagarin would have seen, using footage shot from the International Space Station, overdubbed with Gagarin’s original mission audio:

12 April 2011 | No Comments

Thursday – Matthias Hoegg

The good folks at File Magazine just got in touch to let us know that the short film Thursday, by recent RCA graduate* Matthias Hoegg, has been nominated for the Short Animation Award at this year’s Baftas.

Each bi-annual issue of File comes in two parts – a physical broadsheet style magazine, and a full-screen online player – as they themselves say, ‘it’s a magazine to watch and read’. The ‘watch’ part of the latest issue (No. 4) is online now, and features Hoegg’s beautiful seven minute film, ‘an everyday love story set in the not so distant future [which] sees blackbirds battling with technology, automatic palm readers and power cuts’.

Check it out.

*Interestingly, both the other nominated shorts are by RCA graduates (Michael Please and David Prosser) . Monopoly much?

3 February 2011 | No Comments

Rolling Roadshow posters

We just spotted this rather tasty set of posters on the Trailers page on the Apple site. They’re the handiwork of Olly Moss, and are promoting the Rolling Roadshow We are all Workers film season, which is screening movies in locations where the films where set or shot. Great stuff.

31 July 2010 | 2 Comments

Arcade Fire + Sergio Leone

It’s a bit old, but we’re loving this edit of Once Upon a Time in the West, used as an unofficial promo for Arcade Fire’s My Body Is A Cage (from their fantastic Neon Bible
album), by Chicago based designer J Tyler Helms.

And it give us a chance to link to this little promo piece the band have put together for their upcoming 12″ double-A side, The Suburbs/Month of May:

A. The Suburbs



AA. Month of May

24 May 2010 | 1 Comment

Trust

Trust

"Because. I had a bad day at work. I had to subvert my principles and kow-tow to an idiot. Television makes these daily sacrifices possible. Deadens the inner core of my being."

We've been waiting for this for, oh, a decade or so.

Artificial Eye have finally released Trust on DVD, and if you've not seen it, then you should make sure you check it out. It's one of the best examples of the early 90s wave of American independent movies, featuring a cracking script, brilliant performances, and great photography.

The film was directed by Hal Hartley in 1990, with cinematography by Michael Spiller (who more recently has been directing TV shows like Scrubs and Ugly Betty), and stars Martin Donovan and Adrienne Shelley.

Coinciding with this is the publication of True Fiction Pictures & Possible Filmsin which Hartley discusses the rise and fall of the American indie scene.

Great stuff.

29 July 2009 | 3 Comments

Daniel Haskett

Danielhaskett

A while back we posted about the film Let the Right One In, and how we didn't think the posters did the movie justice.
Illustrator Daniel Haskett got in touch to show us the poster he's created inspired by the movie. Tasty eh?

Be good if more movie posters took a bit of a risk wouldn't it?

Perhaps arthouse cinemas could start commissioning their own posters, as a showcase of new talent? Or do any of them already do this?

22 May 2009 | 4 Comments

Herb and Dorothy

We've just been sent this trailer for the award-winning new documentary Herb and Dorothy, which premieres in New York on June 5, and it looks just great.
The film is all about Herbert and Dorothy Vogel. Herb was a postal clerk, and Dorothy was a librarian, and despite their modest incomes, they built up an incredibly important contemporary art collection, living off Dorothy's salary and using Herb's to collect art. The only criteria was that the work should be affordable, and small enough to fit into their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment.

Over thirty years they collected more than 2,000 pieces, including works by Sol LeWitt, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Chuck Close, and a host of others. In 1992 they gifted their whole collection to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; despite the fact that thanks to their fine eyes, the collection was worth millions of dollars. How cool is that?

They still live in the same apartment, with 19 turtles, lots of fish, and one cat. They're still collecting.

Here's hoping the film makes the jump across to the UK some time soon.

15 May 2009 | 1 Comment

Let the right one in

Lettherightonein

Crikey. Chilling much?

We finally managed to check out Let the Right One In this weekend, and it's a corker of a movie.

Directed by Tomas Alfredson, it's an adaptation of the book
of the same name by John Ajvide Lindqvist (who also wrote the screenplay for the film); and tells the story of a bullied 12-year-old boy who falls in love with a vampire.

Lettherightonein3

It's a disturbing blend of horror, euro art-house, romance and family drama; and felt utterly unique. There are a couple of dud moments where the limited budget shows through (CGI cats, we're looking at you right now), but apart from that it's quite brilliant. The cinematography, by Hoyte van Hoytema, is particularly tasty; and the two leads are perfectly cast.

It's being marketed as a standard horror flick, with a genre poster that looks like half a dozen japanese horror remakes. 

Lettherightonein2

It's far better than that – go check it out. Here's the trailer to whet your appetite.

UPDATE

Lettherightonein4

After Michael pointed out in the comments section that the European posters were better, we tracked down an incredibly comprehensive selection of the movie's international posters over at MoviePosterDB.com. Really interesting to see how the source imagery is adapted for the different markets – clockwise from top left they're: Spain, UK, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, France and the Netherlands. Still, be nice to see an old-school Polish illustrated version…

21 April 2009 | 7 Comments

Big in Japan

We're loving this home movie sent to us by Eric Testroete from Vancouver, who works as a 3D artist on video games.

The film documents his trip to Japan last October, and features most of the 3340 photographs (that's a whopping 46 gigs) he took while there, on his Pentax K20D*. 

It made us think a few things:

Digital photography is ace
As a non-professional film maker, there's no way you could afford to do this on 35mm neg. With digital, the only costs are memory cards and time.

Sharing is ace
Once, you might have toiled over a project like this for months, but only been able to show it to a small audience of friends and relatives. Thanks to the web, and particularly its facility for sharing, you can reach a huge audience in no time.

Computers
They can be ace too.

Most holiday advertising is not at all ace
This made us want to pick up our passports and jump on a jet plane more than just about any advert we care to remember. It's not glossy and perfect. It just feels real.

LCD Soundsystem are very ace
Great track!

All in all, not a bad thing to find in your inbox on a Monday. Cheers Eric.

*He then used Lightroom to process all the images, Métamorphose to rename all the exported files, Sony Vegas to import the sequence and cut it up, then Virtual Dub to scale it down and compress it.

6 January 2009 | 1 Comment

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