Thinking Metal Music

Showreel : Sirens Promo Movie (2018)

Sirens was an album by SkinMechanix that somehow became completely and utterly trapped in development Hell. I think we worked on it for around five years between 2014 and 2019, before the whole project was just abandoned as a non-runner.

I tried to kick-start the project one last time in the Autumn of 2018. Jules and I mounted a camera on an improvised gimbal, headed up to the local nature reserve, Rainton Meadows and began shooting amongst the fading foliage with the leaves tumbling around us and that gorgeous, flickering amber light hovering stage left. That was pretty magical, actually. Most of the footage was captured in less than an hour, before we were moved on by look-i-loos, who had never seen anybody shooting a movie before.

Later, I added the Chess Board sweeps and the Moon transitions because they gave the movie an enigmatic theme. I shot the whole scene at 60 fps so that, back at home, I could add some neat Under-cranking to give the movie an other-worldly feel. The icing on the cake was the fake bokeh elements which, once over-laid, took the movie to the next level. With the moody piano / synth backing, I thought the end result looked really good although, upon reflection, I think Jules' improvised costume would have looked better without the mask. A basic face-covering would have looked less contrived.

Why did Sirens die? Simple, really. Too many competing projects, all screaming for attention, all demanding their time in the Sun. Sirens just couldn't compete with that level of interference.

Showreel : Quietly Yours (2016)

This is an early version of the track, Quietly Yours, featuring the visuals we put together for the Never Mind the Ramones III concert.

The CGI was scripted in Processing, a Java-like programming language, and rendered into short segments of between three and twenty seconds. Those segments were then compiled in iMovie as a rough cut. Live action was added later although iMovie consistently messed up the drop-in points and no end of editing would fix the problem so... We left 'the mistake' in as a feature.

I love Quietly Yours. I think the guitars work astonishingly well and it's one of those tracks that just cries out to be properly finished and released.

Showreel : Glorianna (2016)

This is an early version of the track, Glorianna, again featuring visuals we put together for the Never Mind the Ramones III concert.

The theme was Age & Attachment, and how memories become so much more important as you grow older, as your past recedes into the distance. It's also about attachment. We're not supposed to become attached to stuff, so say the mystics but... blah! What do they know? The curse of aging is that we forget so much. Hanging on to little things keeps the memories alive and if we don't have memories then what do we have?

The stills were taken from the Synchronicity photo session from 2015. I used a large number of found objects - trinkets, knick-nacks and ephemera that I'd accumulated over my (then) fifty five years. Look closely. There are some interesting items in that collection. There's a Dutch Atlas of the World dating from 188 that belonged to my Great Grandparents. There's a collection of lenses and prisms which belonged to my friend and mentor, David Sinden, sadly deceased and greatly missed. There are a couple of Masonic devices lying around. Not sure who they belonged to. One of my Uncles, I think. And, of course, there's my Teddy Bear, Edward, my first true possession.

And so on...

Glorianna was inspired by an actress friend, whom I will not name. I met her only once but made such an impression that she stayed in my thoughts for many, many years. She was regret made real, made solid. Tangible even. She was not a happy soul. She said that she had sacrificed everything for her career - a family, marriage, children, a proper home, everything. However, aside from a few TV & movie appearances, she remained a minor bit-part player all her life. She had only one lasting relationship, alhough she insisted, to the very last, that it was strictly platonic. Her partner, John, was too selfish to love, she said. She eventually died alone in a hospital bed and, whilst her obituary made it to The Times, very few people made the effort to attend her funeral. Alas, her not-insubstantial fortune ended up being donated to a Donkey Sanctuary.

Was it all worth it? I suppose Donkeys have to eat, too.

Showreel : Passengers (2018)

Passengers was composed, written and edited in just a single day in the run-up to our performance at the 2018 Northern Electric Festival. However, the accompanying visuals were never used because, as we discovered on the night, there were six other bands all sharing the same tiny stage and there wasn't enough room for our projection screen. So, yeah... :)

The music for Passengers was very heavily influenced by Adam Lastiwka, perhaps best known for the incidental music to the TV series Travellers.

As with Quietly Yours, the visuals for Passengers were scripted in Processing and assembled into a rough-cut in iMovie. However, I wasn't happy with the end result, which seemed bland and uninteresting, like we were repeating ourselves.

With time running out, I came up with a solution - we would combine the previous movie sequences into a new, updated version using a split-screen technique, which I'd seen (and loved) in movies like Robert Aldrich's Twilight's Last Gleaming. Split Screen is a means of depicting the same story as it unfolds from different vantage points.

And because there did not appear to be any suitable split screen systems available in either iMovie or DaVinci Resolve, I wrote my own, again in Processing. The effect works well although, upon reflection, I should definitely have used the available time to sharpen up my keyboard skills instead of writing software. The performance was not one of my sharpest.

Showreel : Romance and the Telescope (2017)

Romance and the Telescope began life as one of our stage movies - a series of short clips intended to sit behind the band as part of a bigger performance. I liked the imagery so much that I decided to build on the idea and so, over the next couple of weeks, I worked the concept up using a storyboard into a full movie.

Yes, the story is personal. I read Physics at University. Jules was reading languages and the Humanities and, seemingly, we did not have all that much in common at first sight. However, we did discover a mutual interest in Astronomy. I remember walking home from a party one night and pausing not far from the Boating Lake in Newcastle's Leazes Park. I took a few moments to point out the planets Jupiter & Mars, Saturn too, if memory serves, and Jules was apparently hooked. We're still together forty two years later.

Of course, if I had to do the movie over again then I'd certanly do it differently. For a start, I'd explain why the characters are blurred and badly drawn. It's because, way back then, we were too young to know much about the world, never mind ourselves. Hence, we're blurred at the edges and there's a degree of uncertainty about who and what we are at that point in our lives. That's quite deep and not at all well explained. I'd certainly improve the flow of the movie, maybe merge the Moon scene in with meeting the girl for the first time, and I'd redo some of the sound effects. I also earned a copyright strike from YouTube because I used a sample of some road noise that wasn't original.

Why haven't I re-worked the project? Because I updated my Mac and the package I used, Black Magic's superb DaVinci Resolve, would no longer run on that operating system. When I eventually got around to installing a new version of Resolve, the project itself would no longer load. I still have all of the sources so I guess I could re-edit in Final Cut Pro. I'm not that much of a masochist.

Nevertheless, I'm quite proud of Romance. It's my first movie with a proper story. I hope you enjoy it too.