Soul Seasons at Digital Graffiti

05.12.2013

Three years ago I heard about a little oasis in Florida called Alys Beach from friend and fellow artist Shantell Martin. Therein lies a very unique festival called Digital Graffiti which she has headlined (quite a few times) with her beautiful live-drawing performances.

Each year’s festival attracts digital artists, filmmakers, musicians, interactive designers, photographers, VJs, producers, celebrities, agency executives and fans of art, technology and architecture.

According to their website:

“Digital Graffiti is the world’s first projection festival featuring artists, using the latest technologies to project their original works onto the town’s iconic white walls.”

With nearly 200 submissions from countries including England, Portugal, France, Australia, Germany, Netherlands, Serbia, South Korea, Sweden, Japan, Cambodia, Poland, Ireland, India, Brazil, Spain, Taiwan, Iran, Ukraine and the USA, Alys Beach announced that my animation, Soul Seasons, is one of 23 finalists who will exhibit and compete at the Sixth Annual Digital Graffiti Festival.

Prizes will be awarded in various categories and judged by a panel of art and industry experts. The winning categories include Best of Show, Most Innovative, Most Experimental Submission, Best in Florida-Homegrown, Best Animated Submission and Curator’s Choice. All winners will be announced on the evening of June 8th at Caliza Pool.

I’m really looking forward to be a part of this festival, meeting the other artists and finally getting to check out the Alys Beach community. It’s not often you come across a festival that honors video artists in this way. Hopefully this type of event will inspire more like it to happen in the future.

Wish me luck with Soul Seasons, and check back for updates!

To learn more about Digital Graffiti, check out this great video:

That’s a wrap!

08.08.2012

Thanks to everyone who came throughout the week, hung out with us, drank, danced, partied, helped set up & break down, promoted, photographed, participated and supported Soul Seasons!!! You guys are awesome!!! I had so much fun and truly appreciate everything.

Special thanks to:

Flippy Jeep, Jeff Schram, Paula Ortega, Liz Squillace, Aaron Garovoy, Mark Heneks, Verónica Vixen, Peter Lenahan, Verónica Vîxen, Ruben Marroquin, J.e. Moxham, Amy Irish, Barbara Ann, Diane Anger, Christopher Scalzi, Chris Anger, Christopher Daddio, Margaret Bodell, Marion Schrade and the BA+CC, City Canvases, the Barnum Publick House.. the list goes on to all my amazing friends.

The animation itself will not be available online for awhile, as I’d like to only make it available for public installations at the moment, but stay tuned! I will be posting a behind the scenes video montage to show what went in to the making of Soul Seasons over the last four months.

Thanks to everyone for your continued words of support, encouragement & love.

Soul Seasons Closing Party – Tuesday, August 7th

08.06.2012

Pictured above: Aaron Garovoy, Holly Danger, Veronica Vixen

Thanks so much for everyone who came out to see Soul Seasons!! This piece means a lot to me for many reasons and I am very happy to have been able to share it with so many people.

The good news is, if you missed the launch, you can still catch the video. I’m planning on having a closing party for anyone who wants to come out and join me on the last night of it’s installation. A few folks asked me if I would VJ so I have decided to add that into the festivities.

Please join us Tuesday August 7th from 9-11pm at 1330 Main Street, Bridgeport, CT.

Soul Seasons – 1 week until the launch!

07.27.2012

1 week until the launch of Soul Seasons! I’ve poured a tremendous amount of energy and imagination into this piece and I hope you’ll all come out and watch it with me as it goes up next Thursday. It has been a labor intensive challenge for me to do while also having a full time day job and a life that doesn’t involve being behind a computer 24/7, but it has been worth every second.

I can’t say that I’ve worked on a single piece like this in awhile where it has been 100% all my own. After months of working in my studio and obsessing over every detail I can say that still to this day that no one has seen any part of this video yet. I have not shown a soul. I have only posted a few still shots here and there in the digital world so you can see a snapshot of what is in store.

With only a week to go I’m still not sure if I will show this to anyone yet. I like the idea that it is a direct reflection of what has come out of my creativity in being completely solitary with my thoughts. Creating this piece has been meditation for me, and I hope you will love it as much as I do.

Soul Seasons

07.17.2012

Only two weeks left before the launch of my new project, a stop-motion animation called Soul Seasons.

I’ve been in my studio every day for the past few weeks designing, conceptualizing, and ultimately trying to figure out how to get my idea into an actual video piece. Each day as I play with it, it becomes more real, but I still have a dozen things to do to make it come together. Special thanks to Veronica Vixen and her boyfriend Aaron for modeling their silhouettes for me!

I’ve also wanted to document my process but have found it incredibly tough to do everything all at once. I finally found my little Canon Powershot camera yesterday, so I’ll mount it on a tripod over the next few editing rounds at the studio and try and capture the madness. It has been quite a learning process and worth having documented.

So far I have:

Storyboarded everything and plastered the studio
Shot 90% of my green screen scenes
Taken test shots with light kit & set up studio accordingly
Learned how to use Dragon Frame software
Edited 75% of sequence pre-animation
Done test prints for stopmotion

I still need to:

Figure out what elements go inside & outside of silhouettes
Choose which green screen scenes to use and in what order
~~Print out entire sequence frame by frame, start to finish~~
~~Shoot & animate final frames via Dragon Frame~~
Post work in After Effects
Edit & adjust full sequence & color correct in Final Cut
Figure out how to end the piece (!!!)

Holy $#!! that’s a lot to do in the 16 days remaining. No matter how many hours I work, there always seems to be so much more to do! I’m even more limited now that I’m back at the office 9-5pm every day. Wish me luck!! Looking forward to sharing this with everyone.

Soul Seasons will launch at 1330 Main Street in Bridgeport as part of their City Canvases initiative project, and will be projected in the side of the building each night from August 2nd to August 8th from 9-11pm.

Please come to the launch! LET’S MAKE IT A BIG PARTY!

Bridgeport City Canvases

06.05.2012

Hey folks! I am very excited to announce that I have been selected to create a public video projection piece as part of Bridgeport City Canvases to be revealed on Thursday, August 2nd.

The City Canvases initiative is aimed to enhance urban areas in highly visable exterior locations around Bridgeport with projection based public art by local artists. Connecticut received $1 million in grant funding and will be creating various projects in 7 cities across the state. Twelve artists have been chosen to participate in this project and will exhibit their videos in different locations around the city. Each artist’s work will be revealed each week beginning in July. Visit this page for a full lineup of the exhibiting artists.

I serendipitously found out about the project while I was exhibiting work at the 305K gallery art bazaar earlier this spring. I was told that if I wanted to participate that I had two days to submit my concept proposal for a video surrounding their overarching theme of “Change”.

Sometimes I think that my best ideas are born out of pressure, because I don’t have time to over think them.

Strangely, this date aligned to the two days I had taken off work, to be by my dad’s side as he was going through various rounds of cancer surgery. I wrote my proposal while I was sitting in a hospital, hoping to hear that my dad’s cancer had been removed. (Which I’m thankful to say that it has.) Needless to say, my ideas stemmed from a very raw and emotional place. I chose to work with an idea that came from my gut in dealing with the change that was going on around me at that moment. And I plan on dedicating this piece of work to him.

I’m very excited about this event and am looking forward to bringing it to life and sharing it with the city and all of you. I’ve chosen to create a uniquely styled stop-motion animation that I will be building over the next two months.

Look out for more details coming soon because I plan on incorporating YOU into my project!

Please shoot me an email or leave a comment with your email address below if you have interest in being a part of my video and being projected onto a building in Bridgeport during my exhibition. I will be holding a few shoot days in the near future and will only need 5 minutes of your time to immortalize you in my piece. Shooting will take place at the Danger studio in the Loft Artist building in Stamford which is always fun (and usually involves wine).

Thanks in advance guys!!

Danger Studio Official Opening – Private Party

07.28.2010

The summer is in full swing, my blog has been quiet for the last few weeks, and I’ve been struggling to nail down one big opening date for my studio party – HOWEVER, I finally decided to set it in motion and see what happens!

Next weekend I’ll be having an official open studio night, Saturday, August 7th, featuring multi-projector live video mixing, and a poster exhibit displaying my new design series. It is a private party, so please, if you are interested in coming – Email me to RSVP.

If you can’t make the opening party on the 7th, you’ll be happy to know that another date is also potentially in the works for a Kodomo show on Saturday, August 21st. Hope everyone is having an adventurous and creative summer!! See you soon.

F5 Festival Review

04.22.2009

Last Thursday and Friday I was privileged to spend my normal workday at the F5 Motion Design conference held at Roseland in NYC. I kept my eye on this conference from the early stages last year and watched it bloom into one of the biggest, baddest lineups of designers from all over the world. After being exposed to all the presentations, I’m personally going to keep my eyes on 1st Avenue Machine, Dvein, and Moment Factory. These guys blew my minds eye and have opened me up to some new ideas & approaches to design. Here are some of my other favorite speakers from the day, to note a few:

Dvein, Prologue, Psyop, Black Heart Gang, 1st Ave Machine, Imaginary Forces, Rachel Maddow, Moment Factory, Jonah Lehrer.

Since having worked in the corporate world of video production for the last few years, I haven’t had much opportunity to immerse myself in the art world (or even the commercial world) of motion graphics the way I wish I could. Thankfully, conferences like F5, after effects meetups and the VJ world have brought this back into my life in many ways. Most nights after I come home from day to day editing, I begin to collage my own new work and find myself experimenting into the early hours, to create a bigger, more original and more ecclectic library for future live video performances.

The F5 conference reminded me just how powerful motion graphics are, and how much I love that world & the people who make that sort of magic happen. Not only did the conference showcase some of the best work I’ve seen in years, but there was a really interesting discussion about the state of creativity, and how it works from a scientific angle. We talked about how to better access innovations from the left side of the brain, and how we should be open to all new endeavors that allow us to create connections, and draw inspiration from experience. Insights seemingly flourish best when not forcing creativity. Some highlights for me were seeing & hearing all of the bizarre places that people reach to for inspiration. Found everywhere from rubberbands that were made into stop-motion spaghetti to one person dipping their hands & feet in cement just to see what it would feel like to wear on their limbs for a week! Ideas are formed in some of the most oddly beautiful ways and it has always been a passion of mine to explore how other people’s brain’s work.

Later this week I’d like to transcribe my notebook that I had with me for the two days and capture the raw thoughts I had while listening to these fabulous heros of mine. As a result of the festival I’ve already taken some of the advice and put it towards a new identity scope for my danger visuals.

A few frame grabs from new Danger intro visuals

Lastly I want to mention how VERY excited I am to say that a new collaboration is underway with electronic musician Kodomo. It looks like May 6th will be our first performance at the Delancey for the next Warper Party. Details soon to come!!

Burrower

04.05.2009

Inspired by the hauntingly beautiful music of the Cutlery ladies and the poetic words of Nick Cave. I created this piece with an old wooden frame & collaged imagery found from fashion photos from around the world. It almost came together in a seemingly unconscious way, and became an animated photo album that expanded from the corners of my imagination. The photography was altered, animated, arranged and woven into these treasured memories. This piece was created to be projected during the Cutlery’s live performance of this song, and was debuted on the four walls of Monkeytown last Friday night. Looks like we’ll have another gig there in June!!

New stuff on the way!

03.24.2009

I recently started digitizing my last batch of footage from my little San Francisco excursion, and while I have some personal criticisms for the way it came out, I am also seeing a lot of good useable stuff as well that I’m excited about. Macro shots of grassy fields, waves under the golden gate, colorful San Fran architecture, street traffic, sunshine through the tall trees and some hot dukati shots, thanks to my good friend Adrian who lives out there and offered to model for me. Thanks Adrian!

Last year I was really inspired by Pipilotti Rist, who created a huge video installation at the MOMA. A lot of her work was seen from a sort of bug’s eye view, and I took that inspiration to do a bit of that style filming on my own at all the beautiful parks in SF. Looking forward to cutting some of that up this week and integrating it into my footage library.

I’d also really like to create a new reel for the hollydanger.com front page, as it is supremely choppy and outdated at this point. The page itself is also unfinished and in limbo, waiting for me to add my entire portfolio to it, and link over here to this blog! Cliche to say, but there really aren’t enough hours in the day. Last night I just finished my 3rd round of package designs for a canadian musician that I’m working for. Things are looking really great, but I’m afraid of how many hours I sit slaved to these machines working on projects! I have a full time 9-5 job during the week editing videos, then I come home to freelance work & VJ stuff on the side. There are barely any hours left to sleep & eat.

Thank god I love to do this stuff, I just wish that I had ways of doing it all faster so I could do more of it.

This week I’ll be receiving my new video controller in the mail!! I splurged last week and bought the OHM. I should be receiving it in the next two days. Perhaps just in time to learn how to use it, and give it a try at the Monkeytown gig on Apr 3rd. I think I’m also going to drop the dime on a new laptop to make sure everything runs smoothly. It’s about time for a full round of upgrades!

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