Video Militia

Stop motion mix of Canon 5D Mark II and some other formats, from directors Alan Poon and Adam Makarenko.

DP Greg Ephraim makes his directorial debut in this run-and-gun video for The Ventia Fair.  Greg proves that you can go pretty far on a shoestring budget with a little art direction, good photography and... balls.  All locations were unpermitted and unsecured, as Greg put it they had about 2 minutes at any given location.  1 minute before people realized what was going on, 30 seconds after that before they finished calling the cops, and about 30 secs to make a getaway.  It made for the perfect dress rehearsal of a bank robbery.

There's a fine line between drama and melodrama... and director Hope Audikana has managed to have her actor stumble, in strungout fashion, along it. With brilliant photography and casting, this dingy video for Grove Armada might just be our new favorite.

Jaron Albertin directs this dark video for Torontonian composer Todor Kobakov.  Born into a Bulgarian family of classical musicians, he began playing piano at the age of 4.  Todor has since fused his training with the vivid musical scene of Toronto to create compositions that appeal to both the indie and classical sensibilities.  It's no surprise then he's enlisted the likes of Emily Haines and Tunde Adebimpe as guests vocalists.

This video from Paul Rodriguez is so great we can forgive the blatant Joy Division ripoff sound of Former Ghosts.  Sorry guys but it's true.  Nice video Paul.

"THE THIRD & THE SEVENTH" - DIR. ALEX ROMAN

"The Third & The Seventh" is a FULL CGI short film from director Alex Roman that is a tribute to architecture as art.  Alex was a jack of all trades in this project and did all CG, editing, sound design and musical orchestration himself.  Someone give this guy a crew! 

(The director requests that you watch this in fullscreen when you view it.)

The new video for Massive Attack's new album Heligoland blends the confessional interview of a little old lady with footage of her as a young starlet in the infamous 70s porn flick "The Devil in Miss Jones." The video is directed by Toby Dye, and unless you work for Hustler we recommend you watch this at home.

People spend years perfecting their digital skills to make things look DIY and analog.  Director Bennet Pimpinella takes the other approach... actually scratching, painting, and altering by hand each frame for this Bloody Beatroots video "Romborama."  Here's a bit of the process in his own words:

I usually don’t watch the film I’ve dug up. I start scratching the single frames without knowing what’s on them. I use engravers, colours, burns, transfers… and I work on the frames for about a month and a half. The time needed for a 3 minute Super8.  Then I telecine it at home, i.e. I re-record the material in digital. This is where I discover what I have done for a month.

Romborama is the fruit of one day of shooting and two and a half months of scratching, torment, solitude, anxiety and inspiration…. To achieve the right degree of confusion.  I lacerated 15000 frames on a 35mm film.  Then I added letraset, colour and in the end I applied the screentones, used by designers to emphasize the colour contrast.

In Romborama, I illustrate a battle between me and “The Bloody Beetroots”. A clash of colours, beats and scratches!!  I have tried to produce, through obsessive and repetitive imagery, a generational film dominated by new electronica and two masked superheroes, expressing deep, instinctive passions.  The approach stems from the extroverted creativity of someone whose intention is never to separate communication from experimentation, using rhythm, density and elements from the past like human perception.  A film that “rips it up”…."

The new video from Stockholm directing team PUNX reminded us of a techno-version of a nightmare we had after seeing "Fire in the Sky." That shit was scary, but this is somehow sexy.  Take a look.