Ghosts & Shadows – She Makes War Music, ramblings and recommendations

“Scared To Capsize”: The Video Shoot

Another week, another video shoot

The last couple of weeks have been a blur of freelance odd-jobs, from photographing builder's renovations to a mental hospital to taking portraits at a beautiful birthday party to filming male dancers rehearsing to facilitating workshops on geeky web tools to teaching guitar to kids to Audiobooing political discussions. I've been here, there and everywhere and my brain is full of apertures and framing and creating shot sequences and is feeling a little overwhelmed at this point. I'm hoping to get a proper day off everything soon, but not until I've got my teeth in to the edits for "I Am" and "Scared To Capsize", the video I shot with Judy Jacob and assorted talented friends on Saturday.

The premise for this one came from the Kigu costume I wore in Let This Be. Kigurumi is the name for performers who wear costumes which represent cartoon characters, often animals, and I found out about them on Twitter in the coldest part of winter when I was complaining about how freezing it was in my house. Apparently this Japanese craze is starting to catch on in the UK with people buying suits to wear around the house - I just had to try it.

I thought wearing a Kigu suit would be a great way to try and cheer up the sad clown in LTB and wanted to build a whole video around them for STC. I was lucky enough to find The Die Mortal Room, a small arts workshop that make weird and wonderful handmade Kigu characters to order and was able to hire a unicorn, badger, lion and penguin for the day. Big thanks to Ceridwen for being so amazingly helpful!

To the story - I knew I wanted to be in a paper boat, lost at sea, heavy of heart and searching for likeminded souls in a lonely world, and Judy created a beautiful, melancholy and heartwarming story around that simple starting point bringing in supremely talented propmaker, costume designer and performance artist Aste Amundsen to create the boat and assorted paper props my animal friends would carry on their quests. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw what she'd made, it was so much more amazing than I ever pictured and the footage is really stunning.

I lucked out with my co-stars once again. Kat Bax and Bass you might remember clowning around in Let This Be, this time playing an Amy Winehouse-esque Badger and a sleepy Lion respectively, and I was very pleased to get to work with Ben James who threatened to steal the show as icy superhero-in-waiting "The Benguin". There was much hilarity all day and though wearing our animal suits around Shoreditch was largely ignored by the general public (bit too Nathan Barley for them, perhaps?) we thoroughly enjoyed romping around and I had a lovely time hanging with the 3D people for the first time in what felt like weeks.

Happily the Benguin found time in our busy shooting schedule to make a few announcements to the nation, please click the links to watch and make sure you visit Ben's website too:

The Benguin

Benguin Doctrine

Benguin Attack!

Check out the full set of stills here. vBlog episode to follow shortly.

Images 1 & 2 in this post courtesy of Dina Karklina, image 3 by me.