A really nicely put together letterpress process film. Great stuff.
Bleisatz Video Tutorial from Lukas Loss on Vimeo.
Blog
Tuesday, January 24th, 2012
Letterpress
Friday, January 13th, 2012
Vegas 1962 on 16mm film
Thursday, September 8th, 2011
Boardwalk Empire and the Lost Art of Sign-writing
So, a recent trip to Paris. We realised that we had done pretty much all the major touristy things possible on previous visits, so we decided to wander around the backstreets and see some of the more offbeat sights. One of the things that struck me was the amount of ‘classic’ signage around the place, detailed signs that had been lovingly hand-painted and maintained over the years rather than replaced by durable, yet ugly, plastic versions. And while the influence of the Swiss style is obviously a good thing, I don’t feel it’s the catch-all solution some people seem to think it is.
The way Paris has continued this practice which is dying off in most other major cities is laudable, especially as it can be physically difficult – this brilliant documentary on NYC sign-writers is a lament to a dying art, but also shows sign-writers shivering on rooftops waiting for the rain to stop.
Then, a few weeks later, I watched the whole of Boardwalk Empire season one. Set in Prohibition-era Atlantic City, the series creates the atmosphere of a time and a place brilliantly with great set design – including some of the few instances of CGI scenery that doesn’t make me cringe. One of the things that appeals to me about British Victoriana is the way it incorporates a rich past and yet lays the foundations for the 20th Century and all the progress therein; in Empire the feeling is of an era at the cusp of the modern age, the history of the place represented by the beautiful traditional calligraphy, and the onset of modernity shown by the bright lights and electric bulb hoardings. This is all backdrop, of course, but in addition the story has a great narrative drag as well, setting it apart (in my eyes) from the great looking, but deathly dull, Mad Men.
Sunday, August 21st, 2011
Scottish Serge
Great titles, rubbish film. Unless you really want to see Serge Gainsberg playing a badly dubbed Scottish Detective (not as much fun as it sounds).
Wednesday, July 27th, 2011
Screentime: print #02 and #03
So, feeling braver after the screenprinting workshop, I booked some studio time locally, shelled out the cash for equipment, and got designing. As I am still in the ‘experimental’ stage, I went with two design options, deciding to print a one-colour layout first. Things seemed to go smoothly, getting a good stencil and good coverage from my new screen, plus a reasonable amount of detail.
So, on to the two-colour option… I knew I had done nice fat trapping, but was still concerned about register in some areas. But, the results were mainly good – there’s a few imperfections in the black, but that to me is the beauty of screenprinting, no two prints are the same.
Although these were early versions (I will be reworking the ‘Voyante’ artwork into a two colour design), after signing and numbering them I am really pleased with the results. I am considering having then on sale as an extra option at my photo exhibition for the E17 Art Trail in September.
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011
Making Films, 50s style…
Not sure where (or when) I acquired this but I’m glad I did. It’s didactic qualities may have been diminished by the emergence of, say, Adobe After Effects, but it’s a kick-ass cover and the book is full of great technical illustrations. There’s even some hand-written notes in there from a previous owner, trying to work out the complex formulas involved in calculating analogue focal lengths and suchlike. Plus the author’s name – P. Monier – could easily be a rapper’s moniker.
As a creative whose working life has seen a wholesale transition from hands-on, analogue methods to digital workflows (and in some cases, back again), it’s of great interest to see how this comprehensive, highly-detailed manual from 1958 is now pretty much redundant as anything other than a curio and has become what I believe is now called ‘vintage’.
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011
Leviathan: Kapoor at the Grand Palais
A recent visit to Paris fortuitously coincided with Anish Kapoor‘s installation at the Grand Palais. This huge, built-for-purpose PVC tricorne aubergine is as impressive as it is ridiculous, and Kapoor generously lets us go inside the thing as well as wander round the outside looking up. Shamelessly populist and all the better for it, Leviathan seemed to inspire wonder in all the schoolkids milling around, and brought a few smiles to my face as well.
Wednesday, May 11th, 2011
Forty Two…
In 1999, Douglas Adams wrote an article entitled How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet about a technology that was relatively new to the man on the street. Reading it back now, this piece on the effect the internet would have on us all feels like it could have been written much more recently. Basically, he nailed it. His views about the restrictions of ‘old media’ were honest and realistic, and it’s implications are being played out at the moment.
As I write, today is the ten-year anniversary of the death of Douglas Adams. It doesn’t always feel right to make a fuss of ‘death dates’, although when it is sincere it can be a good reason to remember and pay tribute. But Adams’ death at the age of 49 feels particularly harsh, as it means he isn’t around to see his ideas come into sharp focus. Plus, he missed the ascendancy of Apple, his computer of choice at a time where PCs looked to be dominant.
In his books, Adams’ technological flights of fancy took ideas about machinery to extremes: he wrote about an Electric Monk, designed to believe in something on your behalf because you are too busy to do it yourself; a ‘Bistromathic drive’ that is powered by the complex maths required to work out restaurant bills for large groups of people; and it is not surprising that the computer Deep Thought, tasked with spending thousands of years in working out the ‘answer’ to life, the universe and everything came up with an answer incomprehensible to it’s makers: “42″.
But tellingly, his most famous work, the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, was named after the novel’s interactive electronic book. Ten years after he passed away, the ebook and the tablet computer are filtering into peoples lives. I can’t help feeling he would have approved.
In the article mentioned earlier, he argues:
“We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing.
Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.”
All from the now distant-seeming viewpoint of the end of the last millennium. Plus, he was funny.
Sunday, May 8th, 2011
Just My Type
It’s hard to avoid the recent spate of books providing accessible, layman-style introductions to complex topics, from weather systems to the history of shipwrecking. By their nature these books can never be more than an overview and in a few cases annoy the experts, but as an intro to a specialism they are a good thing.
So, I was recently given Simon Garfield’s Just My Type: A Book About Fonts (2010) as a present. This is an area of which I have a reasonable knowledge – would I find it useful or annoying? Well, neither as it turns out, but it certainly makes for an entertaining read. From Gutenberg‘s use of movable type through to the Obama presidential campaign, Garfield manages an educational but informal style. The book guides you though the history of typography, covering the theories of development and the usage of fonts in environments we often take for granted, with a fair bit of anecdotal info in there as a sweetener. It’s also handy for those of us who are so absorbed in the day-to-day usage of typography in our own work to take a step back and remember the basics.
Garfield doesn’t aim to produce a textbook on type, so this shouldn’t be approached as such, but I would still recommend this book to the novice, student and pro alike.
Sunday, April 24th, 2011
Screenprint #01
So, screenprinting. After fairly mixed results with the silk and squeegee at Art College all those years ago, I kept a rudimentary interest in screenprinting. This burgeoned a couple of years ago with the rise of inky communities on the internet, full of advice and weird and wonderful gig posters. I was determined to get involved at some point, but needed a refresher to get me back in the swing of things. So, I finally managed to attend a course at Print Club. A single day, in which we took our artwork from laserprint through to a short run of fresh screenprints, ably assisted by affable instructors and technicians. The course is strongly recommended, and here’s the result.
Tuesday, April 19th, 2011
Wait!
Great stuff from Sammy Davis Jr, undoubtedly improvised.
Thursday, April 7th, 2011
Everyone’s Gone to the Moon
The recent passing of Elizabeth Taylor didn’t really make me think about her films, but rather two books in which she makes an appearance. One was Hellraisers (2008), a factual (but somewhat anecdotal) knockabout romp through the lives of four male British Actors, including Taylor’s on-off-on-off husband Richard Burton. But mainly I thought of the other book, Philip Norman’s excellent novel Everyone’s Gone to the Moon (1995), a fantastic fictional snapshot of the emergence of swinging London in the 1960s.
Taylor and Burton feature (as do John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix and Marianne Faithfull) in fictional but believable scenarios, encountered by protagonist Louis Brennan, a young reporter new to London. Brennan becomes caught up in the swirl of fashion, music, photography and film, and the book is about his rites of passage from enthusiasm and optimism through to disillusionment and betrayal.
Norman was particularly well placed to write about this particular time and place—he was there himself, a reporter for the Sunday Times, during which he covered the break up of The Beatles. Norman has since written biographies of The Beatles, Lennon and other music figures from the 60s.
I read the book a couple of years before I also moved to London to work for a newspaper, and have revisited it a couple of times since—I’m now on my second copy of the book, the first is somewhere floating round Australia after lending it to someone going traveling. It’s basically a good story, well told, catching the flavours of the time: a vibrant music and art scene; the emergence of a meritocracy that saw people from the working class rise as a creative force; and the (supposed) end to post war austerity that shaped the decade.