Category Archives: Uncategorized

I have now made an album of the video clips of our January concert with Weisse Weande at Garage X in Vienna.
You can find them on Vimeo by clicking this link:- http://www.vimeo.com/album/188069

Here are the four videos that show the whole of the first half of the ‘Tagtool True Players’ concert that we gave in Vienna at Garage X featuring Christian Reiner (voice) and Weisse Weande.

.

.

.

Although these clips still have some technical problems I think that they do provide a quite accurate impression of the performance. I’m hoping that Dima will have the rest of the concert captured, edited and uploaded to Vimeo ready for me to post here soon – but at the moment his computer keeps crashing so I will have to wait till he sorts out this problem!

We have had a busy start to the year. On 16 January we had a live Tagtool drawing performance at the theatre, Garage X, in Vienna – an event arranged by OMA International and billed as, ‘The Tagtool True Players’. Our performance accompanied the group Weisse Waende. Although we had heard this group playing live (for one of OMA’s ‘Hilti’ performances) and we had seen each other’s websites, we did not have an opportunity to rehearse with them before the performance. So -although we had prepared some material beforehand this event turned out to be a real jam session! Here is the first clip of the performance.

When we arrived we were happy to find that the theatre, though quite small, had plenty of space for all our equipment, a beautiful big white wall behind the musicians and a ceiling mounted projector. The theatre sound and lighting technicians got everything ready but when we tested our equipment there was a problem – Dima had quickly to reconfigure all our prepared material to match the (lower) resolution of this theatre projector. (He managed to complete this task with only minutes to spare before the performance!). Jörg Stefke made the video documentation and all of the Tagtool drawing was captured directly in the computer. This meant that Dima would have plenty of material from which to make a video of the whole event.
Editing all this has turned out to be extremely time consuming and not entirely straightforward! First Dima had to resize and match the computer captured material with the video footage and then, when he uploaded the first section of video for some reason it turned out to be very dark. However, I will post the corrected clips on Vimeo as Dima completes them.

Last weekend we were in Dresden to see our film, ‘Tales from the Attic’ screened at the Schmalfilmtage Festival.

As these photos show, there was a large audience and it was the first time we had had the opportunity to see the finished version on the big screen – which was very exciting! We had the stop frame Super8 footage of my Tagtool drawing for this film transferred to mini DV at Cineco in Amsterdam. (The ‘homemade’ telecine version and photos of my Tagtool performance is on the blog – 22 September 2009). I will post a video of the final version at a later date.

On 29 December we were invited to do a Tagtool performance in Kolin, a town 60km east of Prague, where our friend Mark Divo has established an arts centre and artist residency. We elected not to set up our equipment in one of the basement gallery spaces but instead to project on the walls and furnishings of Mark’s permanent installation, his ‘Inhabited Sculpture’, in the living room upstairs.

Dima decided to shoot this video using his new Canon 500D camera rather than his usual stop motion recording. Although it was a first experiment with this new camera and Dima had to do a lot of time consuming post production work to achieve this result, we were very pleased with the high definition quality of the resulting images. I think that it captures quite well the party atmosphere with people coming and going while the drawing progressed. To see more information about Mark’s work and the D.I.V.O Institute follow this link:-
www.divoinstitute.org

Here is our 2009 Tagtool Christmas offering! We filmed it in our apartment during our recent skiing holiday in Livigno, Italy and Dima did the post production when we got home. We plan to email this video to all our friends with our best wishes for the New Year, so if you are reading this and you are not on our mailing list we would like send you also, every good wish for the New Year ahead – and lots of Happy Tagtooling in 2010!

The song which accompanies this animation is the 1989 single, ‘A Thousand Nights’ by the Swedish band Lädernunnan (The Leather Nun).

Here is Dima’s stop frame video made from footage shot during the first day of our filming in Amsterdam.

The soundtrack is from the album called Strømblocque Phantasieën by one of our favourite Dutch bands, Coolhaven – check them out at:-
www.coolhaven.nl
We have lots more footage waiting for Dima to work on – so I hope that ‘Room of Ghosts II’ – the sequel, will be coming soon!

Drawing in the very long narrow downstairs hallway presented quite a challenge. As the photos below show, I had to sit in a very small space directly behind the time lapse camera and the two projectors, which meant that I had a rather restricted view of what I was drawing.The ‘background’ for my drawing was some video clips of footage from one of our B+W 16mm films and it seemed a pity to draw over this illusion of stairs created by the projection on the floor of the hallway without taking a photo first.For some of the sessions in the hallway we used only the larger Panasonic projector mounted on its side, giving the portrait format that can clearly be seen in this photo that I took while Dima was setting up the computer ready for me to draw.A really strange contrast occurred between the process of drawing over the figure and creating the shadows, colours and patterns surrounding her. As most of the drawing area consisted of the sharply receding planes of the floor and walls, when I drew thin lines they became hugely elongated on the floor and short and wide on the walls, and describing a circle with my pen resulted in a narrow ellipse. However, this ‘difficulty’ enabled me to produce very quickly some really dramatic effects.

We used two locations for our Tagtool sessions; a very beautifully proportioned room on the first floor back of the ‘front house’ which, when the reconstruction was completed, would be the present owner’s sitting room, and the long, narrow downstairs hallway that ran from the front of the house right through to the very back of the ‘back house’ at the rear of the property.Preparations for filming in the first floor room.
Here is my Tagtool set up in the corner.  For the first session we used only one projector, trained on a very large white ‘flat pack’ three door wardrobe left behind by a previous owner. I began by drawing over some video footage of a swan on the canal provided by the director.We then repositioned the projector so that I could construct this ‘stage set’ which the shadowy image of the present owner could animate and from which the ‘ghosts’ of the previous occupants would emerge.
For the second session we used two projectors which enabled us to have two underlying videos.
The larger beam of the Panasonic projector covered the entire surface of the wardrobe while the smaller image from our BenQ projector enabled me to draw on the doorway and wall. First I prepared two images, the scary head appearing on the wardrobe and the romantic youth holding the swan on the wall behind.
This provided the backdrop for filming a ‘happening’ where the wardrobe would be totally destroyed (in the photos below it is Dima doing the destruction – a role he very much enjoyed!). When the wardrobe was flattened (in a cloud of dust) the scary head was transferred on to the wall alongside the romantic youth. I then ‘erased’ both images using the whole spectrum of Tagtool colours – and also managed to take these photos of the drama. Once the dust had settled (literally!) on this performance, I drew these heads, fading them to produce this ghostly audience.

Canadian film maker Demetri Estdelacropolis had seen our ‘Tales from the Attic’ in Rotterdam earlier this year and invited us come to Amsterdam to do some Tagtooling for the film, ‘Nearly Departed’, that he is making there.  The filming location was an historic canal house in the centre of the city, an enormous, beautiful and quite extraordinary building that is currently undergoing major reconstruction and restoration.  Filming was to take place in the evenings and at the weekend when the builders were not working.  It sounded like a great opportunity for us to work in such a prestigious location – and we were not disappointed!

Needless to say, we came home with lots of photos.  At various points when I wasn’t actively involved in drawing I used my little camera to take some images specially for this blog and as usual Dima also documented our Tagtool sessions.  He is making a stop frame video from his material but meantime I have selected some still photos to ‘set the scene’ for our work on this project. I will publish a selection in my next two postings.

Here is a stop frame of part of the live Tagtool drawing to accompany Beseppy and Martin Janicek at A studio Rubín.

At the weekend we had a rehearsal in our studio when I took these photos of the first practice session.

This rehearsal was really useful as it gave me an opportunity to listen carefully to the sounds of the instruments before I started to draw. Then we each made up a ‘story’ which would set the scene for the three performance improvisations. In order that Martin and Bethany could see my drawing projected on the wall behind them while they were playing, Dima set up a monitor in front of their table. I put a clock on my table so that I could check the pace of my drawing. This arrangement worked very well in our studio and by the end of the session we had agreed on the shape of the three pieces for the performance.

The venue was quite small, a vaulted cellar in a very old building in the centre of the city. I had not been there before and when we arrived at 5.30pm for the sound check I discovered (to my horror!) that the whole place was painted matt black. I realised that I would have to adjust my drawing ideas very quickly! Some of the tonal gradations that I had planned to use were not possible as the black walls just soaked up the Tagtool colours and using the transparency slider was also really tricky.  In order to see the stage I had to stand on a ledge at the back of the auditorium with our flight case upended on top of a small table to make a work station for my Tagtool, drawing tablet and computer, but as there was a large audience this improvisation proved both necessary and successful. There was a very neat ceiling mount for our projector and video camera that was adjustable and hooked over the lighting rig, so in the end the whole set up worked well, despite the black drawing surface.