Who am I?
Camera Assist. Stills photographer. Lover of all things Blade Runner and Neurospice enthusiast.
I also make monatages.
Upon re-watching Oppenheimer last month, I came to a startling realisation……that there was another parallel between it and one other summer blockbuster about the harnessing the power of starts–also with Cillian Murphy in the lead…….
I’ll lead to figure out what it is, but needless to say, whether Nolan intentionally drew this as a deliberate callback, or purely by coincidence, I was immediately inspired to create a mashup to show my appreciation for both stories.
After months of work (very nearly a year at that!), I have FINALLY completed my second montage and this project turned out to be a hell of a lot harder than the last one, despite having more powerful hardware at my disposal. For starters, it was immensely more complicated, on account of having to balance 7 films, all of which are greatly varied in tone & style, across nearly 30 years of influence, with similar yet interchangeable elements that (sometimes) overlap and interlock with one another, synchronised to a single piece of score from just one instalment (at the expense of others) giving it a very different rhythm than my previous effort.
The other difficulty that comes with using score rather than a song, is the that rhythm is no longer determined by a thematic link, as characterised by the lyrics. Instead, I had to feel myself a way through the mist to discover which pieces of the films (both individually & as a collective) I would use, with it only becoming clear once I had begun to lay the initial track.
Furthermore, the piece I selected was roughly twice as long as The Kill, which did buy me more time to use the extra footage, but it came with the constraints of (sometimes) having to “fill in” spaces because I couldn’t think of what to do with them, since I had already put my creative skills into the exciting parts.
This was something of a passion-project that I’ve wanted to work on for years now, but lacked the necessary tools & workflow to acheive it. I was torn between linking my YouTube channel where this is uploaded, but felt it would be more emblematic of the website as a whole if I were to upload it in the entirety here.
I’m currently working on my second, third, & fourth montages, told in this manner and hope to have the next one completed before June.
This is my gradutation film from Ravensbourne, where I served as the writer, director, DOP, production and lead talent. Needless to say, it was an unnecessarily complicated juggling of tasks that I would not recommend any one undertake alone, but I have very little time to prepare, as everyone else was off working on their own productions.
I wish I could have done things differently, starting with getting a producer right off the bat, to cover all of the behind the scenes variables, allowing me to focus on the creative side of things (which is where my real passion lay). If I were given the oppertunity to remake this at any point, I absolutely would–though I would take more time in planning exactly what my vision was going to be.
Zak-of-all-trades 