Definition of an Artist

I don’t know what your definition of an artist is. Some people might think that a filmmaker is not an artist. They may think that an artist is someone who sits in front of an easel and paints lovely landscapes. And they would be right. But they would also be wrong. I think anyone can be an artist and they can practice in whichever field that they want (or multiple fields if they so wish).

I’m sick of people who look down their noses at someone who doesn’t fit their idea of what an artist should be. For example I consider myself to be an artist within multiple disciplines. I am a filmmaker, a writer, a photographer, a musician, and a digital retoucher. I do all these things (professionally or otherwise) and I enjoy being able to switch back and forth amongst these artistic endeavours. In each of these fields I have styles that interest me and keep me hooked. I also have the themes that fascinate me.

It breaks down like this:

Filmmaking: I enjoy feature films, short films, fiction, documentary, music videos, anything and everything. That doesn’t mean I like it all or see the point in everything I watch, but I think experiencing all forms and styles allows me to decide what I class as my favourite films.

When making films I am drawn to fictional stories more than documentaries. I am intrigued by human relationships and how a film can totally surprise an audience or make a person feel in awe of the images that they are seeing. I believe that a film audience are smarter than a television audience and I love to talk about films and debate with people over their beliefs and feelings relating to films. I believe the rules were made to be broken and I am always looking for new ways to portray a story or a character and to convey the things that are happening on the screen to the audience. I like an audience to have to think for itself and not be ‘led’ to conclusions.


Writing: I write films, stories, songs, poetry, whatever. I find that the most ordinary things in life can be extraordinary through words. I love to create words that an audience can relate to. I love to write scripts that have sharp, smart dialogue and unforeseen twists in the plot. Again I am fascinated by the power of words to convey feeling and emotion. It sounds a bit strange but basically if people can relate to something I write then I feel like I’ve done a good job. And they don’t always have to relate in a good way. Maybe they will totally disagree with my point of view. That is their right as free thinkers.


Photography: I completed my qualifications in Photography and started back in the days when a photographer would shoot on film and then develop the film and then spend hours in the darkroom with chemicals and papers creating pictures. Nowadays I do more digital stuff but I still like to dive back into the traditional methods now and again for fun. My favourite type of photography is portraiture. I think taking a really good picture of a person is a great challenge and when you capture their personality in a photograph it is a great feeling.


Music: I play a bit of guitar and sing badly, but I like writing my own songs and learning songs that other people have written. I think music is the one art form where it easy to share your ideas and work without having to worry that someone will steal it. I love people like the Irish singer Christy Moore who would tour around watching other artists, playing gigs and sharing music and bringing that music to the public arena. I think the art of music is a very social art. It is a great feeling when my friends and I get together and break out the guitars and just have a wonderful time singing and sharing songs.


Digital Retouching: Back in the old days I was against the whole digital photography revolution (I know, I know, look at me now). Then when I left University and needed a job a photographer friend of mine asked me if I would like to come and work at a Photographic studio and be a digital retoucher. I asked him what it was and he explained that it was the person who manipulated digital photographic images using a computer. I said that it sounded like fun. That was a Friday night. I flew to England, he trained me to use photoshop and I started work on the Monday. The rest I learned as I went along. I now do this type of work on a freelance basis. You can see samples of my work in my pictures or at www.viewcreatives.co.uk

Poetry: I am a published poet and that’s all I have to say about that.

Anyway, I just thought I would share these thoughts about what I consider as art with you and if anybody wants to let me know their thoughts on the subject or indeed tell me about their work as an artist, please feel free.

Cheers,

Aaron.

Watercress

I filmed 'Watercress' during their last ever gig which took place in the Empire Music Hall in Belfast on the 23rd December 2000.

I had been filming footage of bands for a while and I really liked the music that Watercress had been producing. The first time I heard one of their songs was when I was still at school. A friend of mine called Colm McCann and I would meet up at lunchtimes with our guitars and play a few songs. It was better than being out playing football in the rain and one day Colm brought this book along with the lyrics for lots of songs in it. I was reading through it when I came across a song called 'Plastercast' and I got him to play it. It was brilliant. Colm told me it was a song by a local band called 'Watercress' and he later lent me their album 'Bummer'.

It was years later that Colm was working for NIMIC (Northern Ireland Music Industry Commission) and had contact with Brian Acton and Dan Donnelly from the band. Watercress had been touring around Europe but were coming home for a Christmas show at the Empire. So Colm arranged for us to get access to the show and film the band playing.

I was nervous as hell driving down to the venue. I had my Sony PD-150 Digital Camera that I had saved up and bought, another smaller digital camera that I had borrowed and an old M-40 Video camera which took actual full-size VHS tapes. For sound I was hoping to plug my minidisc recorder into the mixing desk and sync up the sound on the video at the editing stage.

I met Colm when I got there and he introduced me to Dan and Brian who were really nice guys. Brian just took one look at me and said 'so you're the video guy?'
Yep, that was me. The video guy. I plugged the minidisc into the desk although I think that annoyed the engineer slightly. I managed to duct tape my VHS camera up on the balcony looking down on the stage. Meanwhile Colm took one camera and went over to the left of the stage and I took the other and stood on a raised platform on the right. The VHS camera would just take a continuous long shot of the stage and the other two cameras would film close ups that I could cut to. Thinking back I maybe should've put the digital camera up on the balcony for the long shot since it was better quality, but I was afraid some drunken punter would steal it and besides that, I wanted to remain as inconspicuous as possible.

The show was fantastic and in the end we filmed over an hour and a half of footage. We used two complete minidiscs. We filmed until all the batteries ran out and our arms were aching. But it was great. There's something really good about filming live music. Once you start shooting you just have to go with it and see what happens. There's no retakes or starting again. And when you get something right it's just like magic. You can feel it when you captured 'a moment'.

I didn't know when I asked the band if I could film the show that it would be the last one ever and it felt quite emotional when they announced it on stage. Looks like I got my act together just in time. I didn't know that would be my last chance.

It was only when I started the editing process that I realised how big a job it was to make a 90 minute DVD of live footage and sync the sound and add titles. So as it stands I still have all the footage which I keep as a side project for fun. I edited and added sound to the first three songs and have a completed ten minute teaser of the show.

The strange thing after the show was the internet buzz that started for no apparent reason. On one of the Watercress forums people were on there saying that the gig was brilliant. One person even asked if anyone else had noticed that the BBC were there filming the show for a documentary about the band. I was going to post a reply, but I hadn't the heart to tell them…

Just incase any of you lovely people are wondering, there are probably still copies of the 'Bummer' album floating around the cosmos but they are few and far between. It's become a cult album now that people talk about in hushed tones around campfires. Nevertheless, it is essential listening if you like your music original, meaningful and melodic.
Currently Dan and Brian are working on separate projects. Dan is in New York playing solo and with his band 'Sonovagun' (see my friends list for more details) and Brian is living in the North of England playing gigs around the country with his band 'Drat' (www.doubledrat.net)

That's all Folks,

Aaron.

Death in Vegas

Let me start this blog by stating for the record that ‘Death in Vegas’ did not sanction or have any knowledge of this video. Well that’s not strictly true. It was given to them in the strangest of ways but I’ll get to that later. Let me start where most stories start, at the beginning. Once upon a time I was given a song by a friend of mine, Colm McCann. He usually plays guitar and writes acoustic songs, but he had taken a sharp right turn into the world of Dance music. Well, not exactly dance music, more like beats and drums and rhythms and computerised voices and the like. These days, he’s more into the Salsa dancing but I hope one day he returns to his first love and starts writing more songs because I’d love him to release an album (yes his stuff is that good). So anyway, he hands me this drum and bass style song called ‘The Answer is No’ and asks me to listen to it. I play it in my car over and over and start to get this idea in my head that we could make a cool video for the song. Now, unlike the live performance stuff that I film, when I make a music video I tend to go for a video with a story. I don’t even usually think about the band being in the video. If the song is good enough and the story fits the words of the song then the video will work better than if it is just the band singing and dancing around. Nothing is worse than music videos where artists (and I use that term very loosely) just dance around like fucking monkeys. Music videos should have meaning and relate to the song, but then again, not every song has a point. The types of videos that I like are videos that you can watch over and over and see something different every time. My favourite music videos are the three videos that ‘Guns ‘n Roses’ made for their songs ‘Don’t Cry’, ‘November Rain’ and ‘Estranged’. A guy called ‘Del James’ realised that these songs all followed on from one another and wrote a story called ‘Without You’. The story starts with ‘Don’t Cry’ and is the story of a rock star (Axl Rose) who is having a hard time coping with his fame. It makes him suicidal and is affecting his relationship with his girlfriend (his real life wife at the time Stephanie Seymour). The video shows his breakdown and has some amazing imagery such as Axl on a psychology chair shaking and as he lies there another different Axl walks in (like an alter ego) and then another. Also, there is a scene where Axl is drowning and his girlfriend is holding onto him and dragging him further down. The video ends with Axl and his girlfriend having a picnic in the graveyard and the camera slides down below the ground where they are sitting and we see another beastlike Axl skulking around in the grave. The second part of the trilogy is ‘November Rain’ and is the same story progressed a year or so. Axl has become big-time famous and he and his girlfriend are getting married. Everything seems perfect and then at the wedding reception the rain starts and the tables are knocked over and the red wine is spilt and we find out that his new wife is dying. The wedding turns to a funeral and she has died and he is alone again. The video ends with Axl having horrible nightmares and a breakdown. The third part of the trilogy is ‘Estranged’. Again more time has passed and Axl has been through rehab and is back on tour. It is a sort of metaphorical release of his demons and his making peace with the situation he’s in. If you watch these videos together one after the other you will literally get chills up your spine (especially if have any knowledge of ‘Guns ‘n Roses’). So, as I was driving along and listening to this song that Colm had produced I had an idea for a video and a couple of days later the idea was on paper and ready to go. But because the song had no real lyrics, and because I’d never written a video for that type of music before, I had no idea if the music and the video would work together. I decided to go ahead and make the video anyway and worry about it later. To make the video as cheaply as possible I decided to shoot it in the street where I lived. I only needed two actors, one female and one male. The story was simple. A woman wakes up and gets dressed. It is night time. She leaves the house and walks down the street. As she walks down an alleyway, she is confronted by a man who is dressed in black. They stare at each other and the woman runs off. The man gives chase and traps her in a closed office building. He is looking around for her and cannot find her. Suddenly she is behind him and he is trapped. And let’s just say the woman is not as helpless as we may have believed. I don’t want to give the ending away but I thought the idea had a great twist on gender roles. For the male part I asked my future brother-in-law Dave to do it and he agreed once he knew he wouldn’t have to say anything. He had never acted before but was actually very good. For the female part I got a talented actress I met in Cardiff at University called Niamh (see my friends list for more details). She kindly donated a night for filming and we managed to shoot all the footage we needed quite quickly. So with all the footage in the bag, the job was to see if the music fitted the final edited video. It did, but unfortunately I just got the sense that it wasn’t right. I watched it over and over but something just wasn’t clicking. So I had a music video with no soundtrack. At this point I had been listening to a lot of different bands and one that stuck in my mind was ‘Death in Vegas’. They were an up and coming band doing some live shows around the country. The thing that was strange about them was that they didn’t seem to have any lead singer. Their songs would have random famous artists singing. The song I liked best was a song that had Iggy Pop singing on it called ‘Aisha’. It was dark and lucid and fucking hell…I discovered that it fitted on the video perfectly. I laid the track on and it worked. I tried to contact the band to see if they needed a video for the song and didn’t have much luck getting in touch with them, so I bought a ticket for their Belfast performance in the Limelight, a rock bar in my hometown (it’s an amazing bar. Colin Murray talks about it on Radio One. It’s not unusual to see ‘Snow Patrol’ down there having a pint and every week you’d see ‘Ash’ at the Pub Quiz). My plan was to burn a copy of the video to CD-Rom and give it to them after the show. And that’s exactly what I did. I went up to the stage at the end of the show and spoke to the guy who had been playing drums and quickly told him what it was and put it in his hand. I have no idea if they ever watched it or if it ended up in a gutter somewhere, but I like to think that one fine day when they were sitting around bored, they put it on and had a look. Who knows, maybe the phone might ring one day yet, or it might turn up on MTV out of the blue. Whatever happens (or more likely doesn’t) it is now available for all you good people to view here and on my myspace page. I hope you like it. Aaron.

Big In Sweden

The reason I get the opportunity to film a lot of bands is simply because I ask them. I go to gigs in pubs, clubs and venues and if I see a band and like their songs, then I go and ask them if I can film some footage. People are sometimes amazed that I have the balls to go up and speak to performers at gigs (generally because in real life I am pretty shy) but the way I look at it is if they say ‘yes’ then it’s a bonus and if they say ‘no’ then I haven’t really lost anything, other than two minutes of my time. I’m in the same position I was before I asked. The old saying is true – if you don’t ask, you don’t get.

I might have had a different outlook if the first band I asked had laughed at me and said ‘no’, but they didn’t and that gave me a great amount of confidence. You always have to remember that these guys are up there on stage because they want to entertain and be famous and successful. And if they have any sort of brain in their head they’re not going to say ‘no’ when someone comes up to them and offers them a free video. It’s good business sense. If the video turns out to be crap, well, they haven’t paid for it. But if it turns out to be good, then they have just got a free video with which to promote themselves.

The only three reasons a band will ever say ‘no’ is because:

They are already famous and don’t need your services.
They are a signed band and are not allowed to appear in any unsanctioned videos.
They don’t like the look of you or don’t think you’re serious.

The first band that I ever approached was a band called ‘Big in Sweden’. I had just split up with my girlfriend and was in Mallorca on holiday trying to pull my life back together and get some confidence back. I was there with my friend Charlie and had taken my camera with me to record some recce work for a Sea Monster movie we were thinking of making called ‘Dark Waters’. I had been going to Mallorca for about 12 years and thought that it would be a good spot for making a movie. During the day we were touring around the island looking for locations and then at night we were going down to a little pub in Santa Ponsa town called ‘Dicey Reilly’s’.

One night we were having a few drinks when a four piece band from Ireland came on. They were called ‘Big in Sweden’. I had heard cover bands before ranging from good to terrible. But after a few songs, I realised that these guys were brilliant. I just knew that I would love to film them and I said to Charlie that I was going to ask them. At the end of the set, I watched them packing up their equipment and was about to go and ask them if I could film them when my nerves got the better of me and I bottled it. We left the pub and went to another bar round the corner. Charlie told me I could always ask them the next night, but I felt like I’d missed the chance.

The bar that we were in was empty and I was feeling pretty deflated as we sat there with our drinks. Then the door opened and who should walk in but the band we had just seen. They ordered some drinks and sat down at the other end of the bar and I knew then that it was karma. It was now or never. I looked at Charlie, downed my drink, got up and walked over to where they were sitting.

The lead singer was called Tony and we got chatting. I told him I saw the show and the band were great and I asked him if I could come down the next night and film them. And when he said ‘yes’ I was ecstatic. I gave him a business card that I had in my pocket. I know some of you may think that producing a business card is a bit false, but when you’re a young filmmaker and you need someone to know that you’re serious, it helps. Print some business cards and take them everywhere. You don’t have to throw them around, but if someone wants to know that you’re on the level, a good business card looks better than writing your number on the back of a beer mat.

The next night I arrived down early with my camera. Charlie had a little stills camera that he was going to use to take some photographs. At the time I was using a Panasonic M40 camera that was quite big (it was the type that sat on your shoulder). The band were slightly late (Tony joked that it was because they were all in the flat doing their hair and getting dressed up). When they saw the camera I think they were impressed and slightly nervous. Sometimes, size does matter. I didn’t have any sound equipment in those days but because the pub was small I was able to use the sound from the microphone on the camera. A more experienced filmmaker would have filmed one or two songs and went for quality but I didn’t know any better and filmed the entire two hour performance. My arms were killing me by the end of the night, but there was a lot of energy and fun in that video and I am very proud of it.

The show was great and even though I wasn’t getting paid I got my first taste of the good life. The band got free drinks for playing and every time I turned round there was a free drink on the bar for me too. As well as that I got my first taste of fame. Nothing makes people notice you like when you have a camera the size of Florida on your shoulder.

I have total admiration for the guys in the band. They were there for about six months playing every night more for the love of performing than for the pay. And when I asked them if I could shoot some extra footage for the video they organised to come down and get the bar opened and the equipment set up so we could film them singing during the day (priceless time off for them since they were performing every single night). I only had the one camera so first I took a long shot of them playing ‘The One I Love’ by REM and then I filmed them singing it again, taking close ups and wacky angle shots. Then I cut these two takes together into one seamless rendition of the song and put the titles over it. I learned a lot filming ‘Big in Sweden’ and would like to thank them for helping a filmmaker on his journey.

Since then I have seen the band playing in Wexford, Leightonstone (London), Swansea, and various other venues all over the place. When I make it to one of their shows they always make me feel very welcome and dedicate a song to me. One night I got a speeding ticket on my way to the show, and that night the song they played for me was ‘So Lonely’ by ‘The Police’. Nice one lads!

Please note: The band have some new members. The current line up is Tony Ward, Bobby O’Hara, Phillip Joyce, Tony Tracey, and Shane Gough. They are now called ‘Bluemoose’. They also record their own original material as ‘Sonic Vista’.
Please give them some support and visit their website at www.bluemoose.ie


Aaron.

Having a Vocation

Well, I thought it was about time I gave this a go and added some blogs to my page. I was thinking about what I could write and thought that since I am not currently in production on anything I would start by telling you lovely people who stop by about the ongoing quest to become a Filmmaker. It’s an amazing thing when you finally realise what you want to do in life. When a career picks you instead of you picking it. It’s easy to work out if you’re doing what you want to in life. Just ask yourself this question. Would you still be doing it if you weren’t getting paid? If the answer is no then you have a job that pays the bills. If the answer is yes, then you have a vocation. And my vocation is Filmmaking because many times in the past I have worked for little or no pay. When you find yourself standing in the pissing rain at two in the morning filming an empty street because you need the shot for an editing session next morning, well, you know you’re in love. Either that or you’re crazy. So what I’m going to do is take you for a walk through the past and share a few of my experiences whilst making the movies, the music videos and the art. What I’ll try and do as well is to add the videos that match the stories on my page when I can so you can have a look at the work we’re doing. Better will follow but on the website link (which takes you to my myspace page becuase the official website is under construction) at the minute is a trailer for a music video called ‘Sick Weirdo’ (more about that later) and some footage of a hotel that burned down next door to my house one night. Yep, that’s right, standing in the pissing rain at two in the morning filming a burning hotel just because... Crazy.

“In case I don’t see ya, Good afternoon, Good evening and Goodnight.” Aaron.