le blog

So I finished post-production on what at the time was my first music video about three months ago. It was for a competition on Genero for a David Guetta (ft Afrojack) track entitled “Lunar”. Genero is essentially crowd sourcing for music videos. You go out, film and submit your entry and if the band picks it, you’ve got an official music video for fuck-if-i-know band. Only as of today we pulled our submission, because of the infuriately long time it’s taken David’s team to launch a response.

The tracks Genero listed on their website for videos to be authored for David was from the 2011 album Nothing But The Beat. Two years old is considered ancient for the internets standards which has been another factor for our decisive push now.

We’re all very proud of the final video and I didn’t feel like having it sit in limbo for potentially another six, seven, twelve months (who knows?) gathering dust wasn’t being fair on us, given the time we’d spent on the entire production.

So soon, we’re launching it on YouTube as an “unofficial” music video with some attempt of a balls out public viral tactic to get David and/or one of his team to actually see it.

Stay tuned!

With my latest directorial works for contemporary classical Icelandic artist Olafur Arnalds my creative ideas intentionally swayed from the saturated low-fi, graphically intense VFX styled film (seen in my work for David Guetta) to a pensive, looming and disorientating video. My main drive was to create a film that would ultise the slit-scanning effect I’ve been obsessing over for the past several months but also to create a film that would require a type of performance from actors leading me into previously unfamiliar territory.

It does have an intentionally ambigious vibe but for those of you who like plot spoilers or for their music videos to be as simple as Andy Warhol eating a BigMac, I’ll let you into a little secret. The main character is in limbo. A waiting room. As he’s holding on to be seen by the man behind the door he comes to the realisation he’s already dead. Boohoo.

Here’s the finished thing. I had problems getting the motion vector pass to work in Nuke which I reckon is the last thing the shot needed but there isn’t all that much movement so I think I can just about get away with it.

3D Gameboy from Sam Jack Gilmore on Vimeo.

Here’s what I’ve been doing with some of my collective downtime at work. Tends to be a lot of that around Christmas, though our December was actually pretty rammed. Here’s a project I started working on towards the end of October.

I chose the Gameboy because the original design has kinda grown on me. I’ve had a real OLD scuffed up 1989 model sitting on my desk for about four months to help alleviate some render-time induced boredom and thought it’d work as a nice easy model to build in Maya and practise comping in Nuke. Only this cuboid shaped model is a lot harder than it looks; the lack of symmetry, rivets, curves and intrusions took sooo much longer than expected. Now that’s over, the proper fun work starts. Oh boy!

Last night was the Creative Out Of Home (COOH) awards which showcases ad work which prefers to live on mammoth boards exposed to outdoory things like snow, rain and chewing gum.  We won best use of live updates for those Royal Mail olympic projections I worked on (for what seems like) ages ago. Just a shame I couldn’t turn up. Even though the ceremony was just 5 minutes walk from my house, unfortunately, my inability to grab a ticket for less than £250 coupled with the fact I was busy that night doing my hair, caused it’s announcement come through in a slightly less terrific form of ones and zeros.

EDIT – On the evening of Wednesday 5th, my projections also won silver at the DMA awards for Best online display advertising. Seconded to Ogilvy’s Drink Award campaign.