“Traces Of The Soul” now streaming on Amazon
Tag Archive for Traces Of The Soul
‘Fossil Characters’ Nakajima Hiroyuki Short Film
Allow me to present the film I shot with Director/Editor Martin Cooper about calligrapher Nakajima Hiroyuki’s exhibition in Milan last month.
This performance/exhibition/ was part of the event “Written in Stone”, a group exhibition held in Milan October 9-16 2023, in Palazzina dei Bagni Misteriosi of Franco Parenti Theatre, curated by Katia Bagnoli and Bruno Riva.
It was a real pleasure to work with Martin and Hiroyuki again. It’s been some years since I last saw Hiroyuki after meeting him during the filming of Martin’s multi award winning feature documentary “Traces Of The Soul“.
My last blog post was some photos from the trip in case you want to see those.
“Scritto nella pietra” exhibition – Shooting with Nakajima Hiroyuki in Milan
Overall Winner & Best Director – History, Mystery & Odyssey
RIP Zhao Yizhou
Two weeks in Portland, Oregon – DOP for “History,Mystery,Odyssey”
Islamic Calligraphy – Two Films with Soraya Syed for The SSN for Islamic Art and Material Culture
I’m very pleased to present two films I DOP’d and edited with Soraya Syed on Islamic Calligraphy.
(I first met Soraya whilst DOPing of the multi-award winning feature documentary on calligraphy “Traces Of The Soul” in which she was one of the 12 artists featured)
The films above were commissioned by The Islamic Art and Material Culture Subject Specialist Network as part of their ACE funded activities that aim to support regional museums and their collections.
Excerpt from the SSN for Islamic Art and Material Culture blog post (Read the full blog post HERE):
“The art of Islamic Calligraphy can be said to be one of the most important historical developments in the Islamic world. Established over a thousand years and stretching across the world, calligraphy played a fundamental role in the development of Islamic Art and helped to develop a distinctive visual culture.
Hattat Soraya Syed has composed two beautiful short films consisting of a précis of the long and intricate development of the art of Islamic Calligraphy and the Methods, Materials and Training which go into establishing a master of this art. The films are not aimed at experts in the field, but they provide access to members of the public and to curators whose expertise is not in the area.“
Shot in September 2020 at Soraya’s studio in London with full COVID protocols in place.
Sony A7III
Tamron Di III RXD 28-75mm
Rode wireless GO
Sokani X60 vrs 2
Sachtler Ace Tripod
Edited in DaVinci Resolve 16
Two Gay Geeks – Hamish Downie’s Five Questions with Adrian Storey aka Uchujin
Traces Of The Soul – Asia House, London – Screening March 11th 2020
2019 Review Part 2
2019 Review Part 1
“Traces Of The Soul” wins Best Contemporary Art Documentary & Most Beautiful Documentary Awards at Master Of Art Film Festival 2019
“Traces Of The Soul” announces more festival screenings for 2019
“Traces Of The Soul” 1st Prize Fine Art Film at Alexandre Trauner Art Film Festival-A trip to Hungary
“Traces Of The Soul” at Alexandre Trauner Art Film Festival Szolnok, Hungary – 16th & 21st October 2018
“Traces Of The Soul” – A trip to Asolo Art Film Festival, Italy
“Traces Of The Soul” – World Premiere – Asolo Art Film Festival, Italy
Adrian “Uchujin” Storey – Collusion Maker Takeover – Presentation
Last week I was honored to be invited by Lee Mason to give a presentation about my work at the Collusion Maker Takeover event taking place at iMet in Huntingdon.
I talked about myself (oh the vanity:), “Boys For Sale“, “Traces Of The Soul” and the showed the Handbook “New Day” video I made recently.
You can watch my talk (shot from a terrible angle on a Galaxy S8) above.
It was a really interesting day with lots of inspiring projects being shown and talked about and I’m very grateful to Lee and Collusion for inviting me and all the great work they are doing in the local area.
After myself in the evening session LAICA gave a talk about the “bunker project” album that he and Graham Dunning made, Miri Kat & Martin Dubka played us some of their beautiful live coding meets modular synth music and to top it off the amazing Graham Dunning played us some of his unique and wonderful Mechanical Techno.
There was also food provided by the insanely delicious Guerilla Kitchen (Those “black Bean Balls” were simply the most delicious balls I’ve ever had in my mouth, if you can find them, eat some:)
Uchujin / Adrian Storey Showreel 2017
My 2017 Showreel.
Work featured in order of appearance:-
Boys For Sale (Multi Award winning Feature documentary/2017) – Producer/D.O.P.
Traces Of the Soul (Feature documentary/2018 release) – Producer/D.O.P./Titles and VFX/Assistant Editor
Documentally (various) – VFX/D.O.P./Cameraman/Editor
MZed (Ident) – Motion Graphics
Immersive Shooter (Ident) – Motion Graphics
Newsshooter (Ident/Graphics/Show coverage) – Motion Graphics/Cameraman
CGON (promo) – Motion Graphics/D.O.P./Editor
Mujuworld (promo) – Self-shooting Director
Influx (Editorial/2018 release) – D.O.P./Editor
TCOLondon (unreleased promo) – D.O.P.
Laica & Graham Dunning (Music video/Documentary/2018 release) – Self-shooting Director
Andretti Formula E team & Kobayashi Kamui (promo/2018 release) – D.O.P.
Music – “The Jazz Police” by The University Of Warwick Big Band
used under a creative commons CC by 3.0 license
Uchujin 2017 Review pt 2
Self indulgence part 2, 2017 edition…….
Uchujin 2017 Review pt 1
It’s that time again, a self-indulgent review of my year and this is only part 1!, ostensibly for anyone reading here but basically for me to remember all the stuff that went down.
“Traces Of The Soul” Calligraphy Documentary – Official Trailer
Uchujin 2016 Review – Part 2
(Continued from Part 1)
The ancient Chinese oft quoted curse “May you live in interesting times” got used a lot in 2016, for me at least it was a huge shake up of a year and “interesting” barely covered it…
This Part 2 of my look back at the heartless confusing and yet liberating and life altering bastard of a year that was 2016 begins in…
July
After 10 years and 1 day exactly and a LONG way overdue I finally left Japan to return to the UK.
I didn’t write much about that then, and I haven’t since.
I have plenty to say about it, believe me, but the little black ball of anger and disgust deep inside me is not a good place to make public statements from so I’m going to refrain.
It did feel like a huge relief to get on that plane knowing that it was the (almost certainly, but never say never) final time I’d be doing it.
I cried me a river in the days leading up to it but only from saying goodbye to friends and I’ve never been any good at goodbyes so that was no surprise…
My almost weekly for 10 years Friday nights will never be quite the same…
My brother in law thought this would be suitable for a send off meal…
And then suddenly, I was here and it felt like a huge weight had been lifted…
I hit the ground running and within days was in London with Martin Cooper the director of “Traces Of The Soul” editing the trailer at Storm HD…
I had my priorities straight too and bought a lovely new bed to get out of at 6am everyday…
The weather was uncharacteristically kind…
I found some great photos in boxes I haven’t looked in for 20 years, this one by the legendary Dave “Mr Muju” Ashlin…
It’s me playing a gig many moons ago in Brighton with the band I had with Rochelle Vincente – “The Hawkline Orchestra”
And it was another month when we didn’t lose anyone who meant anything to me…though I personally experienced 1 or more little deaths :)
August
I was up in Sheffield with Martin Cooper shooting for “Traces of the soul” – 2 amazing artists with incredible stories, Calligraphitti Ambassadors Iranian born Ghalamdar and Englishman Karl “Kobe” O’brien…
We were “up north” so we breakfasted accordingly…
I bought a car and started driving for the first time in 14 years, not scary at all, no sir…
I was at Silverstone to film drift car nutcase Buttsy Butler for my friends at Postfuel. I didn’t let Buttsy drive my new car…
The UK was proving to very car oriented as I also went for a drive in this beauty…
I was reconnecting with some dear old friends from WAY back in the day…
Being back was beautiful and weird in almost equal measure…
We lost Gene Wilder and the man responsible for the Backstreet boys and N’Sync, Lou Pearlman…
September
The piece I DP’d/Shot/Edited on Buttsy Butler in August went up on the Influx site…
I started another Instagram account to post pics of the out of date food I kept finding in my Dad’s cupboards…
I was at IBC 2016 in Amsterdam with the News shooter crew and very interesting it was too, plus Amsterdam is beautiful…
This was my favorite tattoo from the show…
And this my favorite piece of street sculpture…
It seemed there was barely time to catch a breath before I was passing through Brussels on my way to Photokina 2016 in Cologne again with News shooter…
Where Dan Chung and Kai Man Wong were causing trouble outside the Fuji booth , and I was just lurking in the background…
I shot and edited a load of reports from the show…
Our hotel was next to a refugee detention center which made me feel a bit weird…
Dan Chung has officially the most ridiculous unread mail count I’ve ever seen…
Then I was back in the UK, where I hooked up with my new friend Richard Slade from Neotists to watch him talk at Pecha Kucha St Neots…
Again we didn’t lose anyone who made it to my radar
October
This months piece I DP’d/Shot/Edited for Influx was on Bowler Motorsport in Derbyshire who make custom rally cars based on Land Rovers…
I was self medicating because I had a horrible cold…
I did get a new toy from the lovely people at CAME TV and ran around using it for all kinds of fun filming…
After months and 1 expensive unsuccessful application my wife finally got her UK visa and arrived, to celebrate we went to visit my dear old friends in the awesome Mujuworld in Cornwall and I made a little travelogue about it…
After 10 years of not being allowed in swimming pools due to fucking stupid Japanese rules about people with tattoos I was determined to get fit and was (still am!!) swimming 1km a week…
It was a struggle not to fire bomb the house where Margaret Thatcher grew up on a visit to Grantham…
10 years in Japan and not one cos-play incident, 4 months in the UK and I was reduced to this…
And at last I found the answer…
We lost Pete Burns and Joan Marie Johnson.
November
I was super happy to have 4 of my films in the St Neots film festival…
I was on a plane again, this time to Barcelona, I’d signed an NDA so I couldn’t talk about why though…Luckily Dan Chung and I accidentally shot a video about it on a ridiculous Sony RX100 V set up…
Dan and Phillip really needed to get a room while we there…
I was starting to feel like I’d lost a little weight since I got back…
Luckily I found a supplier of the only thing I miss from Japan (my dear friends aside) to add some nutrition…
I didn’t buy anything at the farm shop however…
The supermoon was pretty impressive when it managed to make itself known thru the cloud cover…
Enid was providing me with reading material…
We lost Eddie Harsch, Leonard Cohen, Robert Vaughn and Andrew Sachs…
December
Richard “Neotists” Slade and I went on a mission to deepest Suffolk in search of…
A design classic, the Herman Miller Aeron, my home edit suite just seriously leveled up…
I visited a U.S. Air force Nuclear bunker with Richard Slade and Dave “Laica” Fleet, scouting locations for upcoming projects…
Charlie Brooker had some thoughts on the future of VR…
I published my 2016 Showreel (Hint Hint, Hire me!!!)
Music “A shrine for horses” by Laica – laica.bandcamp.com
Then everything ground to a halt as I had a biopsy on my tongue that meant that it was really painful to swallow, eat or talk and sleep was a distant memory for well over a week…
(I’m sure some people thought the me not talking thing was fine)
We did go full Jesus’ birthday preparations, my first tree for many years, which cheered me up a little.
Pretty much worse time of the year to not be able to eat anything but soup tho, luckily single malt is most definitely a liquid…
We lost Greg Lake and Peter Vaughan…
There’s still another 2 weeks of 2016 technically but I doubt any of what that will contain is relevant here, probably a few more childhood hero’s deaths if the rest of the year has been anything to go by, so I’m gonna wrap things up here…
If you made it this far with my 2016 review, Thanks, but seriously you should get out more.
If you read my blog at all, BIG Thanks!
Thanks once again to all my friends new and now far away without whom I wouldn’t have made it to the end of this year intact. Big Love to you all.
Go! have a great end to the year and heres to a great 2017!!
Uchujin 2016 Review – Part 1
Well…We’re here again, the end of another rotation around the sun.
This is a year I will never forget as it was the year I finally escaped Japan – after 10 years and 1 day exactly.
5 months in to my rehab/recovery and I can honestly say ….. well I could write a book on how I feel about the whole thing, but I won’t for everyone’s sake….Let’s just say, so far, it feels 99% like the right decision.
As I settle into my new life the only things I miss from that god forsaken set of islands off the coast of China are my dear friends (that was always going to be the hardest part) and natto, and I’ve found a natto supplier close by…
I’m splitting this years end of year look back into 2 pre and post Jexit (see what I did there? Topical :) posts to make them less ridiculous to read and because that’s how the year has felt.
A big thank you to the friends (new and far away) and colleagues who made it as always an interesting, productive year.
Thanks also to the clients who hired me and gave me the opportunities to work on some interesting and diverse projects and a pre-emptive thanks to all the new clients who are going to hire me in 2017 to do amazing work for them…
So settle in for part 1 of the run through of the bastard that was 2016……
January
Whilst I was hiding my scary tattooed body away from the poor easily frightened Japanese people in a private hot spring bath 2016 started the way we were soon to understand it meant to go on, with the death of David Bowie closely followed by actor Alan Rickman…
I published my collaboration video with calligrapher Nakajima Hiroyuki promoting his upcoming aptly named “LIFE” exhibition. (All shot on an iPhone 5s by the way…)
I visited my dear friend Sean Lotman and his family in Kyoto (probably for the last time) , managing to be there for the 1st birthday of his son.
Mt Fuji was peaking between the buildings in Shibuya…
My wife looked awesome in her kimono on a visit to Kawasaki Daishi…
We published the first episode of an ill fated collaboration podcast “You’re not from ’round here” with Matthew Downs a rice farmer on Sado Island.
And most days my head felt a bit like this….
Feburary
In what was to turn out to be the beginning of a great friendship I interviewed legendary calligrapher Koji Kakinuma for the documentary I’ve been DPing and producing in 2016, “Traces of the soul” about calligraphers worldwide…
The awesome talents that are Eiichi & Atsuko “Scart” Miyamoto finally (seriously Eiichi….finally!!) opened their gallery in Tsukiji and I was lucky enough to get riotously drunk with them at the opening party…
I interviewed super lovely guy and talented calligrapher Hiroyuki Nakajima for the second time, again for “Traces of the soul”…
After a shoot for his “Strangers” fashion label (All the product and look shots over on the site where shot by me) I grabbed a quick portrait of my dear friend Kevin Mullin and his writer/editor soon to be wife AnneMarie Luck…
I went to CP+ 2016 with Matt Allard from Newshooter and even ended up with my first cameo of the year in the video:)…
We published the 2nd and what turned out to be final episode of the “You’re not from ’round here” podcast this time with the awesome Anthony Davis…
Spotted a great paste-up in Shibuya alongside a new 281_Anti nuke sticker…
And I was enjoying taking pictures of the fucked up-ness of Tokyo again thanks to the low-light capabilities of my recently purchased Sony A7SII and having my hand firmly on the exit door…
We lost Dave Mirra, Vanity & Harper Lee among others….
March
I was hanging out with my new girlfriend…
And taking photos of Matt Allard for News shooter while he tested the Tokina 100mm PL mount Macro on his serial number 2 (!) Sony F35…
Matt Allard and I also went to NAC in Tokyo to test out some $1300 Arri Sky Panels and while we were there we tested my $70 Pergear light with some interesting results…
Underworld played a secret gig in Shibuya and I was at the soundcheck and got to meet Karl & Rick…
I was shooting for a personal project using the Varavon Birdy cam…
I also used the Varavon on another shoot with Nakajima Hiroyuki, and shot some great timelapses involving him too…
Grandma and I fully agreed on the whole situation…
We lost George Martin, Keith Emerson, Paul Daniels & Ronnie Corbett…
April
Sometimes it snows in April, and this year it most definitely did prompting me to write my 1st (and probably last) blog post on a celebrity death…
I half killed myself trying to keep up with Koji Kakinuma on another shoot for “Traces Of The Soul”
I did the motion graphics for the new News Shooter ident which plays at the beginning of every video…
I spent several hours a day with my head in After Effects working on my short film…
I held a $20,000 paint brush at a secret shoot…
My good friend the talented and lovely Laura Liverani was in town and she had an exhibition of her Ainu photographs at a sneak peak of the Ainu documentary she is working on…
I had given up not trying to frighten people when I went out…
The toilet at Scart Gallery had a polite request…
As well as the Purple one we lost Amber Rayne & Victoria Wood…
May
Once again I was shooting with Koji Kakinuma, this time him producing some amazing very large scale calligraphy pieces on a 3-day multi-cam shoot at his new studio outside Tokyo.
There was some interesting wallpaper in the toilet of a restaurant I was in…
I took possibly my favorite instagram photyo of the year at the Ryan McGinley exhibition which was otherwise a little underwhelming…
Some photos from my “Let the poets cry themselves to sleep” series were published on BBC Future…
I was filming with Icelandic DJ/Producer Arni Krisjanson for his crowd funding campaign…
There were some interesting parties…
Most days I wanted to scream this at the top of my lungs…
There was brief respite from losing people…(obviously thats not true, but there was a brief respite in losing people who had touched me in some way)
June
I went to Bali for “Brightening horizons by paying it forward” and directed/shot & Edited a video promoting the Banyumala Jungle Waterfall Trek in Wanigiri village.
It was awesome…
It was a scary place to be a vegetarian tho…
I released my parting shot to Japan short film “Not With A Bang” the result of literally months of work (read a little more about the process here)…
Hiroyuki Nakajima’s “LIFE” exhibition was on at Bunkamura in Shibuya and he was showing the film we collaborated on to promote it (see January above)…
It was (as it always is in June) my Birthday…
And I looked like this a lot, the two of which may or may not be related…
We lost Muhammad Ali, Kimbo Slice, Prince Be & Bill Cunningham
Mostly I was crazy busy with personal stuff because of what was about to happen in…
Part 2
Shooting Ghalamdar & Karl O’Brien – Calligraphitti Ambassadors
