Tag Archive for Uchujin

Ed Boxall – Dance Beneath A Diamond Sky (Music Video)

Ed Boxall an artist/musician and dear old friend, recently asked if I’d be interested in making a video for a track on his upcoming “Wild Ones” album release.
Back in the (distant) day, Ed and I had a band called “Sunshine Head” and I have always loved his songwriting and art work, so it was a swift and simple ‘yes’.
The track he chose was titled “Dance Beneath A Diamond Sky”, the Bob Dylan reference immediately endeared me to it.

Ed was happy for me to have free rein to do whatever I wanted and after listening to the track a few times an idea presented itself.

I took some existing footage I had shot on a beautiful old Russian Helios 40 85mm lens in a nearby wood and a whole stack of illustrations Ed had sent me.

I had been planning on experimenting more with AI image generators after my initial experiments a year ago as much had evolved in the space. This seemed like the perfect project on which to play.

I fed both the footage and the drawings into the Deforum extension for Stable Diffusion, using prompts generated from Clip Interrogator. This produced some interesting shifting animations of the static footage and dreamlike hallucinations of Ed’s original drawings. I also generated some additional elements to layer into the video using variations on the song’s title as prompts.
Everything was blended together in After Effects and a grade applied to complete the look.

I wanted to make something that didn’t look like it had been generated by AI, something that was using it more as a tool to play with my original footage and Ed’s original drawings. Not only was it more satisfying to use these tools to create based on work done by our own hands but (for me at least) it dismissed a lot of the ethical hand wringing that rightfully accompanies a lot of things being produced by it.

We hope you like it.

Listen to the full album “Wild Ones”

See and order the “Wild Ones” book and Ed’s other work on his website www.edboxall.co.uk

Peripheral Neuropathy – A Short Film

Allow me to present my latest short film “Peripheral Neuropathy”

I started thinking about this idea about 8 months ago and even filmed a few bits to check and see if it was going to work.
I had drawn up a storyboard and planned out 80% of it but had hit a brick wall with how to end it.
It got shelved but kept bubbling away in the back of my mind every time I looked at the crudely hand drawn storyboard taped to my speaker stand.

Then text to image AI models exploded into my world, adding an entirely new tool to the toolbox.
Quite simple film making and some finessed After Effects skills had gotten me most of the way, could I leverage this new tool to finally get this finished?

I’d already been using Stable Diffusion on another short Directed by Martin Cooper to generate backgrounds for some green screen footage we had shot and was increasingly excited about the possible uses in other work.

There ended up being very little actual Stable Diffusion stuff in this film, but what has ended up in there made it possible to finish the film, something I was beginning to worry might not happen. It had helped in other ways by inspiring experimentation and ultimately provided a much needed creative spark, so deserves more credit than the amount of it’s inclusion would suggest.

I used the Deforum animation plugin in the Automatic web UI of Stable diffusion to create a low poly moving “field” to mirror the actual field seen in the piece.
I also used Stable diffusion to generate an image of an aged me from a video frame, I attempted to use EbSynth to map the image back onto the video but was not really getting anything I was happy with. I ended up using FILM to map the image onto the footage, which gave a much more satisfying result.

I knew it needed more than the natural sounds present to bring it all together and asked my long time friend and musical talent Danny Griffin to see what he could do, the only real brief being I didn’t want it to end up being like a music video. I think he absolutely nailed the soundtrack, adding so much more to the piece.

You can draw your own conclusions on what it’s about or why it has the title it does.

I’m very pleased with how it’s turned out. I hope you like it.

*Note to self: Figure out the whole story before starting something in future otherwise it just gnaws away at you :)*

Video Production Services – Christian “Documentally” Payne and Adrian “Uchujin” Storey

Starting the new year as I mean to go on I’ve been working on a few new things with more exciting stuff coming in the next couple of months.
One of those is a collaboration with Christian “Documentally” Payne – Creative Director, Technologist & Documentarian.
(And it should be noted a very interesting, funny and nice man, you should subscribe to his newsletter – the poor dear only has 25K (!!) followers on Twitter so go follow him there too:)

Here is the video we are using to pitch for work, feel free to share it EVERYWHERE!

If there’s anything we can help you with don’t hesitate to contact us!

Need a video?
Christian “Documentally” Payne & Adrian “Uchujin” Storey have teamed up!
Should you need any top-spec high quality videography let us know.
Documentally.com and uchujin.co.uk
on twitter:
twitter.com/documentally
twitter.com/uchujinphoto

Uchujin on tour – Newsshooter.com at Photokina in Cologne and more

wide angle Uchujin @ Photokina

The past few weeks has been a blur of (good) busyness what with a trip to IBC in Amsterdam at a days notice with the newsshooter.com team, a D.P. and editing job for my mates Postfuel on drift car nutter Buttsy Butler, a motion graphics job and then this past week to Photokina in Cologne again with Dan and the newsshooter.com team.

Trade show coverage is a strange manic beast with many gruesome heads that sees you shooting, editing and uploading several spots a day all while running around an enormous conference center whose floors are made from the hardest substance known to mankind (or at least that’s what my poor feet tell me after a week of walking 15km a day carrying a load of gear!).
Luckily the news shooter team consists of some truly lovely and hugely talented people so the manic intensity is offset with a lot of laughs and learning.
Big shout out to Dan Chung, Matt Allard, Lilian Ahlskog, Simon Glass, Joe Marine, Scott Karlins, Daniel Lindner, Tom Barnes, Katie Teesdale-Ward and Dave Newton for making the past few weeks so great.

Can’t forget a thanks to the cinema5d boys for being so damn friendly too :)

Anyway, below are the videos I shot and edited for news shooter at Photokina. Oh and by the way those nice News shooter idents at the beginning of every video….I made those too :)

Oh and for the record they were all shot on my trusty 4 year old Canon C100 MkI with Sigma and Tokina lenses. Despite all the hype of 4K and gear lust a camera that still looks great and works reliably every. damn. time. :)

Oh and there’s a load of photos from IBC and Photokina over on my Instagram account too.

 

Here are some additional videos that I shot but didn’t edit from Photokina:-

Ogose

I felt so safe in a warming bath of sunlight

Had a lovely hungover day out in Ogose in Saitama with Falsalama and his lovely girlfriend recently.
A beautiful wood with several waterfalls.
Just what the doctor ordered, fresh deep lungfuls of air and nature weaving her calming spell on me.
Of course, I managed to find a little darkness in all that beauty, as is the uchujin way.

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The inevitable darkness I managed to find was the poster below, tacked onto a public toilet.It says that on the 2nd of June a 27 year old man from Yamagata prefecture disappeared in the woods. What with the suicide rate in Japan being what it is I hope he’s ok.
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And finally, we have this scary looking guy, 鬼蜘蛛　’Onigumo’ in Japanese, which means devil spider (!), Araneus ventricosus, a species of orb weaving spider. Near where we had parked the car at the bottom of the wood there were many of them. Apparently not dangerous, but I don’t trust an insect or arachnid with that colouring!

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I highly recommend Ogose if you find yourself out that way in ‘Dasaitama’ ;-)

Yamanaka Lake

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A set at Yamanaka lake from our trip on Saturday.

 

Something oddly melancholy about swan shaped boats in the late autumn sunset.

The Flower Of The Dead

死人花 - The Flower of the dead - ©Uchujin-Adrian Storey. All Rights reserved.
死人花 – The Flower of the dead

I know its really autumn now.

Not just because I’m starting to feel the looming of S.A.D.,the change in the temperature requiring no fan to sleep or the noticably shorter days.

No, it is the Lycoris radiata, Red Spider Lily, Cluster Amaryllis – ‘The Flower Of The Dead’, that can been seen flowering at this time of year that signals that the Autumn equinox is only days away and that we have almost completed yet another yearly cycle of seasons.

This beautiful flower originally came from China but only the female variety made it to Japan so missing its male half the plant cannot reproduce via pollen transfer as most other flowers do.

Highly posionous, the bulbs contain toxic alkaloids that if ingested cause paralysis of the central nervous system and ultimately death. For this reason they were often, in pre cremation times, planted in graveyards to prevent wild animals eating the corpses.

The stalks however contain some edible proteins and so it was often planted on the narrow paths between the rice paddies to be used as emergency food if the rice harvests were poor.

The flower has many names here in Japan, some say as many as 900:-

“Manjushage”　曼珠沙華　is taken from a line in the Buddhist Lotus sutra, refering to a red flower

“higan-bana” 彼岸花、flower of the autumn equinox

“shibito-bana” 死人花, the flower of the dead

“jigoku-bana” 地獄花、flower of hell

To name but 4.

In Japanese mythology it is the flower that grows along the banks of the river that one must cross after death or the flower that grows in hell.
There are many haiku written about this flower where it is often assosiated with lonliness and death.

Above all though it is really beautiful, I remember the first time I saw one a few years ago as I was walking to work one bright autumn day, it made me stop in my tracks.
I have always taken photos of them whenever I have seen them since that first time, this year I even saw a white one for the first time. Which I believe is called a Lycoris albiflora, a natural hybrid.

Lycoris albiflora ©Uchujin-Adrian Storey. All Rights reserved.
Lycoris albiflora

They always leave me feeling slightly melancholy but awed by the fact that even someone as cynical as me can still be rendered speechless and motionless by a simple flower.

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Yasukuni-Update

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Yuko Katsuta and Uchujin, The bridge overlooking Yasukuni dori, august 15th 2009 If you’ve read my previous post on Yasukuni August 15th then hopefully you’ll remember the wonderful old woman I mentioned meeting on the bridge overlooking the entrance to the shrine. Well today I arrived home to find a letter from her. A point…

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