Early in 2011, MLCM was invited by Calne Town Council to help staff create three short films to help dispel the myth that they, and town and parish councils like them, have a “Vicar of Dibley” image.
MLCM helped the three teams develop their films, filming sequences and editing the final footage.
“It was a privilege to be asked to lend our expertise,” said MLCM’s James Harrison.
“It proved without question the power of film and video, especially when people with ideas are paired with those who who have the creative experience to turn them into powerful messages”
The Gazette & Herald reported on the Council’s recent Communities Day, at which the staff’s films were showcased.
In response to the claims made by BBC Home Editor, Mark Easton that parish and town councils have a “Vicar of Dibley” image, Easton told the Gazette he was impressed by the three films:
“I think they are really brilliant. I sat in my office and shoved them into my computer and my producer and I watched them all the way through.
“And we thought they were really well put together, beautifully edited and a fantastic example of what a town which has a powerful sense of its own identity can do.
“Clearly the town council of Calne is a million miles away from anything as awful as the parish council in the Vicar of Dibley.”
The Council’s films will eventually appear on its website.
In the meantime, if you’d like to discuss how MLCM can help your organisation communicate its ideas through film, do drop us a line.
Jonathan Cooper, Park Walk Gallery, 20 Park Walk, London, SW10 0AQ
‘The Inhabited Landscape,’ is a new exhibition of twelve egg tempera landscapes and animal paintings by James Lynch – his first solo exhibition since 2006.
Five years ago, MLCM met up with James Lynch at his Somerset studio to hear about his work, his use of egg tempera, and how the surrounding countryside fires his imagination.
The feature we produced was broadcast by Irish radio (and via the now defunct Farm Radio website), and we’ve have resurrected it here:
In addition, the Park Walk Gallery has included a film by Jess Phillimore showing James at work in his studio, as well as indulging his passion for hang gliding.
See more details about the artist and his exhibition at The Park Walk Gallery website.
Jonathan Cooper Park Walk Gallery is pleased to announce ‘The Inhabited Landscape,’ a new exhibition of twelve egg tempera landscapes and animal paintings by James Lynch, in his first solo exhibition since 2006.
James Lynch is known for his paintings that capture the atmosopheric weather over the English landscape, in the Romantic tradition.
In this new collection, Lynch has depicted the Somerset and Wiltshire countryside from a distinct aerial perspective, inspired by years of soaring the skies with his paraglider.
Many of the paintings are pure dramatic panoramas drenched in light, whilst other aerial views provide the backdrop for his birds and animals, which fill the foreground and bring a playful naivety and narrative to the landscapes.
‘‘I’ve always been interested in the skies and weather, ever since I was a child. Now I often find myself souring with the swallows and birds, which fly alongside me, chasing the insects swept up in the thermals. ”
There are impressive works on a grand scale in which the viewer is up in the air with kites and swallows, painted larger-than-life, looking down with a bird’s eye view on fields of crops and far beyond to a distant skyline.
Other major works include statuesque boxing hares on a hilltop and a monumental cuckoo.
There are also paintings of landscapes and weather not inhabited by animals, but where signs of human habitation are evident in small houses, winding lanes or a small tractor ploughing.
‘It’s not just the huge panoramas I’m interested in, it’s the scale of things – those small signs of human activity in the larger picture – telegraph poles, houses, churches, the furrows and marks of the farmer.”
In the renaissance tradition, James Lynch cooks up his white gesso and makes his own egg tempera paint, combining raw pigment with egg yolks from chickens he keeps near his garden studio.
‘I love the way the paint surface reflects light through its egg shell sheen.
There’s also something satisfying about working with these ancient raw ingredients.”
The translucency of the egg tempera allows the bright gesso ground to reflect ambient light through the pigments, and gives the paintings an other- worldly luminosity.
They glow with the vagaries of the English weather and the light that drifts across the chalk downs, granite hills and soft green meadows.
This interest in the elements and the landscape sets James Lynch firmly in the English Romantic tradition and links him with artists such as Samuel Palmer, Ravilious and Minton.
Press Information: For more information please contact Alice Phillimore at alicephillimore@jonathancooper.co.uk or on 020 7351 0410.
The website Distryfy is promising a new way to look at online video and film with viewers actually paying for what they see. We at MLCM think this is a great way forward to help distinguish between the worthy amateur filmmaker and the well-conceived, professionally crafted production – a film or video that has real value in its message. Read more »
MLCM has been commissioned by Pasture Promise TV to produce a series of short, inspiring films centred on the way we use our grasslands to produce better quality, healthier meat and dairy produce.
The brainchild of Graham Harvey, script writer for The Archers, Pasture Promise TV is a European funded project which aims to investigate the benefits of returning to a more natural way of farming – a way which harkens back to more traditional values and places the emphasis back on the biological nature of agriculture.
MLCM has been asked to not only produce three of six main features for Pasture Promise TV but is also involved in making numerous news features which will reflect the opinions of those producers already involved in a pasture-led approach to farming.
The films will appear alongside those being produced by other filmmakers based in the West Country and already MLCM has spent two days filming in Lincolnshire with beef farmers Dave Stanley and John Turner who form part of the growing band of producers who believe pasture fed cattle are better for us today and into the future.
We like this kind of thing – movie-making shouldn’t cost the ridiculous amounts it often does.
MLCM always aims to work smart, and although we produce our films to broadcast standards – both technically and in terms of journalism and story-telling – we still like the idea of finding a smarter way to create special effects a fraction of the price.
All we would add is that filmmaking is never as easy as it looks – you might have all the gadgets and gizmos in the world, but they count for nothing unless you have the creative ability and experience to turn ideas into stories.
Today saw real progress in the development of our workspace to help MLCM deliver even better digital media production.
We have always been very proud to be centred in Devizes and with digital communications so reliable, we’ve never seen the need to be city-based.
We have bus stops and taxi ranks outside our building, a free car park opposite and a pay-per-hour car park behind us!
The town boasts at least 9 coffee houses, a host of independent shops – the envy of many neighbouring towns – and wide open spaces nearby to inspire the most needy of creative people.
We certainly don’t waste your money on leather sofas, edit suite fridges stocked with Stella Artois or staff trying to find something to do.
Your money is spent on production. Nothing more, nothing less.
This from The Week magazine makes for interesting reading if you are either fazed by PowerPoint or bored by those who depend on it too readily.
MLCM can help people design their PowerPoint presentations based on the rules of filmmaking, where narrative and imagery are key components.
Contact us if you’re interested in learning more.
Lucy Kellaway | Financial Times
Switzerland’s newest political movement, the Anti Powerpoint Party (APPP), wants to free the world from the ubiquitous presentation software – and not before time, says Lucy Kellaway.
The main trouble with Powerpoint isn’t that it’s so boring, or even that it encourages dull people to make presentations when they would otherwise keep schtum.
No, it is that Powerpoint manages (miraculously) to make things “simultaneously too simple and too complicated.
It reduces subtle ideas” to bullet points, and encourages users to “pad out a presentation with irrelevant data because cutting and pasting is far too easy”.
The resulting presentations are “the least enjoyable way of wasting time there is”, and the flawed decision-making they encourage wreaks untold damage.
What is to be done? In the absence of an outright ban, terrorist tactics might help: an armed wing of the party dedicated to cutting the wires between laptop and projector.
Let the fight start here! Anti-PowerPoint workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but the “bonecrushing tedium” of yet another incomprehensible slideshow.
We were forwarded this press release recently and reproduce it here in its entirety. It outlines some significant changes to the rules regarding the public performance of music by charity groups Read more »
As well as being proud of our own efforts, here at MLCM we like to celebrate other people’s hard work.
This video includes some great motion controlled time lapse photography, filmed by cinematographer Grant Wakefield in Lasse Hoile’s music video for the band Porcupine Tree.
The use of fast cut, time lapse coupled with the inescapable fact that time does indeed wait for no man (or woman) adds up to a powerful statement – a great example of music+image=meaning.
MLCM realises that stories are at the heart of what we do.
People have always been storytellers – it’s something that separates us from all other beings perhaps.
But things became screwed when man added special effects to his stories by discovering the latest story-telling phenomenon: Pictures In The Fire™(PITF).
Then, as now, those first story critics suggested the thing was all very clever but “it would never catch on”.
Those first flickering flames were later replaced by celluloid and projector lamps, but at least cinema avoided losing the plot and stuck to the principle of just telling a story.
But as technology moves on we appear to be steadily turning out backs on good story-telling in preference for CGI, special FX, clever soundscapes and motion control.
But, as MLCM predicted when it emerged onto our screens for a second time, the 3D film phenomenon appears to be waning, just as it did in the 1950s (a fact nobody seems to acknowledge).
Why, if it didn’t catch on then would it work today?
Audiences want stories. Special Effects have their place but only in moderation or when it helps to tell the story.
According to The Week magazine (15th July 2011), it seems audiences do indeed know best; hopefully the industry will stop playing with fire and get back to what MLCM had been saying for years:
Stories are King.
From The Week, 15 July 2011:
The 3D revolution is already coming to an end, said Nick Alien in The Daily Telegraph.
When “Avatar” was released in 2009, almost 80% of movie-goers chose to watch it in three dimensions; in 2011, only 38% of audiences watching “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” have bought tickets for 3D cinemas.
So what has ended the 3D honeymoon?
Analysts blame ticket prices, which are almost 50% higher for 3D movies.
But there are also medical reasons: the American Association of Optometrists found that a quarter of people watching 3D films reported “eye strain, dizziness or headaches”.
Salvation may be just around the corner – in the form of 4D, said John Harlow in The Sunday Times.
A South Korean company, CJ 4DPIex, has built cinemas where “the seats rock and viewers are assailed by wind and fog, strobe lights and scents to accompany 3D images on screen”.
The company now plans to build America’s first 4D cinema in New York.
Dewey Hammond, who watched a 4D version of Kung Fu Panda 2 in Korea, was full of praise for the new technology.
“If there is a low angle looking up at a character, your seat tilts backwards at the same time. When arrows start flying, expect bursts of air shooting past your ear.”
But it’s not all good news.
Patrons who saw a 4D version of Transformers: Dark of the Moon reported suffering from “nausea and temporary deafness”.
