Fleischer Studios, 1930.

Yesterday RedBull Belgium premiered The Art of Flight in Brussels. The movie has been on a world tour throughout this fall (after having been released earlier in September) and yesterday Travis Rice & co found their way to Brussels. The ‘sold out’ (ticket were up for grabs through RedBull’s site) venue was Studio 4 in Flagey, a great location that was for this event.

The movie/documentary itself follows Travis Rice, John Jackson, Mark Landvik, Scotty Lago, Jake Blauvelt, Nicolas Müller, Gigi Rüf, DCP and Pat Moore as they dream up new global adventures and progress the sport to unimaginable levels. For this, production company Brain Farm gathered an arsenal of the most advanced and progressive filmmaking technology to bring the masses a snowboarding adventure of epic proportions. Filmed on location in Jackson Hole, Alaska, Chile, Aspen, Patagonia, British Columbia, … the movie brings viewers along for the perfect blend of adventure/travel drama and high-energy snowboarding action.

Overall the verdict was that its a great (and I really mean GREAT) snowboard movie if not the most epic of them all. Everything about the movie was super-sized, from the budget (read it was around $2 million) to the riding. A mix of sweeping landscape shots of enormous mountains and huge rides/jumps. Even the run time of an hour and a half is more than twice that of your average snowboard films. The sheer size of everything just blows you away and I reckon anyone will appreciate watching it.

The screening tour continues to Amsterdam, Paris, Stockholm & Moscow throughout the week. If you can attend one of the dates I suggest you do or get your hands on a copy  of the DVD. Besides impressive the footage the movie also has a great soundtrack worth checking out.

Thanks to the guys over at RedBull Belgium for the invites. Can’t wait to hit the slopes this winter myself although I will keep it more real(istic) & amateur

Skinemax is Koyaanisqatsi  for a generation raised on late night television and B-movie VHS tapes. It’s long form entertainment for short attention spans. An hour long VJ odyssey, it will move your body and warp your mind.

A nostalgic look back at a half remembered childhood growing up in the 80s and early 90s, Skinemax takes a close look at the culture of that era. The images that motivated, delighted, and terrified us on the silver screen, set to propulsive modern music that pines for a simpler time.

And what’s even greater, it stars Kurt Russel Lots of scenes shot by that I hadn’t seen in while …

What happens when you set up a four day paint jam somewhere in the English countryside? Supremebeing set it up and captured it all in the clip below which features live painting by artists David Walker, She One, Mr Jago, Will Barras and Bue The Warrior.

Remember hipster avant garde Napoleon Dynamite? Well, seems an animated series is heading to Fox Network as they ordered six episodes of an animated show with the voices of the original cast. Gosh, vote for Pedro!

After “Jedi” was officially acknowledged as a religion a few years ago surely the next step is to make May 4th (International Star Wars Day) a public holiday all over the world… be you Sith or Jedi we could all do with another day off work right?!

Have a great International Star Wars Day.

A while back I was asked by the people from Habbekrats to join them for a screening of Rabat, a Dutch production/movie which will be released in June across the Netherlands & Belgium.

Rabat, which is the first full theatre feature to be directed & produced by the guys from Habbekrats, is the story of 3 young friends on their way down to Marocco. A road movie which follows Nadir on his way down to Rabat where he has to deliver his father’s old Taxi. A trip from Amsterdam, through Europe, on which his two friends Abdel & Zakaria invite themselves to tag along. A trip which put their friendship through several tests as they reach their goal: Rabat.

Thanks to everyone at Habbekrats for the invite. Had been a fan of your work for a while. Something you should also have a look at. Oh, and they just dropped a video for the movies’ title track, De Leven, by Sef.

“Heart over head. Inclusion over ego. United by passion, we go all in. Go all in.”

After having teased us for a while with a battery of short clips, Adidas dropped their latest worldwide campaign and we are digging the whole Gavras x Justice x Adidas collab. Just like their previous ones, Adidas calls in a couple of friends with Lionel Messi, B.o.B, Beckham, Katy p Perry, Ed Banger and Derrick Rose amongst many other.

Great to see mixed reactions amongst several mad men when it comes to the new Adidas campaign. Maybe they have got a different mindset as Adidas definitely slam-dunked this one in my opinion.

Soundtrack is “Civilization” from the new Justice album which should drop in April.

Charlie Sheen got the interwebs buzzin’. Got to love the man! Anyone remember Hot Shots?

The fastest certified twitter account to reach a million followers and he’s destined to make a whole lot of money with it.

I can’t help but wonder how this elaborate marketing stunt came to be and guess its about time someone gave the man his own reality tv show. You’re either in Sheen’s-Korner or you’re with the trolls and right now he’s winning. Definitely check/follow his Ustream casts, they are hilarious.

The project was created by Joris Debeij, a European currently residing in LA, who wants to document the city through portraits of intriguing and unique personalities living there. Each single one on people who found a specific niche for themselves in a city of millions.

Enjoy the selected clips, we know we did.

Salvador Preciado has lived in East LA for most of his life. Growing up, he always was impressed by the tattoos worn by local gang members and he later decided to become a full-time tattoo artist. Sal is now the proud owner of El Clasico Tattoo, a tattoo shop in Echo Park.

Sean Martin has been riding bikes for over ten years. He started out on a BMX and now feels “one” with his fixed-gear bike while riding through the streets of LA.

Imagine this: There are mature fruit trees planted and cared for all over your neighborhood, so you can just pick fresh fruit and enjoy it as you walk down the street, without ever needing to go hungry. The guys of Fallen Fruit started 7 years ago as a one-time project that involved mapping out the locations of public fruit trees.

Buzz of the week goes to Odd Future’s appearance on Fallon with Tyler and Hodgy Beats performing SANDWITCHES.

Odd Future, also known as OFWGKTA (Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All), reign from the City of Angels and are a collective of more or less 10 artists (Hodgy Beats, Earl Sweatshirt, Domo Genesis, Mike G, Frank Ocean, Left Brain, The Super 3, Syd tha Kyd, Jasper Loc, and Taco Bennett) led by one Tyler “The Creator”.

Over the passed months Odd Future has released three mixtapes and over seven solo albums, all available for free on their website.

Basically they’re one group that branches off here and there with side projects (there are two groups inside the collective: MellowHype and EarlWolf) and are generating some serious shock and awe with their lyrics and originality of everything they are doing. Their home-made, skate inspired, horror flick music videos (as witnessed below) are a fair example of this all.

With sold out shows overwhere I am looking forward to seeing them hit local soil soon, preferably this summer.

So the Radical mixtape is just one of their releases. You can grab it here and overhere or give Tyler The Creator’s Bastard tape a listen.

We mentioned this already a couple of times , but pleased to read that “Skateistan: To Live and Skate Kabul” made the Sundance Film Festival among this year’s short film program which features a great 9-minute documentary on the park, including brief interviews with the manager and young people who skate there.

For those of you that never heard about this before, Skateistan is an unregular skate park in Kabul, Afghanistan. The project was started by two Australian aid workers who began giving skating as well as educational lessons to more than 350 kids in Kabul.

Thursday we found ourselves heading to the Belgian Tron Legacy première in Ghent. The people behind it all were so kind to send us an invite and before we knew it we found ourselves walking up a red laser-beam carpet amongst good company.

Curious to see what all the fuzz was/is about, we took our seats, put on our 3D glasses (the movie is partially 3D, partially 2D), sat back in our seats and waited to get blown away by the sequel to the 1982 film Tron.

First off, you don’t go to see Tron Legacy for the dialogue or story in my opinion, you go for the graphics/visual thunderstorm they blast at you & the already legendary Daft Punk soundtrack.  I also have to add that you must go see the movie in a theatre as I doubt you can have the same experience on a home screen.

That’s what makes it a good movie and I expect that the film savvy people of the interwebs will share their professional opinions the next days/weeks, making my opinion utterly irrelevant

PES is back with a new short video called “The Deep.” PES has been an OOTB favorite for a while now and a must see. Enjoy.

Met some great people, had some great experiences, (re)discovered artists, heard some great mixtapes, saw wonderfull street art, got some (product) reviews up and overall featured some great content (although it was not always that great ).

Concertwise we had a good year, with highlights being a studio session by MGMT, the Prodigy concert in Lille, a showcase by Janelle Monae, Chromeo in BXL and the Gorillaz concert in Antwerp.

We also crossed the border several times. Ended up visiting London for Young Scum and ended up there two weekends in a row due to circumstances, went to Paris for the Offf Festival, where we got to stay in the great Hidden Hotel. After that we topped this all off with held a midsummer roadtrip to Croatia & Slovenia before finishing the summer with a quick visit to Amsterdam.

Started reading again in between this all and did some home brewing before finishing everything of with some family time in MT.

As you can see, we ended up sharing all these experiences and still this ended up being the blogpost which read the most throughout the entire year.

All we can say, 2010 has been a blast and who would have thought we would be able to have done it all from one of the greatest cities in the world! Have a great time going from old to new and we’ll see each other once again in 2011! Out with the old one says!

“If life is a catwalk, run like a dog.”

Pahnl is a UK street artist who has been stenciling since 2003 and actively putting work up on the street since 2006. ‘Nowhere Near Here’ is one of his stop motion animations in which he uses a combination of light with stencils & long exposure photography to tell us the story of a dog running around the city at night, doing whatever a dog does.

According to Pahnl “It has over 300 hours in the making, more than 200 stencils involved and too many cold nights spent outside on my knees getting the shots, I am very happy (and relieved) to finally share this with you. Through the course of shooting ‘Nowhere Near Here’, I have dealt with curious drunks, a dog almost peeing on the camera (the irony is not lost on me, haha), the endlessly suspicious police and even someone nearly running off with a tripod.”

Prints and stills from the film are available on Pahnl’s website.

I’ve written about this in the past. Its an old fascination of mine: WWII and other animated propaganda from the 1940s onwards. Bored with the regular assignments at University and willing to do discover something unknown or at least have a good time while spending hours behind your typewriter doing research I even wrote a paper on the matter.

The following are a couple of those WWII and cold war propaganda films released by well-known studios. Household names which often are associated with fluffy clouds and gumdrop smiles. Kids stuff and nothing what you’d expect.  The “hidden messages” in them, the way the music plays an essential part, … is really interesting to analyse. I have spent hours looking at such animations and its surprising to see some well-known characters do their part for Uncle Sam.

Besides that its a discovery (for many), reading up on the matter, when you realise the big studios where able to survive the war by taking on these assignments.

Japoteurs, by Technicolor short films based upon the DC Comics character of Superman.

Hitler’s Children Education For Death, a Walt Disney production.

Even the Russians loved their cartoons.

Want to see more of this stuff, just run a search in YouTube on banned cartoons or cartoon propaganda and discover the dark side of animation throughout the 1940s to 60s.

Got any favorites of your own, please share

Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs”, directed by Spike Jonze. Taken from the short film “Scenes From The Suburbs”.

Detroit,  once the fourth-largest metropolis in America, is often called the Death of the American Dream nowadays. Today, the young people of the Motor City are making it their own DIY paradise where rules are second to passion and creativity. They are creating the new Detroit on their own terms, against real adversity. Palladium & Johnny Knoxville put on their boots and took us for a ride through MotorCity

The film takes Knoxville to visit a new generation of hopeful young creatives attempting to overcome the sense of despair left by the ailing American motor industry and turn around a reputation of a hopeless city. Contrary to expectation, it’s become a DIY paradise packed with artists, entrepreneurs and do’ers, a burgeoning class of young people seeing opportunities that others have overlooked.

A short film about custom motorcycle engineer Shinya Kimura over at Chabott Engineering. Clip was directed by Henrik Hansen who is competing for the best documentary award over at the Vimeo Festival.

Trailer for the essayistic documentary “Urban Movements“, a film by David Köhlmeier.

Also saw this great rooftop time lapse of a shooting with the breakdance world champions, the Prodigyy Crew, he did for the essayistic hip hop documentary: “Your life is music, I’m doing the images to it.”.

Off to Amsterdam for the weekend and somehow every time I have to think of the following legendary scene from Pulp Fiction!

Been a while since I did a quick city trip and no stress, I’ll be a good little boy, scout honour

Btw, why not try this scene in Italian! Peace out.

Remember how in April we spoke about Philips’ latest pet project called Parallel Lines? Well know the second part of that project came to an ending.

Part one was the part in which Philips asked several directors from the Ridley Scott Association to direct their own short using the same script, written by creatives at DDB London, which was extremely minimal. It featured just six lines of dialogue and some significant imagery, most prominently the presence of a unicorn. Have a look at what they made as there are some great gems amongst them.

Part two was the one in which they invited viewers to get behind the camera and make a response to their project and the already released shorts. All they got were the same couple of lines of script and the necessary elements they had to incorporate such as the ‘unicorn’ we already spoke of.

Now Sir Ridley Scott has picked a winner of the competition, and it is the clip below by Keegan Wilcox that has come out on top.  His film Porcelain Unicorn shows an old man reflecting on his experiences as a young boy in Nazi Germany.

Cédric Petitcollin’s Baby Time, shown above, took home the People’s Voice Award. This short tells the story of a hapless actor clad in a unicorn costume trying desperately to reach his wife in hospital before she has their baby. Out.

Couple of weeks back I Exited through the Gift Shop as I watched Banksy’s critically acclaimed documentary/mockumentary which was released over a year ago. I had been meaning to watch my copy for a while, but had never found the time.

The documentary is centred round Banksy, his fellow street artists and one Thierry Guetta, who is an LA-based Frenchman with a sick passion for making home videos. Its through this passion (and his cousin Invader) that Guetta found himself following known artists around, while they were doing their artwork, shooting tons of video in the hope of making a documentary.

Somehow Thierry also was able to covince Banksy to let him tag along. Too sly to participate in a traditional, aggrandizing documentary about himself though, Banksy instead somehow turns the camera on the camera crazy Frenchman while encouraging him to try his luck himself. Its at that point that Thierry quickly adopts the name “Mr. Brainwash”, plastering surfaces with uninspired, copcat work that looks a lot like Warhol, Obey and Banksy. He somehow also convinces Shepard Fairey and Banksy to be his advocates, spreading the word about a huge coming-out exhibit for which he hires a team of expert craftsmen to realize hundreds of unoriginal concepts.

The main question that remains, did Banksy pull another fast one on us? I read somewhere that Banksy declared that he hoped that it would do for street art what The Karate Kid did for martial arts, but I can’t help but wonder if this is all a hoax? Will he at one point in time tell the world how he “pranked” us all. A discussion I am willing to discuss, but will mainly leave to the “professionals”. Out.

This film explores playful uses for the increasingly ubiquitous ‘glowing rectangles’ that inhabit the world. It explores the possibilities of using an iPad to create three-dimensional images out of light, using long-exposure photography and stop-motion animation. Or, in other words, how light painting found its way into an iPad era.

We use photographic and animation techniques that were developed to draw moving 3-dimensional typography and objects with an iPad. In dark environments, we play movies on the surface of the iPad that extrude 3-d light forms as they move through the exposure. Multiple exposures with slightly different movies make up the stop-frame animation.

You can read all about it overhere, on the Dentsu blog.

I’ve always had massive respect for people like Ken Block, someone who started up his own company and took it global while having a lot of fun. Tony Hawk also fits in the list, amongst many others. They’re those entrepreneurs that inspire, a businessman first and an action sportsman second. Mental cases, not afraid to switch the board room for an E.R. every once in a while. You get my grasp.

One of the essential aspects that brought Ken to his current level is the fact he loves to show off his mad driving skills. Its these skills he has lately been showing off while driving a good old Ford Fiesta We mentioned the first clip to promote his new ride already a while back, but thought we ought to make a little round-up as the second one was released earlier this week.

Part 1, which was fittingly called The Music Video Infomercial, features OOTB favorites The Cool Kids performing an original track “Clicking”.

Part 2 was  shot in France, at l’Autodrome de Linas, which is a 1.58 mile oval race track. Built way back in 1924 it has banks at a 51 degree angle, more than double the standard incline of your average NASCAR racing tracks.

Bare in mind that the previous gymkhana videos have been viewed by more than 70 million viewers worldwide. That’s massive and an advertisers wet dream. Out.

Another couple of great mini docs. Now go out into the sun and don’t forget to wear some sunscreen.

Copyright law and what to do with it. A hard nutshell to crack. A discussion that has been going on for decades and one I do not really want to share my opinion on as different parties state different facts which make it hard to draw a line in it all.

I remember how when I was a kid tape and VHS cassettes used to be pirated on a large scale and were sold on local markets. I saw Napster and other services come up later on in life and I saw some of these services disappear as quick while others became larger than life. Evolution and revolution at the same time one might say and interesting times none the less.

Piracy, whether music/video or designer handbags, is something that will always be around in my opinion. What everyone must realise though is that creative people deserve to make a living. A liner note which our younger generations can hardly grasp as they never really grew up to value music for instance.They love music, they talk about & share it with their friends and they especially also download it. Logical in my opinion as they’re growing up in a digital environment with unlimited access to something with no value due to that reason.

Kids nowadays do not grow up in record stores. Flicking through hundreds and hundreds of records, looking for that one album cover to draw their attention, ordering limited edition releases from Japan, … They just can’t value the carrier which a CD or vinyl is for some older generations.

Now I do not want to blame everything on the kids, as older generations also download huge volumes. But I do want to explain  that current tactics fighting piracy do not work in my opinion. One must educate people and learn kids how to appreciate creativity. And that’s the hard part as one does not have the impression that they are hurting someone with a harmless download.

As stated, a long discussion and one with mixed opinions …

Now I stumbled upon the following clip. Its a clip in which director Simon Klose explains why he needs your support to finish the documentary called TPB AFK. This stand for The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard. Its a documentary on the notorious filesharing website The Pirate Bay, a long-standing enemy of the movie & music industry. In this documentary Simon follows the three founders of the site, and their reactions to being found guilty of being accessory to crime against copyright law and fined over 3.6 million dollars.

There’s already over 200 hours of footage saved up and there are plans to record more during the founders’ appeal against their previous verdict, which is set for less than a month from now, on 28 September, 2010. In three days, the director already raised over $30,000 on to pay for a professional editor and use of an editing suite in putting together the full length feature.

The court case, the political parties that have been started across several continents, the threats which get hilarious answers, … all interesting and something which many have been following up close for a long time now. All I can say: crazy Swedes. Hope they’ve got a stay out of jail for free card .

Danny Trejo ain’t your average actor as you might know. The man we all know from a huge list of movies (From dusk till dawn, Point blank, xXx, Grindhouse, Delta Farce, …) has had a turbulent life before finding shelter amongst Hollywood’s finest.

A kid from the street, Trejo was a drug addict and criminal, finding his way in and out of jail for 11 years. It was there, while serving time in San Quentin, that he won lightweight and welterweight boxing titles while he was imprisoned for armed robbery and drug offenses. At that point he successfully completed a 12-step rehabilitation program that changed his life. After having served his time, by coincidence he found his way into the film industry. A friend of his & fellow inmate asked him to use his boxing skills and train Eric Roberts for a fight in a movie scene. The rest is history as other projects followed.

With Machete (you know this exciting release we mentioned a while back) coming out soon SA Studios was commissioned by 20th Century Fox to produce several videos starring Danny Trejo in order to promote the film “Machete” .  The first lifestyle video features Mister Cartoon and Danny Trejo lowriding through East LA.  Its the beginning of what I assume will become a great series with one of my favorite actors. And we’re out.