I was shooting last week in the scrum of the ‘orange’ carpet at the Meteor Music Awards, for the legends that are The Stylebitches, when one Dizzee put Laura in a tizzee, she lost all control! See the video below, or you’re having problems doing that, or using and iPhone, click here to watch it on youtube.

Some tech specs too, the video was shot on the Canon 7D SLR with the EF-S 17-55mm, f2.8 lens. Audio was recorded through a Zoom H4 recorder with a Rode NTG1 microphone and synced later because of the horrible sounding Auto Gain Control on the 7D. So there.

Oh short animation Ark, how you broke my heart. Here’s a film I designed and created the sound for, as well as composing the music.

As part of a Europe wide, film student sound design competition, we were provided with the acclaimed short Ark, with no sound whatsoever, and charged with designing a soundtrack for it. So just mute the sound on your PC for a moment while your watching this and you’ll know what we faced at the beginning!

As with all animation, it’s completely silent to start with as there is no live action taking place for a microphone to record, so all the basic sounds a designer and the audience take for granted are missing, such as footsteps, the sound of skin touching things or clothes rustling. Also, there is no dialogue in this film, so the viewer is even more dependant on the sound to tell the story.

The sound I wanted to create was a stark, industrial and oppressive one, one with no natural or earthy sounds until the final scenes. For this I trawled through various sound libraries, twisting and playing with old mechanical sounds, my favourite being the sound of a WWII submarine recorded from the inside of a one of its missile tubes.

Doing foley for a film can be interesting too. From recording the hum of the fridge to hugging the porcelain throne in the bathroom, spewing up water and sweet corn (you’ll see why), you find yourself doing some odd things!

Even with the sound done, I had to add some music to bring some more mood into it. So I sat down with Apple’s GarageBand music program and put my basic piano training to some use for once.

Thanks to Geoff Perrin, Simon Doyle, Blanaid Hennessy, Colm Purcell and Sean Plunkett for their inputs and voice overs.

I’m still airing out some of my college work. Here’s my favourite (probably because I don’t have to look at myself in it), it’s another of those personal projects we got. For this one we had to interpret how an artist from before the film and photography age would work today if they decided to use cameras instead of brushes and paints.

I took quite a literal interpretation of the brief and used the audio from a scene of a favourite movie of mine, Field of Dreams, and used Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings to represent the action.

Starting with Van Gogh’s Noon Rest From Work After Millet (see below), I darkened the sky a little and put in some stars, to change the look from noon to midnight (for some reason too, I moved the horses in the background).Through some crude animation (thanks to Photoshop and iMovie) I gave the couple some, well, bizarre looking lips! Enjoy!

It’s almost a year since I graduated from the National Film School in I.A.D.T. and I thought I’d air some of the old films I made while there. We used to get briefs for ‘Personal Projects’ that had a general theme.

I can’t really remember what the theme was for this, our first one, but I remember restrictions like not being able to use synch sound, so whatever I shot on video, I couldn’t use the accompanying sound. And in typical student fashion, I left it all to do until the last minute. So in the few days left before the deadline, I grabbed the old video camera from home and set about filming. Shooting is one thing but editing is another. Having never used, or seen, an edit program before, I got my hands on an Apple computer and sat down with iMovie for a day and a night.

The result is a bit rough, it look incredibly unprofessional, but it’s a bit of a laugh and the sentiment in it hasn’t changed. Enjoy!