For music videos, commercials and the more corporate stuff I founded my own small production office with a good friend: The Filmkabinet. (website only in Dutch for now…)

Nice news! Preacher got selected for the No Limits Filmfestival, Sheffield.

So dear peoplez, here it is. The Psycho 44 music video.

Directed / Idea / Edited by The NUC aka me.
DOP: Gerwin Brabants
Thanks a lot Jh Lido, the band, Leslie Verbeeck, Dries De Win, and everybody going crazy.
And special thanks to the camera people: Kobe, Sandra & Ian, Elias, Sam, Biggy, Charlotte, Ferre gsm, Annelore, Jan & the some I forgot.

For the people interested, check out my blog post about editing this video!

This black mofo shot / co-directed a music video for / with  JFJ (= my old white chap Jonas Wellens, who released his first EP not so long ago and who also happens to be a great animator!)

Song = named ‘Suckerpunch Coffee’. Music video = illustrating the blurry confusion between waking up and leaving the house on a cold morning.

Oh, and ‘Preacher‘ got selected for the Wisconsin Film Festival 2011!!

Last weekend yours truly was shooting a music video for ‘Suckerpunch Coffee‘ by JFJ.
It’ll be a mix of live action and animation by Jonas Frederik Jos himself. It’s gonna kick ass!

Shot on my new Canon 60D.
And by the way for your information… ‘Preacher’ got selected for the Northern Wave Film Festival (Iceland) and the Athens International Short Film Festival “Psarokokalo” (Greece).

Cheerio!
Nuccieboy.

Right now I’m preparing the edit of a music video for Psycho 44. Promising Belgian band, finalist of Humo’s Rock Rally 2010, releasing their first EP in januari 2011.

Some insights:

The Song is quite a killer. Called ‘All my Demons Have Distortion’. In short ‘ADHD’. And that’s how it sounds. Very catchy and in my opinion the next alternative radio hit.
A little secret. Making a good video for a bad song is the hardest thing in the world. But a great song lifts a video most of the time to a higher level. So that’s a bonus on this one.

The Video then. I thought a live concept would work pretty well. And also an advantage for an upcoming band; this project was pretty cheap to realize.

So, the band performs in the middle of an audience in a very trashy venue. Everybody is quite excited. How’s that done? Well yeah, we told people to lose their minds. Hmm, that’s not working. Let’s give ‘em some free beers. Better:)
The focus in the video isn’t too hard on the band, nor the beautiful eyes of the singer, but on the audience that’s totally losing control and going hard. Like in fucking hard.
So how to capture the energy of this totally unpredictable crowd? We used more than 15 camera’s, spread over the room. – With camera’s I mean everything that’s able to film: From miniDV and hard disk camera’s to photocamera’s and cellphones. –
3 camera’s were attached to the ceiling. The other ones were handled by people standing in front, in and behind the audience.
Then 8 takes were taken. Which means 5 hours of footage. And now this has to become a hyper-active, energizing edit.

Some problems to beat during post production:

• Shiiiiit lots of footage. 

  5 hours of footage for a 3:20min long song means lots of work. The great feeling of ‘Yes, I captured everything’ turns easily in the not-so-great feeling of ‘Shit, it’s almost too much to handle’.
• Shiiiit lots of different file formats. 

  For the film geeks. I got 7 file formats to handle. (.MTS, .AVI, .3GP, .MOD, .ASF, .MP4 and of course .MOV.). They must all be converted to the same file format to edit. (.mov) And no, Apple’s Compressor doesn’t take them all.
• Shiiiit the band recorded a new studio version of the song to release it as a single.
  Which means I have to edit to another, slightly slower version of the song. Byebye lip-sync.

Now I’m in stage 1 of the editing process. Checking all the footage and selecting interesting images: crazy expressions, guys falling on the floor, the dancing bunny, people going wild. – Check them pictures –
Stage 2 is the actual edit. To the bone. Deadline somewhere in the second half of januari. Yep, I know what to do.

So conclusion:
If everything works out this video will maybe not have the most original concept, but will be quite some fun to watch.
And that’s important. A video on youtube is easily clicked away. So let’s hope the fun factor will motivate youngsters to check it out from beginning to end, watch it a second time, and maybe share it on facebook, blogs or other websites. Let’s go viral!

Spent some time in Munich last week, at the Munich International Festival of Filmschools 2010.
Had a great time! Visited the ARRI Factory and the Bavaria Filmstudios.
Met some great people & directors (who actually are people in a way). Had a few german beers. Made some jokes about the war.
Saw lots of films (only missed 1 of the 12 screenings) and won a Special Jury Mention for my short film ‘Preacher’.

The jury: “From the very first out-of-focus images, PREACHER is an unsettling cinematic experience. With this Special Mention we would like to encourage the filmmaker to continue with his impassioned experimentation.”

And hey it works, I feel encouraged. Thinking about a new short film now that hopefully can be made in the (near) future.

The Stad Van Licht music video I directed (‘Radio Silence’) will be shown in the music video competition on the Short Film Festival Leuven. Which is very nice!
Leuven Kort is one of the most interesting filmfestivals in Belgium I think. Lots of young directors’ work to be discovered.

And I really like the Poor Little Trees of Steven Burke. And his other work as well.

I directed my first commercial for Denzzo. It’s playing now on Belgian TV! (één + canvas)
It’s in dutch. And it tells you to participate in a quiz about traffic rules.
Because a lot of people tend to forget about these rules. Like the woman in the ad.
It was very interesting to do. A whole different approach than any other thing I did in the past…

Was in Sweden last weekend for the Uppsala Short Film Festival 2010, where my short film ‘Preacher’ played in the International Competition.
I was very happy, honoured and surprised to receive an Honorary Mention of the Jury.

The Jury statement about ‘Preacher’:
“An uneasy but unforgettable watch that turns horror movie stereotypes upside down by making the offenders the protagonists and stripping the conventions and power structures of horror films to their bare bones.”
Now that’s some sharp analysis I completely agree with!

And to end. Some things I noticed in Sweden. (it was my first time in this beautiful country…)
- Everybody has an iPhone.
- The doors open to the outside.
- It’s hard to get drunk when a beer costs more than 5 Euros.
- Everybody speaks english.
- Ingmar Bergman lived in Uppsala. Must see ‘Fanny & Alexander’.
- Really should go back in summer for a longer time!!

Some pictures: