Awesomepedia!!

Klasskamrater

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:44:21 -0800

This is a short film I directed about a year ago. It premiered at Dalarna Film Festival last September, and it's been online for a while, but I never got around to making subtitles for it (until now - hit that CC button), so it's not been here on Awesomepedia until now! This film was produced by Daydreamers (the same crew that made Rånet and Answer Me) and the screenplay for this was written by Jonathan Norberg, who also edited the film, and shot it together with Lovisa Ramsén. Big ups to the whole crew - everyone did an amazing job!

As you can probably tell this film is much more contemplative and serious than the stuff I usually make, and it was a really interesting experience. At first I was a bit apprehensive about directing actors twice my age, but Teresia and Henrik were really great and it turns out that none of that matters when you're all united in trying to tell a story. Produced with financial support from Film i Dalarna.

Calle & Anders - Absinthe

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 01:22:38 -0800

Good friends, good times. This could almost be an ad for absinthe, in fact. This was recorded almost a year ago. I find it incredibly uplifting at times! This counts as episode 10 (!) of Calle & Anders and entry #100 (!!) in my video archive.

Hourly Comics - January 1

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 07:58:32 -0800

Hourly Comics from January 1st. Not as drunk as last years comics, but still a pretty interesting new years.

Tags: happy new year, thea, my back is killing me, depression, at least i have my fucking teeth, emil, kindred spirits, party, drinking, game, tobbe, hippies, the king is dead, chess, hemp, rain, singing, con, sms-ticket, grandparents, tired, filmmaking, kim possible, baby pictures

Hourly Comics - December 1

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:32:44 -0800

Hourly Comics from December 1st. I'm not sure, but this might be the longest I've ever put off posting a day of hourly comics! Anyway, the ones from January 1st are coming soon, I promise.

Tags: v for vendetta, can't eat more, sound effects, the office (uk), the office (us), boiler, accusatory, it's not about how i talk it's about how you listen, dark twitter, phone, ads, good night

Watching Me Watching You

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 02:04:13 -0800

I was asked to put something together for Falun Walk of Art, a project where different types of video art is shown in windows spread throughout the town of Falun. This post is about what I made and how I made it. There's a longer video further down, but here's a peek at the finished product:

BACKGROUND

For a long time I've been wanting to make something where two screens interact. Originally that was how 2 Eyes 2 Ears was going to work, but since that's an audiovisual mashup I couldn't risk it going out of sync, even just a frame or two, so we ended up using a projector. But there's a certain something about actually having two separate televisions interact, and since audio wasn't really a possibility this time around, I decided to go for it.

When it comes to video art, projectors are great because they remove all boundaries, but since the screen is more confining it can also be very interesting to keep those boundaries, and then break them! And the television screen is a symbol in and of itself, with meanings and connotations worth exploring. For a start, the television screen is something we'll sit and watch for hours and hours, and some would say it's a tool to keep people subdued. Like cattle.

George Orwell's 1984, the tagline "Big Brother Is Watching You", and the accompanying iconography is deeply integrated into our shared social framework. The connection to the television show Big Brother says a lot about how strange the form of that integration has become in this society where everything is about being seen, being noticed, and being approved of. In summary the TV is something we watch, but it's also, in some corner of our mind, watching us.

CONCEPT

So these were the thoughts running through my mind when I decided to make something with a type of Big Brother character staring grimly out at people walking past and displaying very 1984-ish messages along the lines of "YOU ARE NOT WORTH ANYTHING".

My Big Brother was originally supposed to be a military man, and I spent hours searching online and in real life for a military uniform and, more importantly, an impressive officer's hat. In the end I decided to slap on a suit instead, which worked just as well, although it changed the feel of the character a bit and I had to tone down the acting (which would have been more over the top if I'd had military clothes).

On the other screen I wanted a character who was the absolute opposite of the neat Big Brother. Someone scruffy and unkempt, who does his best to distract and irritate the Big Brother, mainly by writing anti-propaganda messages and trying to get passers-by to read those instead. Ultimately that would result in a direct confrontation along these lines:

I resolved quite early to play both characters myself. It seemed like an appropriate mirror-effect, although I'm not going to expand on what these dual forms of the same person says about our society or whatever (since analysing your own work is often seen as unbecoming). I decided to use the age-old trick of cutting my hair between characters, which felt almost childish and gimmicky, but as you can see I was becoming a bit of a scruffy bastard and seriously needed a haircut anyway:

PRODUCTION

Planning is everything for this sort of project. Production-wise it was a lot like my music video Feet, where different video tracks are interacting in a similar way. Like with Feet I prepared a detailed previz (animated storyboard) and played around with it until it contained all the elements I wanted. I then recorded audio-commands along the lines of "Turn left in 3... 2... 1... now!" and synced them up with the things happening in the previz. That gave me an audio-file that I could play while filming, telling me what to do. This, like every part of the process, was to preserve synchronization between the two screens.

After all that planning the performance itself was deceptively easy. It felt as if I must have forgotten something, and I was slightly reluctant to get that haircut... But I find that's the case with most filmmaking - If you know exactly what you need you'll often be surprised by how quickly you can get it. So I got a haircut, changed the background, and recorded screen two.

It turns out balloons don't actually float in the slow meandering fashion I had imagined, so most of the balloons you see in the final version had to be animated, but I thought it would all look exceedinly fake without a few real ones floating around, so after eliciting some help I shot the ending like this:

[there should be a video here]

POST-PRODUCTION

Making video art is, in terms of editing, completely different from making regular films because art is usually displayed in a very different context, and doesn't establish any type of traditional "contract" with the viewer. For instance Watching Me Watching You is shown in a store-window on a street in the centre of town, and as such it is unlikely to hold the attention of a passer-by for the full 10 minutes it takes to loop. It's also winter so people don't want to hang around outside anyway.

Working under that assumption I divided the piece into three parts where quite different things are happening. The goal was not to make people stop and watch for ten minutes (though that'd be cool), but rather to make it so that every time you pass something different is being shown!

In the first part the Big Brother is staring out menacingly and displaying his angry messages while the "Slacker" sleeps. In the second part the Big Brother is doing the same while the Slacker wakes up and and starts writing anti-propaganda, and the third part is where the characters actually start interacting, where the Big Brother pulls a gun and things start passing between the screens.

Most of the loop is made so that it will still work even if it goes a second or two out of sync, but there are points where things pass between the screens and could thus appear on both at the same time. We did everything imaginable to preserve synchronization, including getting two identical DVD-players in case different models took longer to loop. Also instead of making the two DVDs loop after one play I filled the discs up with 12 repetitions, since the loop point itself is where things could get messed up.

If you're local you can find Watching Me Watching You playing in the window of BK Data on Slaggatan 17 in central Falun (Dalarna, Sweden) until the end of January. Magasinet, who arranges Falun Walk of Art together with Falu kommun and Centrala stadsrum, did a great job of finding two perfect screens and actually building the stylish pedestals that put the screens at eye-level. All in all it turned out looking much better than I could have imagined!

THE FINISHED PRODUCT

So this work of art is about being seen and judged, possibly by our government (implied by the suit), but also by the public (ourselves). I think it's a relevant topic in today's world where people can lose their jobs over something they've said on facebook - where people forget what is public and what is private. We all want attention - we're worried about The Surveillance Society, but we want everyone to subscribe to our youtube. We want to be seen and we want to be liked. Preferably on Facebook.

Even I (especially I) am doing this. Apart from whoring myself out online I literally put this thing, featuring me, in the public space, and this whole post is about how I tried to make it grab people's attention! I am also one of those smug people trying to Say Something About Society, for which I am doubly damned...

On the surface Watching Me Watching You might be a statement about the dangers of a Surveillance Society, and our first choice of store window actually rejected showing my piece because the description apparently made it sound too dangerous. Even though I explained about the balloons and everything! But in the end I see it as a playful subversion and parody of the very concept of a surveillance society.

(On the other hand… Are you sure your webcam is switched off?)

#79 - Original Ukulele Song

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 23:30:23 -0800

Failed love song #79. Written by the same person, for the same person.

This is an original song yo, made from scratch! I hope you like it!

As always, the lyrics are sort of important, and you can download them here to help yourself keep up! You can find all my original ukulele music collected here!

Thanksgiving Mixtape (Jim and Them)

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 14:04:51 -0800

This post is about a little something I put together for the Jim and Them podcast!

One of these days I'm going to write a blog explaining exactly why Jim and Them is my favourite podcast on the whole wide internet (apart from my very own Hallå Där! of course, which you should listen to if you speak as much as a word or two of Swedish). As I've written elsewhere Jim and Them is some of the smartest comedy availible online masquerading as some of the dumbest. And to be fair sometimes it gets pretty dumb. And racist. So yeah, it's very "inside", and from the outside it looks retarded and racist, which is why I feel the need to help people come inside.

But I'll save all that for another day and simply explain that in episode 219 of Jim and Them the boys got drunk as shit and decided to freestyle rap for an entire episode. Now I'm not going to claim that this is "sick as fuck", and in terms of quality their un-freestyled works are much better, but the genius of four drunk improv-comedians rapping for an hour is undeniable.

Like a 5-minute track about running an airship company, renting zeppelins to people and then suing them when the zeppelins crash (because they always crash). Just the fact that they spend about 75% of the time trying to force one unwilling participant (Brian) to rap is hilarious to me. In short I had no choice other than to chop the episode up into tracks, name them accordingly, and compile it into a mixtape:

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE JIM AND THEM THANKSGIVING MIXTAPE [2011]

Making of: Answer Me

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:43:46 -0800

The music video for Answer Me is long since finished, and you can watch it here, but I found some making of material that I never posted, so here's a run-through of how we did it! All photos are by Jonathan Norberg.

My song Answer Me tells such a clear story in it's lyrics that we had no other choice for the music video than to simply visualize that story. The song is written out of the perspective of an answering machine that is trying to get the attention of it's owner, to convince her that the guy she's seeing is kind of a dick, and that there are other guys (or answering machines?) out there that are more worthy of her time.

Last autumn I asked my friend and classmate Dennis Kullberg to work on the music video with me, which eventually led to us co-directing a three day shoot over a weekend in March. We were originally doing a very minor production, but a few weeks before the shoot we were lucky enough to get the Daydreamers crew involved. Daydreamers is a group of students at our school that does productions outside of schoolwork; enormously creative filmmaking students who are more experienced with photography and lighting than either me or Dennis (mere screenwriting weaklings). In short, these are the sort of people you want on your side! And it meant that instead of my tiny old Canon HF100 we were shooting the music video on a Red ONE camera. If you know anything about cameras you know that this is a big deal.

The music video mostly takes place in an apartment, and we decided to get all the other shots out of the way before moving to the main location, Dennis' apartment. So on Friday morning we started our shoot at a café in central Falun. The first thing we did was the exterior establishing shot:

Narcissistically enough, this above photo was my desktop background image for several months. Anyway, after that we moved into the cramped little café. Dennis, my ever optimistic co-director, had told the owner that we would be "about an hour" and we'd be occupying "a table or two". Needless to say, we took up most of the café for most of the day.

This picture shows a recurring problem with filming in front of windows in the middle of town: people tend to walk past them. The bastards. Like maybe you're shooting a romantic moment and an incredibly fat woman walks by and stares right into the camera. Awesome.

Last year Lovisa and Elizabeth (right and left) were commonly referred to as Lovisabeth, since it was nearly impossible to see one without the other! They shot and edited this music video.

[there should be a video here]

The video above is a sample of Lovisabeth's endless battle with the tripod! (Please note how instead of helping I whip out a camera.)

After finishing at the café we spent the rest of the first day shooting the outdoors-stuff outside Dennis' apartment. I don't know if it looks it, but it was actually incredibly cold...

In the music video my character is on the third floor balcony looking down. In actuality we shot that on the first floor balcony of one of Dennis' neighbours. That's the magic of cinema, people! The neighbour we borrowed it from didn't really seem to understand the concept of cinema magic though - she kept walking past inside the apartment, looking perplexed and staring right into the camera.

Did I mention that it was cold?

We spent the next two days in the apartment! I spent most of it lip syncing.

On the evening between those two apartment-days we went out and had a bit of a wrap party (who says you can't have a wrap party when you're 2/3 finished?) and we took the opportunity to get this above photograph, which we needed for the video. You should have heard me directing Dennis in the restaurant.

Jakob: "That's perfect! You look like a total douche!"
Dennis: "But I haven't started acting yet."
Jakob:

In conclusion it all turned out the way I imagined it, or often better than imagined! Here's a comparison between the storyboard (as drawn by me and Dennis) and the final product:

(That's it! Now go watch the video and then listen to my other songs!)

PLAYLISP @ Dalarnas Museum

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 17:30:22 -0800

On November 29th I performed as PLAYLISP at Dalarnas Museum, doing live mashups for A LOT of confused old people and kids. It wasn't the sort of crowd I usually play for, but hey, a gig is a gig is a gig. You'll find videos of the entire thing below!

This year I've been getting a lot more involved with the fancy smancy side of local culture, showing Video Art at Galleries as often as I show short films at festivals. I keep waiting for someone to point at me and go "this is not arrrrtttt", but at this point I've done almost as many gigs at art galleries as I have at dingy parties, and I'm pretty sure I would respond with "FUCK YOU THIS IS ART NOW".

Except for there being a relatively small amount of dancing (I did most of it), I was very happy with how this gig turned out. I've been working on a live setup that allows for more improvisation, and you'll notice that there are a lot of glitchy effects that really enhance the live-feel of what I'm doing. Here is my gig in it's entirety (music starts at 01:10):

01:10 OPM VS Eminem
05:55 Owl City VS Ice Cube
08:20 Grease Lightning VS Nate Dogg
09:30 Bobby McFerrin VS 50 Cent
10:45 Nintendo VS Beastie Boys
11:45 Journey VS Beastie Boys
14:10 Jungle Book VS Eminem VS Gwen Stefani
16:15 MGMT VS Ludacris
17:30 Fever Ray VS Drake
18:40 Lynyrd Skynyrd VS Drake VS Teddybears STHLM
22:40 The Prodigy VS LMFAO VS Quad City DJs

That last mashup is completely new, and probably the most intense thing I've ever made! You can listen/download it here:

After my gig I also played music for a fashion show! I had to take some old mashups out of the closet and dust them off (and invent some new ones) to have enough for both a gig and this, but I think it worked out well!

The fashion show has two parts - the first half, until about 12 minutes in, contains clothes from the lovely Falun café Did U give the world some Love today Babe? (yes that's the name of the café, it's sort of the best), and the second part is from people studying fashion in Falun who've been working on the theme "recycling" (just like my music does, appropriately). Check it out:

I'm not gonna list all the tracks, but here are some of the new ones:
04:00 drake VS mambo # 5
05:00 ice cube VS röyksopp
07:10 the knife VS jay-z
14:45 nyan cat VS daft punk
23:00 primal scream VS everybody

There is a fantastic moment at 20:40 when I drop the theme from Dexter just as a girl wearing a blood-spattered dress and carrying a severed head walks in! Considering the age of the crowd I might have been the only one to actually notice this, but it made my god damn day. It wasn't planned or anything, and I was soooo close to skipping that song too...

For one of the tracks (about 9:30 to 12:00) I'm using a remix made by someone else (Alex S.) as a base, which isn't something I would normally do, because it doens't feel like I put enough of myself into it. As a mashup artist I have to be careful about not relying too much on any one sampled song. If people are only digging a mashup because the originals are good, then I'm not really creating anything new, and I can't claim it as my own. So this mashup (9:30 - 12:00) isn't something I would put in my set for a gig, but I figured it was okay to use it as background music for a fashion show!

As always you can check out PLAYLISP.COM to see more of my music, and if you're holding a party and want some mashup flavour, don't hesitate to get in touch!

Hourly Comics - October 1

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 13:25:02 -0700

Hourly Comics from October 1st.

Tags: radio, tea, failure, muddy guitar, twilight, advertisement, storyboarding, roller blind, old testament, posters for film, mushrooms, smug, fashion show, podcast, hallå där, tobbe

Answer Me

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:18:10 -0700

This is the official music video for my song "Answer Me" which is written out of the perspective of an answering machine that's very protective towards its owner (and maybe there are some other feelings there as well)! You can download the lyrics and chords here and find all my ukulele music collected here!

This music video was directed by Jakob Burrows & Dennis Kullberg and produced by Daydreamers. Big ups to Emilie Olsson, Lovisa Ramsén, Elizabeth Nikkhah, Fredrik Wahlén, Kajza Wiborn, Jonathan Norberg and Jakob Larsson! And a huge thanks to Faluns Centralcafé for letting us film there!

The Robbery

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:17:19 -0700

This is a short comedy film directed by Henrik Eriksson, produced by Daydreamers (me and my filmmaking-pals). My main role on this production was as the film editor, but I was also a production assistant, and I (sort of) acted in it.

I have written about how we made this film on the blog, where you'll also find a behind the scenes video (made by me) that ended up being longer than the actual film.

Hall� D�r! (N�n J�vla Podcast)

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 17:03:11 -0700

Note to non-Swedish-speakers: This post is about a podcast we've started (Calle & Anders & Jakob and another guy). The show is in Swedish, and since it's purely audio there's sadly no way to subtitle it or make it internationally accessible. This show is getting a separate RSS feed and updates won't show up on the main site, so you can just ignore this post and never be bothered about this again. So try not to think about all the goodies you're missing out on.

KLICKA H�R F�R ATT LADDA NER AVSNITTET

�ntligen h�nder det! En sprillans ny podcast fr�n skaparna av webbserien Calle & Anders, med samma typ av meningsl�sa diskussioner om allting och ingenting (och Star Wars)! Skillnaden �r att ett Calle & Anders avsnitt �r ca 5 minuter l�ngt medan ett avsnitt av Hall� D�r! s�llan kommer bli kortare �n TV� J�VLA TIMMAR. I detta f�rsta avsnitt listar vi ut vad vi ska ha f�r typ av format, och v�ra fyra musket�rer (Jakob, Dennis, Anders, Calle) betar sig igenom en hel h�g med �mnen:

UPPSALA INCIDENTEN: Calle is going to court! Varf�r stog han och bankade p� polisstationen i 40 minuter i sp�regn f�r att bli insl�ppt s� han kunde erk�nna brott?
FISKAFF�REN: Vad avledde Dennis fr�n a life of crime? Vilken roll spelade han i uppkomsten av Captain Hooker, v�rldens s�msta superhj�lte?
SLUTARTID: Jakob har l�rt sig mycket under tre �rs studie av filmproduktion, och han v�ljer att applicera sina kunskaper p� Star Trek, till Anders stora fasa.
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: Anders hatar Buffy + Jakob �lskar Buffy = Anders VS Jakob.
DENNIS STORA SVARTA DILDO: Varf�r �r Dennis s� otroligt l�tt att l�nnm�rda?
JOHNNY MNEMONIC: I veckans inslag av "S� S�mst att Det �r B�st" diskuteras Keanu Reeves film Johnny Mnemonic, en film som kan beskrivas som bizzaro versionen av The Matrix fr�n ett ondskefullt parallellt universum som �r fast i 80-talet.
ANDERS VS KONSTV�RLDEN: Med mer inlevelse �n ett krigstal fr�n William Wallace f�rklarar Anders varf�r man inte ska vara r�dd f�r att s�ga att konst �r skit, oberoende av hur pretenti�s konstn�ren �n r�kar vara.

L�nkar: Johnny Mnemonic trailer, "I want to get online� I NEED a COMPUTER", Bilds�kning efter "Sad Keanu", Pausmusik: Here it goes again av OK GO

VIKTIGT: Nya avsnitt fr�n denna podcast kommer att visa sig p� AWESOMEPEDIA.ORG/PODCAST och INTE p� startsidan. Om du vill f� uppdateringar n�r nya avsnitt kommer s� m�ste du antingen b�rja h�nga p� /podcast eller prenumerera p� podcastens RSS feed som endast kommer visa nya avsnitt av Hall� D�r!

FEET - NEW MUSIC VIDEO

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 12:24:20 -0700

I directed and animated this video for my song "Feet". If you like it please send it to a friend or reblog it or something (it would really help me a lot)! You can get lyrics & chords for this song or download the track right here, all completely free and all Creative Commons licenced, of course!

I have made a new section of the site called awesomepedia.org/songs, where you can find all my singer/songwritery stuff collected, including lyrics and chords to all my songs published so far!

Hourly Comics - September 1

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 12:13:29 -0700

Hourly Comics from September 1st.

Tags: more depressing dreams, sleep on bus, lcd soundsystem, ambient music, radio studio, the crying game, expensive bus cards, mashups, comments, classic anders moment, the ambassador, time lord, doctor who, the vatican, donnie darko sequel