Ghost Radio - The Carriage of the Rokurokubi

Still progressing on the music video animation work for the new release by girabbe, and thought it might be of interest to post this odd little snippet from that work, of a carriage-like structure that hints at a Japanese yokai called the Rokurokubi moving through a landscape of ghost-ridden cathodes...

After all summer in Japan is the time for ghost stories... because the thought is that the chill you receive from the telling will cool you off from the hot weather. (Here's a link to The Roving Ronin who tells the history of Japanese ghost stories with a selection of different tales)... the ghost story candle ceremony the Roving Ronin describes on his page can be seen in a trailer for the movie Yokai - 100 Ghost Stories.

And, my favorite Japanese movie for ghost stories, for its beautiful cinematography and music of the biwa has to be Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan (based on stories from Lafcadio Hearn's collections of Japanese folk tales):

Film Reel Organism

Over the last couple of weeks I've started to work on a promised music-video project for a song by the band girabbe for their upcoming release slated for this summer. I believe there is a full video-album planned with different video artists participating on certain songs, and I'm looking forward to experiencing the full release!

Somehow, perhaps aptly, I was able to grab a really hauntingly atmospheric number titled "ghost radio (part 1)" and have been doing some test runs on style and content. (There is a very interesting story behind the song, but I will leave that tale up to girabbe).

In the meantime, here are a couple of experimental snippets from my work thus far, utilizing an old freeware software friend InkScape, to create animated bits brought into Final Cut. (Note - the sound on these tests is also random personal experiments - see Moon City Costumes).

(please place your amoebas between the speakers)



(a skeletal broadcast from the dark ride)

I've got a long way to go, but I've been enjoying this break, that has given me the opportunity to get back into my more surrealist abstract leanings.

Also, as a side note, I would like to recommend the following fun internet search for images  from the book Codex Serphinianus (a strange, wonderful book that is inspiring for its unintelligible other worldliness) -- (think Fantastic Planet in book form). Someone has also posted a youtube video of some page turning through the book: