Complexity

Mind Control In The 21st Century

2008-02-25T13:00:18Z

The complete project is a sci-fi comedy with a darkly paranoid twist - this extract is a short orientation film explaining how the world's population is controlled.]]> The complete project now has three full episodes in script form, a half hour promo which we shot on a shoestring and is slowly but surely building up a head of steam as a radio series, as we rewrite the television scripts for radio and record them ourselves at the Complexity studios.

Yago Delas - Music Project

2007-10-06T17:04:00Z

Yago is a percussionist who often plays with Kassamba and Banda Sonara. He developed a set of percussion instruments made of tuned logs suspended from wires which you can see in this outdoor performance. We recorded sound in 5.1 but for the web the audio is mixed down to stereo.

Manolo Sierra

2007-09-30T16:14:15Z

We mentioned Manolo previously, before The Great Scourge, so it seems only fair to mention him again, particularly since he has just updated his website. Manolo is an outrageously talented painter and all round nice guy. He did the sketch on the front of the Complexity domain and produced some of the artwork featured in The Deadfall. Why not head over to his site and check out his gallery?

Showreel 06

2007-09-29T08:26:30Z

Nic's showreel can be found here. Does the 06 refer to the year? The version? Its position in the periodic table? We may never know. Music by Nic, just because.

Plaid & Tekkon Kinkreet

2007-09-27T06:51:46Z

Plaid have helped us acoustically with some of our own projects in the past, and have a solid visual relationship with Bob Jaroc, the visual artist who supplies a lot of the live performance imagery for their gigs. They have scored the just released anime Tekkon Kinkreet which is the perfect project for them, blending their love of the Japanese animated form with their love of small, weird children with superhuman powers locked in a struggle against the mafia. What? It all makes sense.]]> I saw the film with Andy some time ago and even with a badly mixed version of the soundtrack on a low quality DVD, with some stuff missing, it looked and sounded amazing.

It will be playing, or for those of you who are attending it is playing, or for those of you in the future, has played, at the Edinburgh Film Festival where you can read a little more about the film.

Whilst the DVD is already available, keep your eyes open for a general release. If you can see it on the big screen, you will be delighted by this utterly bonkers and strangely moving film.

Carmela

2007-09-24T18:39:49Z

In a previous entry we mentioned that we shot two films. Carmela was the second which we shot back to back with A Chus. Carmela was written and directed by Maria, Nic was the DoP and editor. This is a version without English subtitles. ]]>

Deadfall - In Post

2007-09-23T16:29:44Z

Nic has been working on a short film with Laurence and Sam which is now nearing completion. There are some stills of the production here for perusal. The Deadfall will be a psychological thriller of around half an hour in length.

Stillness

2007-09-22T11:35:14Z

Stillness is a spot Nic directed for Konami. This is a longer, unreleased version of the spot with a more notable Playstation weirdness to it. There is some groovy sub-bass audio going on in the soundtrack which you will hear if you have a set of good speakers or earphones.

A Chus - Technical

2007-09-22T10:53:36Z

A Chus was shot over two days, in the height of summer, back to back with another short film, Carmela, whilst we were all working on our day jobs.]]> The total cost of the two films was around 150 euros. Most of that went on food and copious drinks in what turned out to be one of the hottest summers on record. A large portion of the budget was also spent on our 'car mount rig' for the second film, which consisted of a plank of wood and some foam rubber.

We shot on DV, on a Canon XL1. Sound was easier to record unsynced which we did on a Sony Minidisc. Since there is no dialogue in A Chus, these were mainly wildtracks. However we had to clapperboard the takes for Carmela and sync sound in the edit.

Having an extremely small budget, we couldn't employ a smoke machine in the bathroom scenes so instead had to rely upon smoke bombs bought from a conjurers' shop in Barcelona. By the last few takes we began to suspect that we had bought tear gas by mistake.

The bird that flies through the background in the shot of the champagne glass was not added in post but rather a serendipitous performance by a young, talented pigeon.

A Chus

2007-09-20T22:39:36Z

In 2005 we shot two short films, switching around production roles in order to give people a chance to experiment with new skills. The first of these films was A Chus, written and directed by Marta. Nic was the DoP and editor. ]]> You can watch the entire film here. We'll post the second of the two films shortly.

ReCaptcha

2007-07-31T22:48:08Z

We're testing a new system to avoid the filth leeching on the glory. ReCaptcha is a beautiful idea which should both reduce the filth and promote literacy. Let's see if it works.

A Black Hole

2007-03-22T15:57:12Z

You will be delighted to hear, as were we, that due to a combination of a database error, an update to Wordpress, its abililty to run on an older version of MySQL, a bad conjunction of the stars, solar spots, a child born on the cusp of Neptune's crossing and an archaic curse laid upon our URL, dating back to a 12th century Viking witch, we have managed to lose all the previous entries hitherto herewith contained. The main problem was a bunch of parasitic spammers who, not content to bombard us daily via e-mail, have taken to adding to blog comments with inane monkey babble about viagra and goods and services. They managed to overload a spamfilter we had installed and screw everything up. We will find them and perform horrible medical experiments upon them. In the meantime, we've switched to Movable Type, which works with our older MySQL and runs a little faster when it's serving static pages. We have also switched off comments for the moment, which is a shame. Perhaps we can add them back in on an individual basis for anyone who can provide photographic evidence of the beheaded corpse of a spammer?