Burst the Bubble

Civil Disobedience is a London based techno label. I was approached by them to film an art piece to be premiered at a label party where the theme would be “bursting bubbles” a term can be applied to many different things but generally refers to the protection of a fragile state, and one that could collapse at any moment. They had also enlisted the talents of Vanessa Kisuule, an artist and performer who had scooped a number of titles on the slam poetry scene with the shoot to take place in her home town of Bristol. In preparation for the shoot we explored the idea of bubbles being a front or a facade and delving into what lies behind the facade of gentrification in the concrete foundations and roots beneath. There were of course many ways to explore that visually by juxtaposing modern glass and steel buildings with dilapidated backstreets and root like pipes and cables.

The whole video was filmed on a Sony NXCAM with high frame rate. This provided a much sharper and more edgy look that the traditional movie blur that comes from filming at a more standard 25 frames per second on a DSLR. When colouring I drew upon perhaps my favourite music video of all time – Leftfield’s “Africa Shox”, directed by Chris Cunningham. This video uses very murky and desaturated colours to make the filmic world seem all the more cold and hard for the fragile subject of the video. In the case of our video I too desaturated but then coloured with a palate of taupe and grey, something commonly used in modern combat movies and games to not only provide a degree of hardness but to further amp up the warring cadence of Vanessa’s slam style. The final result a stark, edgy and impactful art piece.