VFX breakdowns for BBC One TV series Ripper Street
"With a final dollop of blood splatter sploshing across the plasma TV, Series One of BBC's visceral police drama Ripper Street came to a crashing finish on Sunday night!
Screen Scene VFX completed all the visual effects work on Ripper Street's first season, and are proud to share this fantastic breakdown/making of video showing you how they weaved their inimitable brand of wizardry to make Dublin look like Victorian London."
(Screen Scene Post Production Facilities, 26 February 2013)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The amateur video which sparked the 1992 Los Angeles Civil Unrest
"in March 1991, television screens across the world broadcast [George Holliday's] videotaped footage of LAPD officers raining down 56 baton blows on an African American named Rodney King. ... on April 29, 1992, a jury in Simi Valley, one of the whitest exurbs of Los Angeles, acquitted three of the four officers involved in beating Rodney King. The response in South Los Angeles was loud and immediate: That night, thousands of residents, black and Latino, took to the streets, starting a four-day riot that destroyed more than 1,000 buildings, injured 2,500 people, killed 58, and resulted in $1 billion in damage and 16,000 arrests."
(Josh Sides, 19/04/2012, Design Observer)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Overcoding, Coding, and Recoding
"...The social axiomatic of modern societies is caught between two poles and is constantly oscillating from one pole to the other. Born of decoding and deterritorialization, on the ruins of the despotic machine, these societies are caught between the Urstaat that they would like to resuscitate as an overcoding and reterritorializing unity, and the unfettered flows that carry them toward an absolute threshold. They recode with all their might, with world-wide dictatorship, local dictators, and an all-powerful police, while decoding - or allowing the decoding of - the fluent quantities of their capital and their populations. They are torn in two directions: archaism and futurism, neoarchaism and ex-futurism, paranoia and schizophrenia. They vacillate between two poles: the paranoiac despotic sign, the sign-signifier of the despot that they try to revive as a unit of code; and the sign-figure of the schizo as a unit of decoded flux, a schiz, a point-sign or flow-break. They try to hold on to the one, but they pour or flow out through the otaxher. They are continually behind or ahead of themselves."
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 260)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
EvoFIT Facial composite system for identifying suspects to crime
"A facial composite is a picture of a suspect to crime (as seen on TV crime programmes and in the newspapers). Traditional composite systems used by the police require witnesses to describe an assailant's face and then to select individual facial features (producing a "composite" face). This process does not work well: we are not good at describing faces nor selecting individual features.
We have developed a different approach at the University of Stirling and the University of Central Lancashire. Unlike current systems, faces in EvoFIT are modelled in their entirety and are not separated into component parts. A facial composite (the new term for 'photofit') is created by first displaying a number of faces containing random eyes, noses, mouths, etc. A witness selects a few of these faces that are most similar to a criminal. The selected faces are then mixed or 'bred' together to produce another set for selection. Repeated a few times allows a composite to be 'evolved'."
(Charlie Frowd)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Gillian Wearing: a fascination with social behaviour
"The artist's fascination with social behaviour has been influenced by the 1970s 'fly-on-the-wall' style of British documentary such as Franc Roddam and Paul Watson's The Family (1974) and Michael Apted's 7-Up (1964) and brings to mind the recent documentary "Capturing the Friedmans" by Andrew Jarecki."
(Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania)
Sixty Minutes Silence, 60 minutes, colour video projection with sound, 1996
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
