Kim Beaton and her digitigrade leg extensions. Photo by Dionwrbear.

The booming film industry here in Wellington, New Zealand (a.k.a “Wellywood“) has attracted phenomenal talent from all over the world. Creatives come from as far away as Los Angeles, London, Johannesburg, Vancouver and Tokyo to work on films like District 9, Avatar, and the LotR series. One such transplant is Kim Beaton, a multi-talented artist/inventor from Seattle who was recently hired by Weta Workshop to do conceptual design work on the upcoming Hobbit films.

Kim is a vibrant, intensely focused person who always seems happiest when she has multiple projects in development: large scale sculptures, community arts outreach programs, armor design and production, you name it! She’s also an accomplished inventor. In fact, many of you may already be familiar with one of her patents– last summer, two YouTube videos were posted of Kim striding through downtown Seattle in a pair of startling, stilt-like “reverse leg” extensions. The clips quickly went viral.

Upon arriving here, Kim was encouraged by Richard Taylor (5-time Academy Award winner and co-owner/co-director of the Weta Companies) to continue honing the digilegs’ design in the workshop. After several months of development and fine-tuning, the company is selling Kim’s professional design, now christened Weta Legs, for $945 U.S. dollars a pair. From the official site: “Weta has made many pairs of digitigrade leg extensions in the past for stunt men and creature performers in the movies and on the stage, but this is the first time we can offer [this] leg to anyone.” In fact, it’s the first time any company has put a line of digilegs into mainstream production.

A heads up to performers, costumers, burners, party monsters, cosplayers, designers and filmmakers– this is big. I’ve had the opportunity to test Kim’s prototype myself. They’re incredible. They’re comfortable. They’re FUN. I mean, really, really fun. Watch this instructional video (featuring Kim and a woman who has never been in stilts or extensions of any kind before in her life) to hear and see a bit about why her particular adaptation of the digitigrade concept is so unique and easy to acclimate to wearing.

As far as I know, there’s nothing else remotely like them available on the market. It’s very exciting news for Kim, for her company, and best of all, for all of the non film industry folks out there who can finally own a pair of these. Recently, Kim spoke with me at length about the history of digilegs, as well as her past community collaborations and several other upcoming personal projects. I hope you’ll enjoy getting to know this incredible woman and her work as much as I have.

Please describe the Weta Legs. What sets your invention apart from other kinds of stilts or leg extensions?
They have been called the Holy Grail of costuming. How do you build a device that will give a person the backward leg of a dog or horse? They are referred to by all sorts of names: digilegs, digitigrades, faun legs…

What does digitigrade mean?
A digitigrade is an animal that stands or walks on its digits, or toes. But this is not easy to say unless you like tongue twisters, so it was shortened to “digileg”. They’ve also been called “dog legs” or “reverse stilts”. Originally, we called them leg extensions, because they’re not really stilts, but we want to give them one name that is pretty easy to say. Hence, Weta Legs.

One mustn’t get too put out by who one’s friends choose to play with.

So goes the story of Ian Worrel’s short animated film, Second Wind featuring an old man and his giant feline traveling companion. It’s a beautiful six minutes, rife with expressive animation and a haunting score. Just the thing to perk up a boring Wednesday afternoon.

The act of “sweding” a movie — creating an amateur version of a feature film — was coined by Michel Gondry in his film Be Kind Rewind and it is something that you may have seen popping up on the internet in the film’s wake. I can assure you that you have not seen anything approaching the surreal sensibilities of this version of Blade Runner filmed by “The Dokkoi Company”. Beginning simply with the words “2026. The Replicant ran away. The Bladerunner chases it.” what follows is a crazed, whirlwind tour of Ridley Scott’s film, replete with a strangely evocative score that sounds like it was created using kazoos, a toy car hanging from string, and the copious use of crude, paper masks. It’s a tour de force of interpretive reenactment, and they even went so far as to create a version for the more recent Final Cut. Worth it for the penultimate rooftop scene alone; not unlike the film it apes.

There can be no doubt that the fine folks at The Asylum are fans of the special breed of 50s era science fiction; an era in which the mysterious atom reigned supreme. So intrinsic to the conclusion of WWII, viagra a symbol of American dominance and ingenuity, healing and a portent of The Future the atom was also viewed with fear, and whole oeuvres were built around the concept of atomic energy run amok, creating vast, horrifying menageries of over-sized, irradiated monsters. What else but fanatical love for this bygone age could explain the existence of films like Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus or the soon to be classic Mega Piranha starring former pop icon Tiffany and former Brady Buncher Barry Williams? How else would one explain the decidedly sub-par visual effects except as a desire to retain the essence of those films? This, dear readers, is devotion. This is love. Now to patiently await the remake of Them!.

Cover of a recent issue of Cut Magazine

This weekend, Villa Sonsbeek in The Netherlands hosts O.K. Festival: 3 Days of Magazines, an event curated by O.K Parking.  The weekend promises workshops, lectures, more than 100 independent magazines and a dance party at the event’s conclusion. The festival’s mission statement feels like coming home: “Under the title ‘Welcome Magazines,’ O.K. Festival presents the energy and the visual explosion of strange, beautiful and original magazines. One by one they present an answer to the uniformity of the mass media. The printed media are falling victim to increasingly strict formats. Sales figures reign. In the gaping hole they leave behind the independent magazine manifests itself. Everything that is excluded by the mainstream media finds its place here.”

Panels include “On the Value of Independent Magazine Culture,” “What Drives Magazine Makers?” “Editor vs. Designer,” “Ten Moments in Magazine History”  and, of course, “Surviving in Print.” There are also a couple of hands-on workshops, such as “Making a Magazine with Stencilprinting.” If only we’d heard about this festival sooner! If we’re lucky, recordings of the panels might be available on the O.K. Festival Vimeo page, which currently houses a couple of interviews with festival participants.

Even if you’re nowhere near The Netherlands, the O.K. Festival website is still a fantastic resource for discovering new magazines. A couple of new-found brothers and sisters:

At first sight, Sang Bleu is all about tattoos, body modification and fetish, but Sang Bleu offers more than that. It provides a precise insight into modern urban society. That is why art, fashion, sociology and literature are also featured in Sang Bleu.

Dabireh is a Collective of young Iranian graphic designers who share a passion for calligraphy and typography and have a keen interest in the history and theories of Persian language and writing system.

Lumpen Magazine. lum·pen adj. 1. Of or relating to dispossessed, often displaced people who have been cut off from the socioeconomic class with which they would ordinarily be identified: lumpen intellectuals unable to find work in their fields. A member the underclass, especially the lowest social stratum. 2. Vulgar or common; plebeian

Anorak. The happy mag for kids.

Many more beautiful magazines listed here! [via Courtney Riot]

Today, in remembrance of the late Malcolm McClaren, who died this week at the age of 64, the FAM presents 2000’s, The Filth and the Fury. Directed by Julien Temple it is considered a response to Temple’s earlier film, The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, filmed in 1978 and released in 1980. Swindle tells a fictionalized version of the rise and fall of the seminal punk band the Sex Pistols from the point of view of McClaren, who presents himself as an all powerful puppet master, using the band for his own ends. Filming began before the bands disintegration making the final product a disjointed — albeit entertaining — mess, with lead singer John Lydon and original bassist Glen Matlock only appearing in archive footage.

I’ll apologize then to those who have not seen it, as I could not find the film in its entirety to embed here. Instead, we have the film above which, as previously mentioned, represents a rebuttal to that 1980 release, specifically the band’s response. It’s a fascinating story but it also highlights the friction between the two parties, especially between McClaren and Lydon the two men at war over who harbored the creative spark that was responsible for this piece of music history.

The truth, no doubt, lies somewhere in the middle, and regardless of McClaren’s other achievements in fashion, film, and music, the Sex Pistols define his career in the minds of many. Whether he was a genius or a scoundrel depends on who you’re willing to believe.

“Nouadhibou means ‘where the jackals get fat.’ It is also where ships go to die.” – Jan Smith

In 2008 photographer Jan Smith went to document the abandoned hulls of ships at Mauritania’s Nouadhibou Bay, the world’s largest ship graveyard. He would be turned away at the border, sleep in a minefield, and be accused of being a spy before he finally convinced them that his purposes were purely artistic. The government of Mauritania is, apparently, not too keen on allowing visitors in to see the collection of over 300 ships; the legacy of decades of corruption during which harbor officials were bribed into letting people simply abandon vessels, thereby allowing the owners to avoid the fees usually associated with discarding a ship.

Smith’s photos are hauntingly beautiful, stark black and white images that appear to be from another world entirely. Well worth sleeping in a minefield.

via Good Magazine

Issue 01 contributor Eugenio Recuenco recently updated his portfolio with a striking series of 12 images that span very different eras and cultures, all of which are united by one main character: the violin. The larger images can be seen on Recuenco’s site, and the full series can be seen here, after the cut.

In this series, the violin travels from the plains of Africa to an Indian bazaar, from an Elizabethan parlor to a pirate ship, from the hands of a white-clad nun to the laps of two conjoined Geisha twins. While it’s certainly a tribute to the universality of music, many of the images also seem to contain messages about culture, gender and inequality. In the image of Africa, the violins are represented as crops barely growing out of the parched soil. In the image depicting the Islamic world, one burqa-clad woman wearing black gloves points her violin bow accusingly at her fellow player, whose bare hands are exposed – a reference to the modesty police found in many countries in the Middle East, including Israel.  The American image seems to represent a two-party system orchestrating a rigid conformity. Interestingly, many of the images feature a visibly artificial background. In the Eskimo image, the sky is merely a cheap-looking painted sheet. The wallpaper in the Elizabethan image is stitched out of old rags. In fact, the images that appear to look the most “real” are the ones rooted in fantasy, such like the pirate, modern primitive, and fiddler on the factory roof.

(Update: The original playlist is gone, but you can still watch the whole thing here, courtesy of Lionsgate.)

It’s Good Friday today, the celebration of that penultimate event that preceded the most important of Christian miracles. In the spirit of this solemn occasion the Friday Afternoon Movie presents the story of a serial killer who impales his victims with a spike mounted to his video camera’s tripod. Happy Easter!

Released to intense controversy, Michael Powell’s brilliant Peeping Tom from 1960 is a film whose reputation has undergone a renaissance in the ensuing decades, starting in the 1970s. Martin Scorsese, in the book Scorsese on Scorsese, paired it with Fellini’s 8½ as a complete education in directing, saying:

I have always felt that Peeping Tom and 8½ say everything that can be said about film-making, about the process of dealing with film, the objectivity and subjectivity of it and the confusion between the two. 8½ captures the glamour and enjoyment of film-making, while Peeping Tom shows the aggression of it, how the camera violates… From studying them you can discover everything about people who make films, or at least people who express themselves through films.

Such effusive praise aside, Powell made a fantastic picture, one that manages to match the suspense of his contemporary, Alfred Hitchcock whose classic Psycho was released in June of that year, a mere three months after Peeping Tom.

The story of Peeping Tom is a simple one. Mark Lewis is a quiet man who works on a film crew, with aspirations of becoming a filmmaker. To supplement his income he also takes racy photos of women. He lives in a house willed to him by his father and rents out part of it while he poses as a tenant. He slowly becomes interested in Helen, who lives below him with her blind, alcoholic mother. Mark also likes to kill women with the aforementioned tripod, filming them as he is doing so. The explanation for this particular psychosis is that Mark’s father was a prominent psychologist who made his reputation by constantly harassing and terrifying his young son in order to better understand the psychology of fear, all the while filming his reactions, going so far as to wire all the rooms in the house.

To contemporary audiences this is all very old hat but again, at the time it was scandalous. The racier version of a scene with Pamela Green, in which one whole breast is exposed for two whole seconds, is credited with being the first nude scene in a major British feature, but even the cut version of this did nothing to silence the outcry. People were appalled of the idea of camera as weapon almost as much as they were by the fact that Powell cast himself as Mark’s psychologist father with his own son playing the role of Mark as a child, and the backlash effectively ended Powell’s career in the UK. A movie that can be read as an implication of its audience as voyeurs and the directors of horror films as psychotic killers, terrorizing the innocent for entertainment it was perhaps ahead of its time. The reevaluation of Peeping Tom is well deserved and Powell deserves all the recognition he can get.

Meet Teagan White, a 20-year-old Minneapois-based college sophomore originally from Chicago. Her work is the visual equivalent of warm milk and madeleines before bed. It has the same calming effect on me as Amy Ross, Finn Family Moomintroll, and Gnomes by Will Huygen/Rien Poortvliet.

Pictured here are some of Teagan’s illustrations on the topic of “animals doing people things,” inspired by J.J. Grandville’s animal art. After the cut, a motley assortment of favorites, taken from Teagan’s site and her blog. In addition to illustration and fine art, Teagan is also a typographer, sculptor and graphic designer. So young, so talented! One to watch. In fact, watch closely, because Miss Teagan will be collaborating with Coilhouse on something unique in the very near future. You heard it here first! Stay tuned.