Had a great time with Ondi Timoner today filming for her BYODocs Show – seen here! We spoke a little about Think Outside the Box Office – but mostly about my docs Bomb It, Bomb It 2, Better Living Through Circuitry and even going back to Survival Research Laboratories and Target Video. Let me know what you think!
This week marks the official release of the BOMB IT 2 DVD. To purchase, visit our BOMB IT 2 website. Don’t forget to check out this exclusive webisode with BOMB IT 2 artist Darbotz, where he explains his artistic process and the story behind the Squid Monster character featured in his work. Thank you for all of your support!
It is finally time for the US premiere of BOMB IT 2! Thanks to our good friends at Bombingscience.com, Keepitclassic.com, and Tugg.com, you can catch BOMB IT 2 at the O Cinema in the Wynwood District on Wednesday, May 29th at 7:30 pm. But there is a catch. We still need to sell 33 more tickets in order to make the screening happen, so PLEASE help spread the word and reserve your tickets for the US premiere of BOMB IT 2 today.
The screening will be introduced by host Marc Ferman of www.Keepitclassic.com. There will be a live Q&A with director Jon Reiss via Skype following the movie. If you are a fan of street art, graffiti, art, or just pop culture, this is a screening you CANNOT miss! In BOMB IT 2 director Jon Reiss takes audiences to previously unexplored areas of the Middle East, Europe, Asia, the United States and Australia on a hunt for innovative street art and artists.
BOMB IT 2 explores the indigenous street art scenes in Singapore, Bangkok, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, Perth, Melbourne, Copenhagen, Chicago, Austin and the Palestinian refugee camps on the West Bank.
Bomb It 1 + 2 director Jon Reiss speaks with the filmmakers behind “Between the Lines” about street art and graffiti, freedom of speech and democracy. “Between the Lines” is a documentary about a group of Toronto street artists who find new meaning in their work as they defend it against Mayor Rob Ford’s War on Graffiti.
BOMB IT 2 is screening at 6 p.m. at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco on Thursday, October 6th as part of the Can Film Festival, sponsored by the Estria Invitational Graffiti Battle.
“The Can Film Fest” is organized by nonprofit arts organization The Estria Foundation as part of their week long Graffiti Arts Festival taking place October 6-8 in San Francisco.
BOMB IT 2 goes where no graffiti doc has gone before, including the West Bank, Tel Aviv, Jakarta, Copenhagen, and Singapore, among other places. It shows the incredible range of styles and ideas that surround graffiti and street art culture throughout the world and especially in places where most people probably don’t even think it exists.
Graffiti and street art is not a monolithic force around the world – it is different for every individual and every culture – and that is evident in the broad range of practitioners in the film. We are happy to partner with The Estria Graffiti Arts Festival this year and be part of celebrating one of the most vibrant art movements happening in the world today. A lot of misunderstanding and miscommunication exists surrounding this world, and the more outreach by organizations such as the Estria Foundation, the better!
This past week we launched the Australian section of Bomb It 2. I was especially excited to go to Australia to meet graffiti and street artists because I had been a fan for years and it was economics that prevented us from including the country in the first Bomb It. I was also excited because it meant that Bomb It had now covered our sixth continent of global graffiti and street art (next stop Antarctica!)
First stop was the remote city of Perth (making it about a 22 hour plane flight from Los Angeles). I had the pleasure of meeting Stormie Mills whose work is some of the most incredible I have seen in 5 years of filmming – but he is also one of the nicest people I have met on my travels (and I have had the great fortune of meeting a ton of wonderful people.) Stormie is very eloquent about his work (why he works primarily in black, white, gray and silver) as well as the city of Perth.
Next stop was Melbourne – big shout out to Andy Mac from Untilnever who hooked me up with Phibs from Everfresh. I shot Phibs in the rain – on my last day – the last piece for Bomb It 2. Everfresh is a seminal, prolific and wonderfully stylish crew – check out their new book. I also had a chance to interview crew members Reka which will be a future piece and film a piece by Makatron (which made it into the Phibs piece). I love how Phibs incorporates so many influences into his work – which as he says reflects himself “being somewhat of a mutt.”
Two One is a Japanese expat working in Melbourne – I was able to catch him grinding a piece of wood into the shape of an elephant as well as painting a few other pieces. In the episode he speaks to why his subjects are mostly animals – animals that have been given power by humans – interesting how his Japanese tradition influences his street work – which was really given birth in Melbourne.
Last but not least is Ash Keating (and big thanks to Phibs for introducing me to Ash and Two One). This is one of the longest pieces in Bomb It 2 – partly due to the wide ranging nature of the interview that I was able to do – covering a good portion of his career, but also because Ash opened up his archive to us – so that you can see never before seen footage of him in action, spraying with punctured cans and fire extinguishers, throwing and dumping paint on surfaces, as well as repurposing vinyl sign waste into art performances. Ash Keating is also one of the most eloquent people I interviewed on the relationship of public unsanctioned art to the question of who controls public space. Further how this public work can actually create a sense of community where it takes place.
It was a pretty crazy trip – due to family and work obligations I was only able to go to Australia for 11 days. I spent 8 days teaching four Think Outside the Box Office workshops in four cities: Perth, Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne. This left 3 days not teaching – I spent 2 days shooting all of the pieces and one day sick. I hope to return to Australia to be able to see a bit of the country and meet more filmmakers and artists.
Some acknowledgements: Thank you to Kathleen Drum and Mike Cowap and everyone from Screen Australia, Jack Sargeant and the Perth Revelation Film Festival, Defrim Isai from the South Australian Film Corporation for making the trip possible. Thanks to Pedro T Pinto for the fabulous camera work – a rare pleasure to work with a DP. Andy Mac and Phibs for the introductions. All of the artists for their generosity. I was also able to film Vexta and Andy Mac who will be the subjects of future pieces.
For this week’s Bomb It 2 installment on Babelgum we went back to Asia to look at Jakarta, Singapore and Hong Kong.
Jakarta has a vibrant graffiti and street art scene and was my first stop after Bangkok (covered in week 1 of Bomb It 2). I was there for only six hours – but I had a chance to film and interview Darbotz who paints a giant monster squid and freely talks about street art and its relationship to semiotics!
Finding graffiti writers in Singapore was perhaps the most startling since I was familiar with the very strict laws and caning used against graffiti writers there. I was headed to Singapore to teach at the NYU campus there and planned to use that as a base to film graffiti and street art elsewhere in Asia, but I didn’t think that I was going to meet any there. But I was pleasantly surprised to be able to talk to both Killer Gerbil as well as Zero, two street artists who were very aware of the odd relationship that their country has with illegal painting on walls and how the country while clamping down on graffiti also tries to co-opt it.
Finally this week are two pieces on the Hong Kong artists Mic and Xeme. Xeme is also responsible for Invasion Magazine – about all things street and graff in Asia. In Hong Kong as with much of the rest of Asia – there are many walls to paint – and not that many artists – or anti graffiti sentiment – eg it is pretty easy to paint in Asia. Xeme finds himself bringing graffiti tourists around to the best spots. But I particularly liked that he spoke about writing in Chinese – and the difficulty communicating with an international scene when he uses his local language.
Mic talks not only about the irony of being arrested by the Chinese government for doing graffiti – while at the same time being commissioned to do murals for the same government (even the police). He also speaks eloquently about his works relationship to the public space in Hong Kong and the plethora of advertising that they are assaulted with every day.
I hope you like the pieces – and I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Jon
No guest post today – instead I wanted to write about the Bomb It 2 episodes that we uploaded to Babelgum this week.
The attitudes and motivations of graffiti and street artists in the Palestinian refugee camps on the West Bank is quite different than those of most writer’s I have spoken to around the world. Their work is much more politicized – it centers around the struggle that they face every day. I had the pleasure of meeting and filmming four current and former graffiti artists and street artists in the Muhnned Alazzh, Ayed Arafah, Aysar Daward and Khaled Ajainia. The results of those interviews now comprise three Bomb It 2 Webisodes on our Babelgum channel. Let me know what you think!
The key difference of West Bank writers was the subject matter that they wrote about – how they used graffiti as a means of expression. Traditionally in the camps, graffiti has been a method of communication between the Palestinian leaders and the people. Also as a means of communication between people in the camps.
From those early uses a number of artists moved into more creative uses of graffiti and street art. Muhnned and Aysar both are heavily influenced by slain Palestinian caricaturist Naji Alali – painting his work throughout the camps.
The original work painted for my by Ayed Arafah deals with the tragedy that he is so close to the sea, but because of his status, he has never been allowed to see the sea.
One of the most interesting discussions was how the artists felt about painting on the “Apartheid Wall” the gigantic separation between Israel and the West Bank. The dominant position was that by beautifying the wall with art – you make it acceptable, that instead of talking about how horrible it is, you devolve into discussions about the art. They want to retain the brutal nature of the wall, and not beautify it with art. An interesting counterpoint by Khaled Ajainia was that while life in the camps is brutal, it is important to embrace art and celebrate life.
As some of you might know – Bomb It 2 launched last week on Babelgum. What is Bomb It 2? As I mentioned in the intro to Simon Pulman’s post last week on this blog, its not another feature – it’s a web series – part of a growing – dare I say – transmedia extension of the Bomb It experience.
The idea originated simply. I started travelling to a number of foreign locales introducing Think Outside the Box Office and holding workshops on the topic of distribution and marketing. Many of these places were cities that I had not travelled to for Bomb It, but still had vibrant graffiti and street art communities. Some cities were places where I had no idea what kind of graffiti culture to expect (Singapore especially). I approached Babelgum to see if they would be interested in sponsoring a new series of episodes to expand Bomb It further out into the world – and they agreed. (With the extra footage of the original Bomb It we had created a similar series of episodes for Babelgum.)
Continue reading →
Babelgum Actually — gasps — Pays for Users to Create Videos
By PATRICK J. SAUER
So far as I know, Babelgum is the only company paying Web-video creators money up front,” says chief revenue officer Douglas Dicconson. And not for low-brow stuff, but ambitious professional works such as British documentarian Daniel Edelstyn’s Vodka Empire, the unlikely 25-part saga of his discovery that he’s heir to a Ukrainian vodka factory, and his attempt to bring Zorokovich 1917 to the modern spirits world. […]
Dicconson says that he closed more revenue in the first quarter of 2010 than in the past three years combined. And momentum continued this past spring as Babelgum’s traffic spiked to 5.7 million visitors a month, when Vamped Out and Vodka Empire first aired. Na zdorovye!
3 to Watch
Dirty Oil
Babelgum’s first fully financed feature film, helmed by Academy Award-nominee Leslie Iwerks, will get its U.S. debut as an episodic series. Dirty Oil examines the economic and ecological impact of the oil sands in Alberta.
Vamped Out
When we last saw our vampiric out-of-work-actor hero Alowisus Hewson (Jason Antoon) in season one, he was sucking a young Hollywood starlet’s blood while formerly skeptical documentary filmmaker Elliot Finke (series writer and director Kevin Pollak) wigged out. Will the 172-year-old thespian find work in a Twilight world?
Bomb It 2
Babelgum produced the original street art/graffiti documentary, and the sequel will profile artists from locations such as Singapore (third offense is a caning!) and the Middle East. “In Israel, there’s a blossoming street-art culture with percolations of ideas,” says director Jon Reiss, “but in the Palestinian refugee camps, everything is political.”
Read more here or on the September issue of Fast Company magazine.