Soft Copy’s first music video from their new 2010 release “Vicious Modernism”: Hot Cakes.

“Sounding like a muscular cross between XTC at its most adventurous and Gang of Four at its most accessible, this Toronto band has a knack for making the daring sound user-friendly. ” John Sakamoto, Toronto Star

VIDEO by ANDREW MCALLISTER & SOFT COPY. WWW.SOFTCOPYMUSIC.COM ©2010

3D MODELS CREATED BY THE FOLLOWING CREATIVE USERS OF THE GOOGLE 3D WAREHOUSE COMMUNITY:

TheHark0, Amfab, anonymous, chuck in the air, dr.CYBORG, PaulDesign

Click here to view the embedded video.

For the past while, Kerry Potts and I have been working on a short doc (11 mins) entitled Love on the Street, which premiered at the imagineNATIVE media arts + film festival. In this work, we interview people who are homeless about their perspectives on love. The video also interweaves the interviews with shots of Toronto to convey an intimacy that people on the streets develop with the city. The overall goal was to redirect the audience’s gaze to focus on each person as a partner, friend, parent or lover.

Browse on over to Eye Weekly for a great overview of the imagineNATIVE film + media arts festival, and read their wonderful praise for our short documentary:

Much better is the short doc Love on the Street (***, plays with Jackpot), which marries beautifully shot urban landscape sequences with unguarded interview subjects discussing homelessness and love.

Originally screened at the imagineNATIVE media arts + film festival, Thursday, October 15, 2009. Watch the trailer below.

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FIN DE SIÈCLE presented as dual-screen video installation with audio soundtrack as a part of the VEHICLE project at University of Toronto Art Centre for Nuit Blanche 2008.

For suburban teens, cars enable vices and passions: they facilitate making out, meeting up with friends, and getting to the crucial rock & roll gig in the city. The car creates a private space for sharing secrets, taboo acts and dangerous music. Cars allow freedom, the promise of ‘getting there’, often in spite of the end result. “FIN DE SIÈCLE” is a document of youth, rock & roll, angst, poorly articulated dreams, missed opportunities, let downs, fleeting revelatory moments, expressed in the format of a dual-screen video loop and a limited edition soundtrack by rock band Soft Copy.

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Documentation of the Vehicle at Nuit Blanche 2008 by the Way Up Way Down collective.

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You Knew Everything There Was to Know, and photographs from Weekend Getaways, MobileCity Podcast presented at CONTACT 2008 in cooperation with the Scarborough Arts Council, Scarborough Civic Centre.

Gallery

Acknowledgements

With assistance from:

About

You Knew Everything There Was To Know is a look at the culture, nomenclature and legacy of the idea of Scarborough through the lens of a video camera. The two cities included in this video are Scarborough, Ontario and Scarborough, England.

Scarborough, Ontario began in the vision of Elizabeth Simcoe who claimed that the Scarborough Bluffs reminded her of the limestone cliffs of Scarborough, England. Places inherently manifest the visions of the makers while adapting to the changing needs of inhabitants, which is reflected in the ethnic diversity of Scarborough, Ontario. The use of the camera in this case is like a measuring device, taking stock of the landscape and the people living within it. This project is a kind of social science, (part taxonomy, part scientific investigation) of the legacies of post-colonial cities.

My work positions the viewer as an observer to the everyday, those things which are often overlooked and otherwise considered too banal for serious scrutiny. As such, my videos provoke in the viewer a sense of unheimlich, the uncanny: as the video unfolds, the familiar begins to appear as unfamiliar. As we watch what happens over a brief period of time in everyday urban and rural spaces (the abandoned street corner, the landscape of a glacial mountainside), these places begin to unfold themselves and reveal a sense of wonder. Hence the uncanny: what was previously thought of as an “empty” place, void of any real humanity, begins to point up zones of desire, commodification, growth and change.

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Acknowledgements

This project is produced with the support of the support of the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council, and with the support of the Ontario Arts Council. The Ontario Arts Council is an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Antecedents presented as a dual screen installation in the “Car Project”, a mobile gallery organized by the Way Up Way Down collective: Yam Lau, Sunny Kerr and Tania Ursomarzo. Funded by the Ontario Arts Council.

January 2006. DV. 4:22.

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December 2005. DV. 8:56
Created as a part of a Self-Directed Residency at the The Banff Centre
Banff, Alberta, Canada in July 2005. Completed in December 2005.

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November 2005. NTSC DV. 8:41

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The first images from Antecedents are derived from Super 8 footage shot by my father in 1968 and 1972, at Emerald Lake and the Columbia Icefield in British Columbia, Canada. The original films have been paired with revisits of the original locations shot on digital video. The final sequence presents the Super 8 film, but with the entire image removed, save the dirt, dust and human hairs. In an attempt to reconnect, know or love, individual frames of the film have been edited to extract these fragments of DNA, as they would have been collected by the film projector when these images were screened in the family home. The sound piece that accompanies the original films has been stripped out, and digitally “convoluted”, filtered or added to a minor chord.

Everyday, we try to connect with our immediate surroundings in order to derive some meaning about its nature or our nature. Revisiting the original locations is an attempt to “place” oneself in order to give clues to our nature or identity, and the notion of what or whom the “public” is that surrounds us. The passing of time, and “where we are” becomes a subject in itself.

Created as a part of a Self-Directed Residency at the The Banff Centre. Banff, Alberta, Canada. July 2005
Super 8 footage shot by Peter McAllister, 1968, 1972. Created by Andrew McAllister