Conspiracy theory, that keyword that has somehow entered our everyday lexicon, is a term often used to compartmentalise any narrative that can’t be filed under consensus. Ranging from a lizard alien super race, to everyday political and scientific discourse, why has this banner become such a catch all garbage can for anything we find difficult to confront, explain, or investigate?
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While work is currently under way on Tin Foiled, a dive into how the term conspiracy theory has been weaponised, I’m increasingly finding myself looking back and cross referencing research and work I had done in 2019 and 2020, on the Mathew Hopkins focused documentary “The Watching“. Both subjects share some similar themes and hopefully I’ll expand on these more as they roll out.
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One of the applications I often lean on for any SFX, product or small scale camera work is Dragonframe. It has become the industry standard within the world of stop motion film production, but seems to be something of an enigma to many other professionals in production and post. But look a little closer at what this software can do and more importantly, how seamless the workflow and it should become pretty clear what an amazingly useful tool it can be, even for non animators.
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I’ve just put together a few of my favourite film effects from the Scratchtapes collection, into a mini pack of Final Cut Pro templates. Frame Damage Vol2, is a collection of 15 FCPX effects and a few flare and film clutter transitions.
The templates are made up of telecines from super 8 and 16mm film. The scans are over sized and in some cases, can be cropped in or windowed to reduce the sprocket holes, if need be. I used a few different cutting edge techniques to achieve the damaged effects, including bucket processing out of date film, hand scratching with a hot needle and coating removal with a pan scrubber.
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It’s now 2 years since Codename Rendlesham was finalised and released. With the caveat that few productions and/or witnesses from the US have visited the UK in this time, the Rendlesham story, like many things has seemingly stood still….for now. As underlined in the documentary, the legend of Rendlesham has relied on a constantly evolving narrative, with emerging revelations and claims of new evidence surfacing every few months. Whether or not this evolutionary pause of the story represents the gradual onset of it’s ageing, or we’ll see a sudden revitalisation, remains to be seen. I’m hedging my bets towards the latter for now.
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Chill Factor Films 