Jamie Chinnery - Showreel 2013

Finally, here it is, I have complied all the work I have done over the past nine months into a Showreel.

I have made two versions of this showreel, please watch the second one
HERE

Fifteen Dead - Music Video

My band, Fifteen Dead had recently got back from touring America when we decided it was about time that we made a music video. Obviously this would be a good way for me to get one under my belt, as well as get practice doing them in the first place before I was doing one as a paid job.

Jack Peppiette and I met up to discuss concepts and art direction, we decided we should decorate the space we were going to use for performance with flags and candles to create atmosphere.

We had recently started practicing at a practice rooms in the caverns of Edinburgh's Old Town. So we thought this would be an excellent atmospheric place to do the video. I also rented out some strobe powerful strobe lights to give some parts of the video a frightening feel. Unfortunately in practice when using a strobe and a DSLR this creates a black bar across the screen for much of the filming.

We were on a pretty tight time frame, and with all the candles creating a surprising amount of heat, the rain outside leaking into the cavern making it incredibly humid and having to perform over and over for 3 hours, we had to call it quits. Unfortunately I really don't think we got enough takes to make the video as good as it can be. We so hopefully soon, it will make down to the cavern again to get some more takes under our belt and finish off the video.

For the narrative section of the video Jack was going to paint a symbol on a flag that was also used in the video. This all went pretty well.... as far as filming goes. We had to madly scrub the floor and walls to get the red paint off when we were done before anyone noticed.

Jack Peppiette - Artist, Apprentice Tattooist

Jack grew up just down the road from me, he was a few years younger than me but was good friends with my younger brother, they used to spend hours drawing all sorts of horrible evil torturous monsters that I'm sure would give any child psychiatrist a seizure. When he was about 12 his family moved to America and we never really heard from them again.

Jack being all arty with an arty hat and badass tattoos.

Untill one day I went into the tattoo studio where I had got some work done before to book myself a birthday tattoo, the guy behind the counter was skinny and bearded with similar hair to me, but he was covered in totally awesome tattoos. I have a very particular taste in tattoos, normal, unimaginative tattoos really nauseate me so when I saw this guy I was like, NICE. After I booked a session he just said '....Jamie?' I had literally no idea who this dude was so I apologized and asked if I should know him and he just said 'Jack'. Instantly I saw the little boy who used to run about with my wee brother and steal my guitar without asking in this grown mans face. 

traditional style mandala

Anyway, Jack and I talked for a while and I told him I had been doing video stuff and he was very interested to have a big part project he was planning filmed. He was going to make a massive Mandala, which is a Indian type of circular, repeating pattern. But he was going to do it in a Modern Traditionalist' tattooing style. 

Jacks Modern Traditionalist Mandala

Unfortunately Jack made a mistake near the end of filming so he has to get the project back up to the same point again before we can finish filming. Hopefully it will be soon! check jacks website here

http://jackpeppiette.blogspot.fr/

Marcus Houston - Self Defense Expert

After the success of the first videos I did for Marcus of Combat Ready Gym and me spending more and more of my own time there training, Marcus and I talked about the idea of creating an internet presence for himself. We talked about the idea of celebrity and that you only need to convince people that you are famous  to actually become famous. 

 

I started filming Marcus doing instructional videos to not only help raise his profile and internet presence in the self defense field but also the presence of the gym. After a while the idea came about that we could make a proper 'History channel reality TV show' style intro for it, thus creating a high production value for what was really just Marcus doing demonstrations like he would do in a class. 

I wanted to mix footage of Marcus's skills with kinetic type. I needed to give it quite a dramatic feel so I used camera shake as well as my signature quick cuts.

Scottish D.I.Y: Cramond Island

The festival on Cramond Island is something I look forward to all year. I think that it encompasses all the most beautiful parts of the D.I.Y Punk ideology. Cramond Island is a small island off the coast of Edinburgh, only accessible by a causeway that is covered by the tide most of the day. Once you are on the Island, you are trapped. Every year there is a music festival held on the island completely for free, all the equipment is carried over by the bands and spectators alike. I like to think it is an island (metaphorical as well as literal) of beauty and unity, in a sea of chaos and division.

Watch the video here

Krav Maga Edinburgh Promotional Clip

My good friend Lawrie is an excellent personal trainer as well as a kickboxing and self defense instructor at Combat Ready Gym in Edinburgh, I highly recommend him if you are ever thinking about getting a personal trainer or taking up martial arts. Contact him here. The owner of Combat Ready, Marcus Houston told Lawrie he wanted a promotional video made for the gym to help show what was available to potential customers. Of course, Lawrie knew just who to call! 

Lawrie and Kate having a lovely time training, while two men tear eachothers faces off in the background

Combat ready is a 'reality based martial arts gym' that also deals in 'CrossFit' and Kickboxing. I met with the owner to discuss what he wanted. Marcus is a man who definitely knows what he wants, which I like in a client. He wanted the clip to be 'like a badass music video with loads of awesome martial arts'. Right up my street. Filming was surprisingly easy, all I had to do was go along to some of the classes and film what looked most impressive, the guys and girls were under strict instruction to appease me if I asked them to do a particular move again, which helped a lot! haha!

Marcus lovingly caressing a soldiers face. 

I was slightly in dismay when I was told that the soundtrack would be Ed Sheeran but when I actually listened to the song properly I noted that it was very percussive which is always good for getting awesome cuts in time with the music. This coupled with the fact there was obviously going to be loads of people punching stuff made for some sweet snare hit/punching bag hit combos. 

Marcus had me make a fair few changes to the video and I think there was 3 drafts in total but all his input definitely made the video come out much better than if he hadn't said anything. 

SCOTTISH D.I.Y : ShortsFest

This next commission came from young Hashim, who had seen my first installment of Scottish D.I.Y. He was  putting on a two day festival in Glasgow with bands from all over the UK. This made all the more impressive by the fact that, when I say 'young Hashim' I mean it, he wasn't even old enough to legally attend the festival he was putting on. The venue didn't know that though!

Hashim, looking (and being) really young.

This was quite obviously going to be a big undertaking so I once again employed the help of my friend Pawel Kuncewiz and his fancy shamancy Canon Mk2. Pawel and I tried to get as different footage from each other as possible, one of us would be on the band from the stage and the other from the crowd etc. We had a laptop set up in the backstage area with our external hard drives connected so whenever we ran out of space on our SD cards we could ran back and download our stuff onto them and swap for our spare SD. On the whole filming went pretty well. 

Pawel being dreamy.

For the intro of this video I wanted to show just how many bands were playing this festival, but I really tried to make each clip actually fit with the music. I tried to sync up the vocalist of the band with the vocals on the music and the strumming of the guitars etc. 

This film was pretty well received in the hardcore/punk community and has been featured on various blogs. 

Michael Da Bear - Tattooist

Michael owns the tattoo shop that Tomaz (my first commission) works in. He does totally incredible lifelike portraits as well as pretty much any other type of tattoo you can imagine. I really enjoyed doing Tomaz's video so when Michael asked me to do one I was very excited. If anything I just love tattoos so getting to watch one being done from start to finish is really interesting to me. 

one of the tattoos featured in the video

I think this video was when I started really putting effort into making the video fit PERFECTLY in time with the music, which now I is a strong part of my style. Michael wanted to use Prodigy for the sound track, you can never go wrong with a bit of Prodigy. I think my favorite part of this video is the intro where the tattoo machine is being put together. Tomaz had asked me to do something with fast cuts for this part of his video, which I tried, but didn't have the experience (or possibly the correct soundtrack) to make it work properly at the time. I think I did a pretty good job here though. 

When I showed the video to Michael we had a bit of a disagreement when it came to this quick cutting editing style though. He thought that it didn't give you enough time to see the tattoos, which I can understand but to me, analyzing tattoos can be done on the pictures on his website, the video is to draw people in to investigate further. Regardless, the customer is always right! And I made a version for him with slower cuts and I kept my original version to use at my own discretion.

Michaels version of the video

 

MY VERSION OF THE VIDEO

Jason Rees - Cancer Research fund raising video

My friend Jason is genuinely one of the nicest people I have ever met, He never seems to spend a moment idle and is always helping people out in whatever way he can. He had told me about how he was cutting off his dredlocks, which he had been growing for 6 years, for charity. This idea was met with much dismay around our friend group as we all loved Jason's hair and felt it was kind of like his trademark. As the date drew closer he had collected almost £600 for Cancer Research UK. Jason had the amazing idea of making a video when he did it and using it as a way to collect money for the charity even after the event had happened.

Before and after! 

Jason's favorite musician is Frank Turner, so of course he wanted to use him as the sound track. Being from a punk background we didn't imagine using his music would cause any sort of issue when it came to copyright but Jason emailed him anyway and he said it would be fine. Once the video was online, Frank Turner himself posted the video on his facebook and within an hour it had 300+ views.

WATCH THE VIDEO HERE

Tomaz Wrablox - Tattooist / Artist

I met the lovely gentleman known as Tomaz Wrablox at my degree show. I think its safe to say, he was the victim of my first ever piece of 'Shmoozing'. He told me he was a tattoo artist and that my friend, who was in my Palace of Crust documentary had been in the shop getting a tattoo done. I offered to do a video for him and he liked the idea. A couple of days later I was in his shop filming him for most of the day.

I really wanted the interview part of the video to look cool, I hate how interview backgrounds are just COUCH. WALL. There is an old abandoned textiles mill in Aberdeen that wasn't far from the studio in which Tomaz worked so we decided to do it there.

I think the interview looks pretty cool, even if the camera is a bit shaky (I hadn't bought my L-bar yet) and the sound picks up loads of wind (I didn't realize that is what the fluffy cover for the mic was for).

WATCH THE VIDEO HERE

Scottish D.I.Y - Palace of Crust

I have, as far back as I can remember, been obsessed with documentaries. I would imagine my obsession began with watching nature documentaries on the BBC as a young child. Later on that would change to watching films about bands I liked, I loved how a documentary wasn't a piece of art by the band, like a album or music video, but it revealed to you WHY their personalities drew them to make the album of video the way it was. I believe art and music should be an extension of the self and an expression of the way the artist feels. So when I really truly love a work of art, I feel like I, to a certain extent can imagine what the artist is like. A documentary gives you the opportunity to firstly see if that assumption was right and furthermore can illuminate things about the work you hadn't considered or reveal things about the artist you never would have imagined, and best of all, in their words.

In my final year of University I was living in a house with some friends that I was in a band with, we used to host gigs in our livingroom for free. The whole way through uni I been doing 3D modelling projects as this was what I had always wanted to do when I finished, but I was having some serious trouble with my project this year and was desperate from a break from it.

My housemate suggested that at the next gig we hosted, I should rent some cameras out from uni and film it, then upload it to the internet so the bands could use it to promote themselves. I thought this was a great idea, then suggested we could do interviews and before long I had decided to make it a full blown project.

Of course the only problem was that I had literally never done anything like this before and had no idea what I was doing. Because the jargon and tech stats ment absolutely nothing to me I ended up using a DV camera but also recruiting one of my friends at uni who had a Mark 2 Canon, as you can imagine the footage didn't exactly match up.

The first edit that I came up with was surprisingly well received. And was featured on some music blogs with good reviews. It also got 1000 views in a week, which I never would have expected.

 However after not very long I decided it had to be redone as, for lack of a better term, it was crap. The main issue was it was just way too long, and if you weren't already into punk music, you would never want to watch a band play a whole song, let alone two. Now these thousand views I got just embaress me and I wish I had waited to release it to the public.

Here is the first edit, if you want to watch it but..... please don't.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46jL7i_G5bA

My second edit edit, needed a refined structure and some creation of context for people that weren't into punk and who didnt understand the idea of D.I.Y culture. I shorted down the performances drastically and wrote out a monologue to go over the intro which outlined the ideals of D.I.Y.

Obviously I wish I could go back and redo this now, but it was a massive learning experience as I did almost everything I could wrong. But here it is!

Hi! I'm Jamie, what's your name!?

Hey!

So I've finally got round to creating a blog for all my work. We were never forced to do this when I was at uni, which I am kind of annoyed about now. Not being someone that has to shove all their achievements in everybody's face all the time, I never really got into blogging but here I am.

I was quite surprised how much I had actually done when I gathered all my work into one project folder to create my showreel, but because I didn't blog about it at the time, I'm going to have to do it retrospectively. As I only started doing video work, (as in, actually using a camera and filming things myself) in my final year, through this blog you will still see my progression from complete n00b to what I am today. (A guy that has more than one lens for his big fancy camera! I used to hate those guys!)

I hope you enjoy me spraffing on about myself!

Jamie