Online Silverscreen 1: Concrete Poets “Writers Block”
October 06, 2007
To those of you who frequent UK skateboarding websites and forums, the name Concrete Poets should already be familiar to you. With their website already established, countless mentions on The Story Store and Slam City sites, and a world of hype built up on the Sidewalk forum, you'd have to be visually impaired to not know that The Concrete Poets are about to unleash their first full length effort. With "Writers Block" finally been released through the Story Film Makers Guild in mid October, we thought we'd give the man responsible for the Concrete Poets empire, Henry Edwards-Wood, chance to fill us in on the background to the project. Read on...
Could you break down for us exactly how much time you put into the making of Writers Block? Including filming, editing, motion graphics etc...
Damn, there's no actual way to be accurate on this as i've been working on the vid for about 2 years its pretty much engulfed my life, Filming wise it was mainly done at weekends and occasionally evenings and holidays and that we'd meet at SB skate for abit then jump in the car and go from spot to spot. Pretty usual stuff I guess except we had to do it all around college / work / personal life and all that. We'd just film all day till the skaters were to tired or my arm felt like it was about to drop off. Towards the end it got harder as everyone tried to wrap up the sections and also because i was doing a lot of filming for other people as well. I remember the day I'd decided we were done filming it was the maddest feeling, I then spent literally 2 weeks glued to my Mac for about 14 hours a day minimum, I had been working on rough section edits for months in my spare time at work and stuff so I had the basic skeleton of the vid already their but it was a matter of tweaking every little thing rearranging stuff, grading the clips and adjusting levels and that. The motion graphics kind of take a lot of time but are sometimes more fun cos i could get creative and mess around in photoshop then animate it in After Effects but for the complicated ones where i literally had to adjust keyframes and settings on each frame they took literally hours. I edited the credits in one day, woke up at 9 started it, from scratch, finished at like 4 in the morning.
The level of filming and editing displayed on Writers Block seems to be up there with any competant company based video thats been released recently, did you purposefully strive to create a scene video that matched the production standards of "professional" releases? If so, what are your inspirations?
I love (as most people do) all the Blueprint Videos as well as vids like Mosaic and Yeah Right, they were the first vids I watch where I actually took note of the effort that went into them, I would literally rinse them over and over studying the camera angles and editing techniques, working out what was good for which trick and spot. It was those high end videos that made me wanna film in the first place, cos after watching them if I was watching a video I would instantly see a dodgy angle or budget effect or what ever and it would take away from the companie's integrety. I knew that scene videos come dime a dozen so I just decided that if I was gonna make a video, Id have to try and use the same quality control as any professional outfit, so I would look at each bit of footage and think would I accept that if i was watching it in a professional release?
Henry Edwards-Wood. Photo: Concrete Poets
A lot of people seem eager to compare the look and feel of Writers Block to that of Static 2, would you class Josh Stewart as a direct influence on your work? Where else do you draw influence from?
I'm not gonna lie, Josh Stewart is probably one of my favourite editors at this time. Static 2 is also one of my favourite videos, I like it cos it's independent but also the way he edits is so grimey and hip hop-esque whilst still being elegant and steezy. I draw a lot of influence from the old Transworld videos like Modus Operandi, and I love the editing in Photosynthesis. Its probably from watching all those vids that I love playing around with digital film to make it look like its cellulite, film burns, stutters, flickers etc but tried to make it more grimey and less glossy to show the darker side of London / Britain.
For those who have yet to watch Writers Block, could you clarify how a London scene video came to be released through a shop in Sheffield?
Well basically Shaun Currie has a lot to do with it, and I'm sure we'll go into Shaun abit later, but basically he moved to Sheffield about a year ago and instantly embedded himself in the scene and has become a bit of a local celebrity. Anyways so he kinda got us abit of hype up there and he said he walked into story one day to find Baines looking at his page on the Concrete Poets website. Next thing I know, Baines myspaces me and says hes interested in releasing the video through the Filmers Guild Label. This was like a dream to me as up to that point the vid was purely under our own steam and we weren't sure many people outside of London would get to see it. We went up to Sheff soon after to see Shaun and to talk with Mark about the vid, we showed him what we had so far and he was really into it and it went from there really.
