A beautiful winter’s scene, a cross dressing Father Christmas and a pooping reindeer. Made using pre 1923 vintage graphics from graphicsfairy.blogspot.com.

Merry Christmas!

Happy Birthday Broadway ‘ Cake Film’ HD from Benjamin Wigley on Vimeo.

Broadway had commisioned Swirls Bakery to create a cake in the shape of a cinema seat to celebrate their birthday and asked Ben if he’d make a short “making of” to be played before films that week and in their cafe bar, online etc. We knew we’d like to incorporate film symbology and scenes along with the baking of the cake so decided to rip off homage the work of Vincent Bousserez & Slinkachu. They both use tiny figures of people in real world environments and we thought this would be a nice way to incorporate some iconic film scenes in amongst the baking of the cake.

Once we’d decided on the film scenes we’d like to incorporate/the ones we could figure out how to fit into a load of flour, sugar and cake, the little model figures were purchased online from a model railway website and cut, melted, glued and painted to resemble the characters they were representing.

The actual cake wasn’t to be made for another couple of weeks so we filmed the baking of a mock cake and miniature scenes at my flat (apparently because I have big, bright windows but I suspect because Ben didn’t want his place caked in flour) using a DSLR and a lot of flour. Ben’s wife Megan came over and we filmed her going through the stages of mixing the ingredients and baking a chocolate cake (as we knew the base of the final cake would be chocolate). We then spent most of the day balancing monkeys and little men amongst bits of cake and ingredients to try and represent, as closely as we could, the scenes from the various films.

Some stills from the day

A series of cheerful Christmas knitted jumpers come to life. Merry Christmas!!

Read more about the film and watch the trailer at www.artdocs.co.uk

See more of Ben’s work at www.benjaminwigley.co.uk

Finally got around to updating my website and showreel, my previous one was looking dated, it was entirely in Flash and the content was ancient so I thought it was about time for an overhaul.

This is only bare bones at the moment, I’m hoping to add a more thorough work section with information on various projects, and if I think it’s interesting enough possibly a couple of walk through/tutorials on bits and pieces.

I’ve also moved the blog into WordPress from Blogger in an attempt to make me update it more regularly, as you can see from the last post my time between posting is usually pretty generous.

The story was a bit convoluted but can be summarised thus:  Ben and myself put a sack on Paul’s head and beat him up in a dirty old chicken shed in the dark, genius I’m sure you’ll agree.

This was the same dirty old chicken shed we had filmed parts of the Bolivian film in over the summer, however in October it was a lot darker and colder, still at least I wasn’t in my underpants and a Nazi helmet this time.  As the chicken shed is in the middle of a field surrounded by houses we were hoping we wouldn’t draw their attention, I didn’t want to try and explain why Paul was tied to a chair, gagged, covered in blood with a bag over his head, more worryingly why Ben and I were wearing tights on our heads.

We spent the next day at Ben’s trying to make scary images with a load of weird stuff like pigs’ ears, silly string & talcum powder.  Along the way we discovered it’s actually quite hard to breathe through tights and boiling hot custard and that pigs’ ears and silly string in water isn’t scary, it  just bastard stinks!

Another pleasant discovery was that if you cover a balloon in latex, pop it, fill it with red coloured gunk and squeeze, it looks like a prolapsed rectum (according to Paul who apparently knows someone whose mate’s mate knows someone’s mate whose cousin’s mate’s dad’s best friend’s rectum exploded in his kitchen), although I’m still not sure how scary a big fat hell rectum is.

Helped my friend Ben out with some stop motion bits for his documentary about the Vissarion Christ, some nutty bloke in Siberia who thinks God is his Dad (I don’t think he is, but you never know, he does have a beard though so perhaps).

We weren’t going for photo realism (just as well), more of a Michel Gondry thing.  We pinned up a bluescreen, layed out a load of plastic sheet and then covered Ben’s floor with loads of potting soil and clods of dirty old ground and grass, complete with several thousand hitch-hiking ants.  Rocks borrowed from the garden in front of Ben’s flats covered in flour created a mountain range/pile of rocks covered in flour.

Little plastic sheep (as seen above alongside an albino cow and a dead horse), fencing and a couple of hours of inching along a toy train and we’d finished and had the fun task of sweeping up all the soil and ants.

If you’d like to see Ben’s documentary go to:
www.insearchofthevissarion.co.uk

Stills from the day:

For that authentic Bolivian look always use the most orange fake tan you can find, as displayed here by Ben, who, as you can see by his gesture, was more than happy to have his photo taken with a tangerine face.

Again, authentic Bolivian stuntmen always wear a nifty vest, underpants and nazi helmet combination, as modelled here by Paul, again Ben shows how happy he is to be photographed. Unfortunately, as I took the photos on my phone there are none of me, what a shame.
In the background you can see the huge dirt mound we decided to run up and over wearing our underpants, vest, helmet and smart shoes. Upon reaching the top of this mound we discovered, much to our surprise several football matches being played and people staring at us.
Paul described running up the dirt mound breathing in building dust in our pants, vest and smart shoes, covered in fake tan and sweat on one of the hottest days of the year “the single worst experience of my life”.

Filming Paul lifting the giant weight in his stunt tracksuit, everything above the wooden fence would be replaced with an image of the Bolivian mountains and the giant weight added on top.

Ben and myself in our trendy Bolivian stunt tracksuits and helmets. We photographed ourselves in a wide pose so we could animate the human tower on top of the footage we shot of Paul, the blue fabric was to try and stop our feet getting lost in the grass.

After a dirty, miserable day of filming in the boiling heat followed by an all nighter to edit and finish the effects and sound, Paul managed to somehow erase the entire tape on the way to hand it in. Luckily for Paul’s testicles we had a backup copy

Some stills from the day:

Filming Paul walking down and accross the road, this would be shot immediately afterwards with Paul dressed as his double.  During post production the two shots were joined using a mask so that it appears the two versions of Paul are in the same scene.  We planned and filmed a nice 180 degree pan from one double to the other at the bus stop, however we cleverly failed to notice a car pull up and park in between filming the two halves making them impossible to combine in the limited time available.  Obviously this was all Ben Wigley’s fault and absolutely nothing to do with me at all whatsoever.

Ben setting up the shot of Paul’s double turning and walking down the street into the distance, or, if you’re a toothless old hag with no watch who smells of piss, measuring the angle of the incline in the road using a theodolite.

To accomplish the disembodied door portal we built a door and frame and made it stand freely in the alleyway using two highly technical methods: 1) great big bits of wood wedged in the ground and 2) Paul’s brother, Mike, who stood behind the door and held it still and upright.  Michael also doubled for Paul in one shot when we wanted to do a hand held track down the alleyway and behind the double, as Mike was wearing a dark jacket we shoved a folded piece of paper into his collar to represent the shirt collar and kept him close to the camera so he would be out of focus.

Paul’s double opens the mysterious portal door to reveal… two blokes trying to prop up the door and stop it from moving.

Our film was shortlisted and screened at the cinema, from left there’s me, Paul (in the white t-shirt and hat staring at the camera), Ben and Meg; Ben’s girlfriend.  In front of us is a lad doing a cracking impression of a tawny owl/tiger, or possibly miming the action of honking a woman’s bosoms (I apologise if you’re permanently like this due to some form of muscle taughtening disease/disability).  Two rows behind him there is a man with a human arm extending out of his rectum.