Michael Jackson R.I.P.

Ok, now some days are passed and yesterday was his memorial where fans, friends and artists were crying remembering the artist and his songs.

He has been one of my favourite artists when I was a kid, I had all the cassettes and VHS with his performances, but more than Off the Wall or Thriller, I was a fan of BAD and Dangerous just because I was too young for his firsts hits.



I've read a lot of stuff about him and since he died I spent time reading and reading, watching videos, concerts, listen to his music. He was an incredible star as much as a controverse person. I don't want to attack him now, but I think that is important to remember him in every detail, good and evil to avoid any sort of hypocrisy. I pretty much agree with the Independent.co.uk when in the "Michael Jackson Bad and Very Dangerous" article said:

What has stunned me and truly floored me in the past week or so has been the complete sidelining by the entire media of Jackson's later life. Across the board, from every news channel to all the quality papers, there has been wholesale collusion in the notion that "he was a great artist and, yes, there was some, umm, troubling stuff later on, but let's forget all that right now and just celebrate the music".

Hang on a minute. I'm not the kind of person to start Paedogeddon-style witch-hunts gratuitously, but ...

The article it may be a bit too much, but I repeat; I think is right to remember all about him, giving, of course, much more importance to his career as a musician.

Another interesting article is "Michael Jackson R.I.P. - the good, the Bad and the ugly" where the Times Online made a kind of recap of all of the most important moment on the MJ' life with videos. For instance:

8. Signature moves: watch the Moonwalk

1983: Jackson captivated audiences the world over when he premiered his signature dance move – the Moonwalk - on a Motown TV special.

I spent also time watching the first version made by Martin Bashir of the documentary "Living With Michael Jackson"

Living with Michael Jackson was a documentary, in which British journalist Martin Bashir interviewed Michael Jackson over a span of 8 months, from May 2002 to January 2003. It was shown first in the UK on 3 February 2003 and in the US three days later on ABC, introduced by Barbara Walters.
Martin Bashir put the proposal to Jackson as a way to show the world the truth about him and make nothing off limits. Jacksons decision to make the documentary was made on the suggestion by his close friend Uri Geller. It later emerged that Geller had turned down another bid for the interview by journalist Louis Theroux. The interview was very unusual, as it had been extremely rare for Jackson to allow such access to his personal life, or to talk so freely about his traumatic childhood. Nevertheless, he did show some reserve when asked to discuss other personal issues, such as the plastic surgery he has had.

...and than the second cut made after that MJ:

felt betrayed by Bashir and complained that the film gives a distorted picture of his behaviour and conduct as a father.

Well, I would like to rememebr him like this:













Good bye MJ

Being Different

At Uni, for a module coursework, we had to create a documentary respecting the british "Channel 4" guidelines. I decided to do a Mockumentary cause I think it gives you more ways to play around.

Here it is the video:


Often people is curious (like I do) about the creative process behind an idea.
From the creation to the final wrap, that is what I've done:

Being different

The Idea
The starting point was since the beginning the song from Sam Mendes' "American Beauty": "Dead Already" composed by Thomas Newman. I like the tempo of the song and the way it sounds, than the character just pop up in my mind: a different guy with a different childhood spent reading book instead of watching television. The question is: how can he be different?

Creating a Character
I thought that the best way to made Andy Bloom character up was thinking right from the beginning about the few sentences I needed for the 3 minutes joint.
Consistency, attractiveness, sense of rhythm and briefness, those were four of the most important elements I kept in mind while I was writing down the lines.
Andy Bloom's world must be believable and understandable in only 3 minutes.
I built the character keeping in mind the actor that was going to interpret him.

The Actors
To reach a good result without professional actors, the most important thing was them to feel comfortable about the things they needed to say keeping words as much real as possible. Andy, Gen and Dean are friends for real and Eileen is in fact Andy's girlfriend, so for them, they where talking about real people in a real world. Than I asked them to think about the weirdest person they ever known and relate him with the concept they needed to explain in few sentences. I knew since the beginning that give the actors lines to follow couldn't really work, the only way to reach a good result was to explain them the concept, relate it to their real world and wait for the answers to the questions I made for them. It worked.

The Locations
Choosing the locations was the easier part, in the flat I live there are big rooms with big windows and my characters didn't need anything fancy. I was lucky cause my flatmates have very particular things in their rooms so that the talking heads have a much more interesting environment that surrounds them.

Camera, Mic and stuff
I've shoot in SD (PAL, Wide) with an amateur Sony HD camera combined with a Marantz recorder and a shotgun mic. I've used natural light, shooting between 12am to 5pm. The locations are all in my flat. I've played a bit with the exposure, the focus and the white balance, all obviously set on manual. The audio tracks has been recorded on Wav 44.1k on mono and fixed with ProTools and Adobe Soundbooth. The mockumentary has been edited with Adobe Premiere Pro, the opening titles has been created with Adobe After Effects, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. The post-production took about a week to be completed.

Editing Style
The product I had in mind had to be entertaining above all. I wanted to have a gentle jump from a cut to another. After I shoot the talking head interview for Andy Bloom I decided to drop the video and keep the audio cause the light wasn't good enough and so I've used pictures with a sort of Kevin Burns. The opening titles are a mix of camera movements and animated letters, I've used After Effects with a massive number of keyframes to reach a good result. I did it that way to underline Andy's speech cause I think is the most representative for his character.
Images and music are not necessarily following the same rhythm and the edited cuts are following more the words than the music.