Marcus Moonen

Castingsession today!
This afternoon we will be holding the first castingsession for The Space Between, our new short film in our fantastic location Absolute Zero. It's been (and still is) a bit hectic, to get everything ready for the actors to come in and show us what they got, since both Andrew and I have the toils of daily life to contend with as well. But we'll be ready!

Candidates
We've been asking people to register themselves as candidates for the film through our "The Space Between Facebook Page" and we've been talking to people we meet at work, in clubs, on the streets! As it stands, we're looking forward to quite a turnout for our two planned castingsessions. I've met a few of the candidates and all of them were lovely, making me a bit sad that we only have 5 parts to fill for the film. Maybe talk to Andrew about writing in a few more characters! ;)

---Information for candidates---
As you might already know, we've planned two castingsessions on the 20th and 22nd of september. We would love to know if you're gonna come, but you can also surprise us by just dropping by. We're looking for 3 male and 2 female actors. All the dialogue in the film will be in English. We are looking for an international cast, so any nationality is welcome. You will however have to speak... English! :) During the castingsession the director and screenwriter will ask you a couple of questions to get a feel for who you are and you will be asked to play a short scene in front of a camera with another actor or actress. The film is being shot on professional equipment, however it's low to no-budget, so this is something you would do for the experience and the exposure. We plan to submit the film to many filmfestivals and competitions.

If you feel like this is the opportunity you've been waiting for please let us know by responding to one of the events on Facebook (link below)! If you have any questions, contact us through our Facebook Page. More information about the film and schedules will be available at the casting sessions.

Links
Casting Session 20-09-2011
Casting Session 22-09-2011
The Space Between Facebook Page

A new film!
I'm currently working on a new short film, a dark comedy called "The Space Between". It was written by my friend Andrew Hickson, owner of the best cocktail bar in Nijmegen: Absolute Zero. Currently we're in pre-production, still punching up the script, scouting locations and planning our schedule. We're also looking for companies or individuals to sponsor this production. Things we need would be catering, wardrobe, hair, make up. If you would like to help out by volunteering your skill or services, please let us know by contacting us through this site or on our Facebook Page. Our intention is to start filming somewhere in November over the course of a few weekends. Not much to say yet about a releasedate, but it won't be before 2012 comes around.

Location
Set in a nightclub, the film is about a guy trying to win the heart of the girl behind the bar, losing himself along the way. The main location and castinglocation will be Absolute Zero, which has a very nice modern look and feel. Here are some stills:

Casting
We've planned two castingsessions on the 20th and 22nd of september. We're looking for 3 male and 2 female actors. All the dialogue in the film will be in English. We are looking for an international cast, so any nationality is welcome. You will however have to speak... English! :) During the castingsession the director and screenwriter will ask you a couple of questions to get a feel for who you are and you will be asked to play a short scene in front of a camera with another actor or actress. The film is being shot on professional equipment, however it's low to no-budget, so this is something you would do for the experience and the exposure. We plan to submit the film to many filmfestivals and competitions.

If you feel like this is the opportunity you've been waiting for please let us know by responding to one of the events on Facebook (link below)! If you have any questions, contact us through our Facebook Page. More information about the film and schedules will be available at the casting sessions.

Links
Casting Session 20-09-2011
Casting Session 22-09-2011
The Space Between Facebook Page

Since I'm running Adobe's Premiere Pro as a part of Production Premium CS5.5, I bought an nVidia Quadro 4000 to make sure I take advantage of the CUDA technology and Adobe's Mercury Engine. My platform is a Mac Pro 8 core 2.4GHz with 24GB RAM, which came with an ATI Radeon card that is not supported by Adobe. Apple does not allow upgrades in their custom-built [sic] towers, I had to buy it separately and install the card myself.

I'm shooting DV and HDSLR footage, for which Premiere Pro CS5.5 is a great solution (especially when reading the horrorstories about FCPX) for native editing of both. I shouldn't complain about performance when I can edit HDSLR on this system as if I'm cutting DV footage on a slow pc, but still I'm kind of underwhelmed by Premiere's and nVidia Quadro 4000's performance on this very pricey Mac. But more about this in a later post.

Now, Apple updated OSX to 10.6.8 last week, killing my Quadro's multiple monitor capabilities in one fell click of the magic mouse. After some quick (and admittedly frantic) googling I found out that nVidia had posted new drivers for the card itself and CUDA support. I was surprised that there was no way I was informed automatically about the updated drivers, I think I registered my product with nVidia. Ok, fine, I'll be Dora the intrepid explorer and find out this kind of essential info unguided.

With both drivers freshly installed, I fired up Premiere and started setting up a new project for a little homevideo I did for one of my closest friends of his 7 month old daughter playing and gurgling. I checked all the settings and suddenly discovered that there was no hardware Mercury Engine support. nVidia's forums were no help. I found one post of somebody describing the same problem, but no replies from either nVidia or anybody else. So I posted as well, describing the problems I am experiencing. I kept on searching because I wasn't holding out much hope with regard to the forum and found nVidia's Customer Care Twitter account. I tweeted my troubles at them like a young bird begging for a worm from mama bird.

Today I found out that there is no e-mail when you get a reply on nVidia's forum. Nice. So I didn't know that more people are experiencing the same issues. I did get a tweet back stating "We are working with Adobe to determine the cause of this.". No timeline, no info on how they'll publicize a solution. I'm kind of worried by all of this. nVidia is talking to Adobe about their card not being recognized in Premiere after an update by Apple's OSX. Somehow that just seems wrong. I'm starting to think that maybe, after much deliberation and finally, after years of doubt, deciding upon a Mac Pro, I bet on the wrong platform. Please prove me wrong and get this fixed a.s.a.p.?

The video for the new The Gathering track Heroes For Ghosts

is LIVE NOW!
on The Gathering's Youtube Channel!!

Check it out and let us know what you think of the video!

An easy URL to remember the video is http://tinyurl.com/heroesforghosts ! =)

Less than 24 hours to go... Before the video goes live!

I'm done, I've finished, I've completed it, it's a wrap! The video for the new The Gathering track Heroes For Ghosts will be released tomorrownight Wednesday 15 June at 23:58 CET on The Gathering's Youtube Channel. I hope you will check it out and let us know what you think of the video!

Keep an eye on this website, because in a few days, I'll post a story about the "making of" of this video and tell you what crazy adventures we went through to get all the shots! I'll also talk about what equipment I used, why it is sometimes better to shoot from the hand than from a stabilizer and how it feels to risk your camera hanging over the bow of a speedboat at 40 knots! ;)

Update: Above post stated that the video will be released on the 16th of June. This should of course be the 15th of June!

Since I got back from filming the music video for The Gathering's new track Heroes For Ghosts (free download!), I've been working almost non-stop on thinking about, structuring, designing and editing the video... And I've loved every second of it! Not only because I love what I do -make films-, but also because I LOVE the track! It's hypnotic, it's got drive, it's ecstatic and it's beautiful. And I think the video will do it justice.

Editing can be a very lonely job and you have to be careful not to become too myopic. There´s a risk you run that you won´t be able to look at the work objectively anymore, after a while. I was very lucky to be able to discuss my work with two kick-ass filmmakers, one in Hollywood, the other in Hong Kong. Their feedback and perspective were invaluable, so thank you Joe and thank you John for taking the time to watch an early version and giving me feedback!

At this point I'm about 90% - 95% percent done. There's some minor adjustments I'd like to make and then it's ready to go live from my end of things. So hopefully it won't be very much longer now! Stay tuned, folks!

The Gathering will be touring South America this summer with their South American Ghostride tour. To help them promote the tour, they asked me to shoot a promovideo for their tour.

Last year I also produced two promo's for the benefit concert they did in Chile for the victims of the earthquake. Them doing a benefit show like that is one of the reasons I like these guys so much!

The promo was shot handheld on the Canon 5D MkII with Canon primes during one of the band's rehearsal sessions. The "Weatherman" bit was shot on a tripod. There was some nasty rolling shutter as I pan at the end, but for this kind of quick production it's not that big a deal.

Since it was all quite impromptu I didn't have an external microphone with me, so I ended up using the on-camera mic. It performed better than I expected, actually, although the rehearsal itself was too loud for the mic. I got some nasty distortion as soon as the drums and guitars kicked in. We had fun shooting this thing and hopefully the tour will be a great succes! Look out for more info on the upcoming musicvideo!

Here are the tourdates for The Gathering South American Ghostride Tour:

Date	Venue	City	Country
24 June	Auditorio Derrama Majesterial	Lima	Peru
26 June	Teatro 16 de Julio	La Paz	Bolivia
28 June	Teatro Caupolican	Santiago	Chile
30 June	Teatro Colegiales	Buenos Aires	Argentina
1 July	Teatro CIEE	Porto Alegre	Brazil
3 July	Hangar 110	Sao Paulo	Brazil
5 July	Teatro Libre	Bogota	Colombia
8 July	Circo Volador	Mexico City	Mexico

Check out www.gathering.nl for more info on the band and the tour!

Famous Dutch rockers The Gathering are releasing a new album this fall. This album is Norwegian native Silje Wergeland's second record as the band's new singer.

The Gathering have expressed a desire to get closer to their own artistic preferences, the heart and soul of their music and this can definitely be heard in the new track. An epic 10 minute journey from melancholy to ecstasy, the song is a testament to the band's creativity and musical prowess. I'm very excited to have been asked to shoot a musicvideo for this track.

I'll be flying out to Norway by the end of this week, where the video will be shot. We decided to film the video in Norway because of its' beautiful and dramatic landscape. The band's photogenic singer, Silje Wergeland, a Norwegian native, will feature in the video.

We are still looking for actors for the video. So if you are in Norway and would like to have a chance to star in The Gathering's next video, check out this page and let us know!

In collaboration with mainly Frank Boeijen en René Rutten (the band's keyboard player and guitarist respectively) I've written a script for the video and the band have given me license to experiment, so nothing is set in stone. It's an exciting and (just a bit) daunting prospect to have the freedom to shoot what looks good and fits with the music.

I'll be shooting the video on the 5D MkII, with a set of Canon primes, I'll have a DVtec shouldermount with me and a Glidecam HD 2000. I can't tell you any details yet, but I am a bit nervous about getting the shot from that speedboat... ;)

Music copyright Machinist
www.machinistdrone.com
www.zenovandenbroek.com

Machinist

Music and lyrics copyright Hadewych
www.hadewych.net

Untitled


Lexicon


Ava


Gentle Art Of Incineration / A Forest For Eoh

First of all: Happy New Year everybody! =)

Recently I had gotten an assignment from my art academy to shoot a short film about a specific space. Which is not an easy thing to do, because you have to have an inspirational space, you have to have physical access to the space and of course, permission to film there. After some deep thought and rummaging in my memory for a suitable spot, I remembered the parking garage I'd park my car in sometimes.

I have a fascination with empty spaces and I'm a big fan of science fiction. These two themes somehow always seem to blend together quite well. So one day as I was parking my car again, I thought I'd drive down to the bottom layer of the garage, to see if it was indeed empty as I'd suspected. What I found there was a world that gripped me immediately. I was entranced by the light, the symmetries and the space.

Next day, I had my still cam with me (a Nikon D3000 with an 18-200mm lens on it) and I started taking some pictures to see if I could capture what was going on here, that made me feel like I was in an abandoned spaceship hurtling through the vast reaches of intergalactic space. The photo's turned out quite well, I thought. I had found my space!

During classes I'd convinced my teacher and colleagues that this was something worth pursuing and armed with my tripod, my Panasonic DVX100B camera and a warm jacket, I one late night drove into the garage and set up my gear.

At first I had a hard time capturing the images that conveyed this feeling of solitude and timelessness, but as I let go of the need and relinquished control, slowly the images I'd been waiting for started to come through my viewfinder.

Unfortunately I have been ill for a week or two and I haven't had much time or energy to work on this, nor on one of the other projects I'm working on. I did work on the sound-design for this film in the CausaliDox studio, adding sub-bass drones, hisses and clicks to conjure up an aural image of an abandoned spaceship.

The film's title will be "9" . The deadline for this project is next weekend. So I'll be posting the film online after that. That is if I don't decide to make another version that is less clean, than required by the academy. Anyway, I'll post it soon.

I've also been writing a plan for this film. It's a first draft of a film-plan, so it definitely can be improved upon. It is in Dutch, I'm afraid. Click on the PDF link below to open the document. Feedback welcome as always.

I'm working on the videos for Hadewych and Machinist. They both performed last Saturday in Den Bosch in an old school next to the city's museum. As always the performances were haunting and beautiful!

I was there to film, hoping to create a document of the evening, but unfortunately not everything went as planned. Because of the very minimal amount of time I had to prepare and change positions during the change-over from one act to the next, I had barely time to set audiolevels and make sure everything was ready to go. The audio was not the best I've recorded. Also, someone accidentally (?) switched off one of the camera's during Hadewych's performance, so I unfortunately only have the handheld images.

Here is a screencap from both performances:

I was lucky enough that Machinist had his own recording device with him, with which he captured the audio for his performance, so I'll be able to mix that in with the ambient recording. Hadewych however was not so lucky, so I have only the low-quality on cam mic recording, which bums me out. I don't know what to do yet, but I'll discuss it with Peter J. Nijland to see what he wants to do with the footage.

I'll be working on the edits for the videos tonite in hopes of finishing them before Christmas.

Happy holidays everyone!

My friend Peter Johan Nijland is performing with his band Hadewych on December 18th 2010 in Den Bosch during MOL.

Hadewych conjures the ultragrotesque. As they put it themselves:

Music in its directness. Music that is true to itself as music. Non-conceptual music. Music that reveals being. Avant-garde music, ritual music, atmospheric aesthetics of old black metal, prepared piano music, 20th century composers (e.g. Cage, Scelsi), some ambient, some shoegaze, some art rock, some ultra.

Peter has asked me to help him create visual art for the Hadewych performance next Saturday. He's looking to bring the forest into the venue and use abstract images of body positions to accentuate the music. We'll be heading out to the forest to shoot the footage, one of my favorite places to be. And since I haven't had any time to be in a forest for a while now, I'm looking very much forward to working there with Peter this Sunday.

After some misadventures trying to build a Wordpress site, I decided to give Drupal a try for my new website. I needed to upgrade the old static HTML site I'd built. It was quick, it was dirty and it was obsolete. A dinosaur. I needed something spiffy, SEO-savvy (meh, sorta ;) and easily manageable.

My good friend guaka introduced me to the wonderous world of Drupal and even encouraged me to dive into the beta release of Drupal 7. He has been building websites that range from sites about dumpster diving across the globe and creating The Hitchhiking Guide to a site for his family's Teak Furniture business. The learning curve was as steep as a Himalayan mountain and the concepts were hard to grasp at times, but I made it through somehow (and I couldn't have done it without guaka's help. A big thank you!).

I've been able to build a site that more than ever suits my needs, has a place for all the content I've been creating over the past years and will allow me to update frequently and painfree. And best of all... It's modular, so there's somewhere to go if the need arises.

Please check out my new site, for which I will be adding more content in the months to come. Also I hope to find time soon to tell you more about my music, my other great passion. When Drupal 7 will see its' official release I'll probably add more functionality. I see this webspace as a living, evolving entity that will grow with me, as I hopefully will grow as a filmmaker.