War Torn Man – new video with Rodney DeCroo

This is my new music video for Rodney Decroo!

A good review in the Georgia Straight:

“Let’s hope this collaboration between acclaimed (but not acclaimed enough) singer-songwriter Rodney DeCroo and filmmaker Flick Harrison isn’t the last. ”

When I first heard this song, I thought it was a fictional story about Iraq. But it’s actually the true story of Rodney’s dad after the Vietnam war.

I used the Collateral Murder video as my model for this, and I suppose I was thinking of the video for Brothers In Arms by the Dire Straits as well.

 

    War Torn Man – YouTube.

 

Vancouver Drawdown 2011

Here’s the photos I took this year are the Vancouver Drawdown, a city-wide drawing event that brings people together to get creative and learn a few new art moves. I documented this event along with Josh Hite and Melissa Baker!

Software of the Spectacle

Final Cut Pro X means Apple has abandoned professional artists

by Flick Harrison

Guy Debord said that the main function of our society is now the production of spectacle. The spectacle alienates us from life and each other. Facebook, for instance, transforms our relationships into images of those relationships, mediated by Facebook’s own hidden desires.

Fifteen years of engagement with the Final-Cut-Pro-using professional class is, at best, a good self-funding, street-cred foundation for the new consumer version of FCP, called FCP-X.  It could be compared to the free itunes app of yesteryear which slowly led us to the Itunes Store and thence to the app store, iphone and ipad.

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Gathering free TV’s for Macbeth: nach Shakespeare

Imagine if, ten years ago, you could drive around collecting free, working televisions until you filled several carloads, then finally had to abandon dozens more because you had no room.

That’s where we’re at today, as the dominant technology of our living room becomes obsolete practically overnight. HDTV is sending those heavy, awkward boxes out to the curb, to be replaced with newer, more expensive, and quicker-to-obsolescence machines.

I’m designing media for a new theatre show – Macbeth: nach Shakespeare by Heiner Muller. I’m building a throne of televisions that will show piles of corpses whenever the King sits on it… I thought it might be easy to gather free TV’s through craigslist, but I never imagined how quickly the cathode-ray sets were being discarded.

This class-warfare Macbeth takes the moral clarity out of the story: Instead of Macbeth murdering a wonderful King out of pure bloody ambition, we start the play with Macbeth committing murders for the King’s benefit. Peasants strung up for not paying rent, rebellious lords skinned alive for disloyalty. So when Macbeth decides to murder up instead of murdering down, the moral leap isn’t that big: what’s one more dead body on the pile?

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Inside the Burrard Bridge Stairwell

I’m doing the cinematography for a project with Josh Hite and Scott Billings, untitled for now.

They are creating a machine to bring a camera up and down the center of the long-closed Burrard Bridge stairwell, in a repeatable spiral pattern.  Then actors will be performing gestures, scenes, and actions on the stairs, drawn from a collection of movies that feature scenes in stairwells.

Here’s a writeup from Price Tags, which talks more about the project and tells you how you might get involved, if you want…

Flick’s Video Art at W2 – March 18

Well if my birthday wasn’t cool enough, I’m having a group show with Drop Out Video Arts at W2 on March 18!

Channels 3×4, Animal Bodies, Magneticring Team Up with Video Artists for Vancouver’s Drop In/Drop Out.

I’ll be projecting the first aspect of a piece called DOARIP (Death of Analog, Rest in Pieces) involving Avatar and smashed televisions.

More to follow…

Here’s the website for Drop Out Video Arts

And the trailer for the show:

Brief Encounters Promo Clip

Yet another evening of artistic blind dates, yet another promo clip I produced for the Tomorrow Collective. This is a sample of live documentation, which is shot as a safe wideshot to ensure the artists get all the choreography, setting, etc for posterity.

Brief Encounters is an interdisciplinary art event that throws different artists together to make short performances. They go from total strangers to presenting a work in two weeks.

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