Tal Rosner is an award winning designer and filmmaker who recently came to Stockport College to give a lecture. He started off telling us about where he started from which was doing a BA degree in graphic design where he learned about composition and magazine layout design. Although he enjoyed this he decided he had a nack for rhythm and moving image and so went and did a MA course at Central Saint Martins (London) where he graduated in 2005 producing the film 'Doppelganger' as his major project
Doppelganger is a 4 minute long video that he describes as a 'daydream travel between real and imaginary, steel and concrete, clouds and smoke.' It uses footage from took from Londons Docklands area shot from on a train, (Rosner explained the potential of filming from moving trains later on in the lecture saying that it acts as a free dolly!) the video has lots of fantastic shots beautifully edited to an electronic beat, he uses a sort of kaleidoscope effect alot and said that he wanted every single frame to look like a piece of art if you paused it. I really like this piece and I can see definate influence in his work from Michel Gondrys Star Guitar. Rosner actually said that Doppelganger was the first piece of work that he produced that he thought was to a professional standard.
After his MA he got a job in London that he thought would be his dream job, but when he got there he found that he didnt like it as much as he'd hoped to have more creative freedom instead of just being told to do something a certain way.
After this he teamed up with 2 French classical pianists who asked him to work on a cd/dvd combo for there album, they wanted to give it a more modern feel to it so it would apeal to younger listeners and, after seeing Rosner's previous work, thought he was perfect for the job. Again he used footage from a moving train but went alot more abstract with it, and really shows the pace of the music.
The next piece of work he showed us was 'Debussy en blanc et noir' which he used lots of different footage and replaced, edited and speeded up parts of the footage to make it more interesting. I really liked this piece especially the replacing the sky with different footage as I think this can change the entire mood of a shot and I also have a fascination with sky and clouds!
Rosner then moved on to talk about the BAFTA award winning Skins title sequences that he did and explained that the producers of the program had seen his Stravinsky work and thought that it could work well in a more commercial place. He explained that he wanted to show the characters not the actors in the title sequences and also because skins focuses on a different particular character each episode he decided to do each one slightly different showing more of that character than the others. For series 2 he changed them slightly using the shapes of the letters as the transitions which works really well.
Finally he showed us his favourite and most recent piece he had produced called 'Without you' which was inspired by a poem by Joseph Albers; "Calm down, what happens, happens mostly without you" The video is very abstract using footage of unusual architectural designs and shapes and edited with shapes and colours that are similar to them.
Tal Rosner, I think, is a very talented designer/filmmaker and overall was very impressed with his lecture, he had a few slip ups during the presentation like forgetting where he was up to and talking about because he didnt have a set presentation planned out, but I think that didnt matter as his work speaks for itself. He explained that music influences his work and his edits a great deal and I think this shows through in his work and has moulded his own distinctive style. Overall I have learned quite a bit from his lecture, the two main points I found where that I should investigate sound alot more in my work and also that moving image/ motion design can be applied to all sorts of things not just modern commercials or animations, I think this would be something to look into further.
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