Cinematography and Scripts 1992 - 2006
Several feature length dramas shot in this period
Out of Order 1986 A Relative Stranger 1992 Living In Hope 1993 |
I've already mentioned shooting Out of Order for Birmingham FIlm and Video Workshop - before that I'd been shooting video quite seriously from about 1977 onwards. I'd shot my first film in 1971 using photographic theory and in about 1982 I was handed a 35mm camera - there was no crew, just me - somehow, after a lot of sweating, I could hear that the film was running smoothly. I went down to the studio and shot a promo.
I had a simple strategy, light the faces at one Fstop and just maintain the rest of the bandwidth of f stops to about three above and three below. I didn't know what I was doing but later realised that the principle was fundamentally correct, except that in fact, film is so 'safe' a capture medium, that as a BBC type once told me: "The reason why we shoot wildlife on film is that we can hand a film camera to a chimpanzee, spin the iris and we'll get something we can use". So I started shooting a lot of film from the mid to late eighties onwards and Universal trusted me to shoot all sorts of acts for them - as did Time Warner when I shot most of the interviews with many big stars for "a History of Rock and Roll'. People may think this is name dropping but it was a fact of my life and my job was to get in and out without anyone blowing their temper onto the crew who were always the target if anything went wrong. Let's just dsay that I shot with Van Morrisson a few times and we got along fine.
But: I was always using productions to learn techniques mainly because when I first joined LVA in 77 I realised that few artists really had a very limited technical grasp - this appalled me because I thought, had this been a 15th century artists studio, the first thing you;d have to know is how to mix pigments - ergo, I knew I must learn about the mediums of any cature medium and that attitude took me through to finishing a PhD in 2018 concerning higher frame rates, higher resolutions and higher tonal values. So from the beginning of Vida and then Triple Vision, we used the productions to hire in tools - such as the Simon platform, first used on And the There Was One with a high and dropping crane shot (and that was finished with a 200 foot version with Building Sights around 1988 when we were so high, the machinery creaked and the technician went white and shouted "Don't Move" and somehow we returned to the ground without the whole thing tipping over - I had a BBC Cameraman who refused to shoot the shot so I had told him to get off and I'd do it - that'll teach me).
This went on into the 90's and I tested HD for Sony Panasonic etc - through the period when people were beginning to realise just what the digital actually was - I continued to shoot on film and did some BBC2 drama work, some Channel 4 projects oin Hi* experimenting with the limits of capture in both directions - and eventually by 2006 I'd become tired of the continuous movement of the camera and obtained an AHRC Creative Fellowship - which was art based - but sought to discover just how HD would affect not just the audience but also the makers). Eventually the art department had understood makeup, paint on flats etc - but to this day the US has some serious trouble with wigs!
In parallel, after Channel 4 and I was on the road as a cinematographer, I was thinking about drama and had written a script called The Isle of Glass. in the early 90's By 2005 I'd written about ten features and some 20 shorts and made some of this work in projects like Skin Deep and Forever. However I had a salutory experience whilst travelling back from Beijing. On screen was a movie by a very well known Director who I'd sent copy of Isle of Glass to. He'd originally sent me a review which was glowing - and now maybe 15 - 20 years later the story was unfolding in front of my eyes.... It was a jumbled version because the lead had died during shooting and two very well known actors had been cast to replace him in a variety of scenes and the director used the trick of the transformation of the actor in different stories and different times (the basis of my script). The killer blow was my lead character's mother had died in childbirth and she was named as a boy - and there it was....
I had a simple strategy, light the faces at one Fstop and just maintain the rest of the bandwidth of f stops to about three above and three below. I didn't know what I was doing but later realised that the principle was fundamentally correct, except that in fact, film is so 'safe' a capture medium, that as a BBC type once told me: "The reason why we shoot wildlife on film is that we can hand a film camera to a chimpanzee, spin the iris and we'll get something we can use". So I started shooting a lot of film from the mid to late eighties onwards and Universal trusted me to shoot all sorts of acts for them - as did Time Warner when I shot most of the interviews with many big stars for "a History of Rock and Roll'. People may think this is name dropping but it was a fact of my life and my job was to get in and out without anyone blowing their temper onto the crew who were always the target if anything went wrong. Let's just dsay that I shot with Van Morrisson a few times and we got along fine.
But: I was always using productions to learn techniques mainly because when I first joined LVA in 77 I realised that few artists really had a very limited technical grasp - this appalled me because I thought, had this been a 15th century artists studio, the first thing you;d have to know is how to mix pigments - ergo, I knew I must learn about the mediums of any cature medium and that attitude took me through to finishing a PhD in 2018 concerning higher frame rates, higher resolutions and higher tonal values. So from the beginning of Vida and then Triple Vision, we used the productions to hire in tools - such as the Simon platform, first used on And the There Was One with a high and dropping crane shot (and that was finished with a 200 foot version with Building Sights around 1988 when we were so high, the machinery creaked and the technician went white and shouted "Don't Move" and somehow we returned to the ground without the whole thing tipping over - I had a BBC Cameraman who refused to shoot the shot so I had told him to get off and I'd do it - that'll teach me).
This went on into the 90's and I tested HD for Sony Panasonic etc - through the period when people were beginning to realise just what the digital actually was - I continued to shoot on film and did some BBC2 drama work, some Channel 4 projects oin Hi* experimenting with the limits of capture in both directions - and eventually by 2006 I'd become tired of the continuous movement of the camera and obtained an AHRC Creative Fellowship - which was art based - but sought to discover just how HD would affect not just the audience but also the makers). Eventually the art department had understood makeup, paint on flats etc - but to this day the US has some serious trouble with wigs!
In parallel, after Channel 4 and I was on the road as a cinematographer, I was thinking about drama and had written a script called The Isle of Glass. in the early 90's By 2005 I'd written about ten features and some 20 shorts and made some of this work in projects like Skin Deep and Forever. However I had a salutory experience whilst travelling back from Beijing. On screen was a movie by a very well known Director who I'd sent copy of Isle of Glass to. He'd originally sent me a review which was glowing - and now maybe 15 - 20 years later the story was unfolding in front of my eyes.... It was a jumbled version because the lead had died during shooting and two very well known actors had been cast to replace him in a variety of scenes and the director used the trick of the transformation of the actor in different stories and different times (the basis of my script). The killer blow was my lead character's mother had died in childbirth and she was named as a boy - and there it was....
EXHIBITIONS Between 1978 onwards
In 1978, the Fashion show, (made in 1977) was exhibited at the Long Beach Museum by Kathy Rae Huffman, (curator of moving image work). Next came the Fourth Tokyo Video Festival where Flaxton, Cooper and Dedman's piece (written by Flaxton) Talking Heads, won a prize. From then on Flaxton's work was shown at many festivals, notably the Worldwide Video Festival in Den Haag, Netherlands, but many, many other places including Moscow, Tokyo, Algiers, San Francisco, Locarno, Montbeliard, Paris, Milan, Rome, Seoul, Amsterdam - and many other places around the world. In 1986 the British Film Institute as well as Channel 4 asked Flaxton to Shoot “Out off Order” the 3rd electronically produced and released on 35mm ‘film’ in history (after “Harlow” starring Ginger Rogers, 1965 and 200 Hotels, 1972). Though travelling as a cinematographer and occasionally exhibiting between 1992 and 1998 there was a hiatus in Flaxton's work between Zagorsk (1992 and Skin Deep (1999) Flaxton in fact worked on many artists pieces and brought a high level of lighting to many people's work. Having come across HD in 1990, between 2000 and 2007 Flaxton concentrated on HD as a developing production form and tested cameras for Panasonic and Sony and by 1999 he had shot an HD work in the US which was mastered as a 35mm output at Du Art Labs in New York - and from then on spoke at many seminars including the NFT to speak about the transition form Standard Definition (720 x 576 pixels) to the then low level HD Standards of 1280 x 720, the faux HD of 1440 x 1920 and finally the full 1920 x 1080 standard that we all know today (2023). So in eventually entering academia in 2007 with an AHRC Creative Research Fellowship - where the candidates charge was to discover how technical and creative innovations feed upon each other, Flaxton then began a second wave of production as an artist - where, having spent many years on moving camera cranes and dollies - Flaxton chose to use HD and the camera itself as a window, a portal on, not only the world - but importantly on the very thing that looks: the self. By 2015 Sedition Art had arrived and was a perfect fit for what Flaxton later called his 'Chamber Works’. Flaxton also began producing long form moving image artworks during this period characterised by “Myth and Meaning in the Digital Age” (began in 1992 and finished in 2018) , “To Sand and Stare: A Somerset Landscape” (2011 to 2018) and latterly “Mexico: Landscape of the Heart” (2023). |
Latest Retrospective - Bath 2023: Terry Flaxton: A Life in Video Art
From 6th October through to 5th November 2023
28 Roseberry Rd, Bath BA2 3DX
From 6th October through to 5th November 2023
28 Roseberry Rd, Bath BA2 3DX
Upcoming Exhibitions in 2024
- UK RWA Open Bristol September - December
- Australia, Adelaide July, A Life in Video Art, Retrospective, July
- Sedition International, Online Release, Un Tempo Una Volta, April
- Italy Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello & Palazzo Bembo, Exhibition titled Visions, Venice, March
Between 2008 and 2023 Terry exhibited work in the China, USA, Australia, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Germany, Korea, Portugal, Iran, Turkey, Slovenia, Sweden, France, Norway, Malta, Madeira and the UK - some of these countries many times. A complete list of Exhibitions between 2008 and 2023 follows beneath the section on exhibitions beneath 1978 and 2007.
- UK RWA Open Bristol September - December
- Australia, Adelaide July, A Life in Video Art, Retrospective, July
- Sedition International, Online Release, Un Tempo Una Volta, April
- Italy Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello & Palazzo Bembo, Exhibition titled Visions, Venice, March
Between 2008 and 2023 Terry exhibited work in the China, USA, Australia, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Germany, Korea, Portugal, Iran, Turkey, Slovenia, Sweden, France, Norway, Malta, Madeira and the UK - some of these countries many times. A complete list of Exhibitions between 2008 and 2023 follows beneath the section on exhibitions beneath 1978 and 2007.