Continuing our love-in with LeeFest, the not-for-profit music and arts festival and hot ticket for this summer, we are proud to be helping them to curate the artwork that will be displayed around the festival site. This is where you come in, we are looking for artists/designers/film makers/carpenters/dreamers to create magical, engaging installations.

Think Burning Man except in Bromley, think of building a hammock out of video tape, a trojan badger or some kind of sculpture, painting, short film, or performance that fits with this year’s theme: Contrast. This is a great opportunity to show off your skills to a diverse audience alongside some of the hottest up and coming bands (the line-up is RIDICULOUSLY GOOD). You’ve got a month to submit your idea (a sketch and short description will do) and, if you are selected, a month to build it in time for the festival on the 29th and 30th of June. Selected entrants will get free camping tickets for the weekend and the best artwork will receive a very special grand prize, which will be announced very soon.

For more information you can download an infopack here or visit the LeeFest site here.

See you there – and please someone build a bubble-whale:

From the 31st of May to the 12th of July we, ShellsuitZombie, will be taking over a box in the 55DSL Boxpark store and filling it with creativity. We have 30 spots in the box to fill, with each spot taking a day. We are looking for designers, illustrators, photographers, musicians, bands, brands and generally cool fucking peeps to take a day each and show off what they can do.

Why? Well, not enough people have a space in London to show off. It generally takes a lot of money and a lot of luck to get a spot on Shoreditch high street to do your thang. So to be able to run your own show, for free for a day is a good opportunity to get your name out there.

We are still looking but spaces are filling fast, so if you want in, have a look at our website for the event, www.uncontained.info or the printable PDF. Remember, you can do anything you want. ANYTHING.

(Favourite moment at 2 minutes)

Over the last year or so there seems to have been a wave of videos that have shifted the boundaries of photography, making previously impossible or expensive angles doable. Furthermore, a number of the most exciting innovations seem to be coming from enthusiasts: experimenting with cameras on different objects like remote control devices, ropes, ski poles, helmets, surf boards and so on. I’m not saying it’s mega-cheap to put this stuff together, but with the arrival of affordable, durable HD cameras like GoPro, it suddenly seems much more democratic. A couple of guys with a remote control electric helicopter and some photography knowledge can go from the garden shed to shooting for Red Bull like these guys:

Or maybe even get some amazing footage in amongst some wild lions like these boys:

This is the final straw. I’m quitting my job and dedicating my life to making bespoke onesies out of human hair and twigs. These wonderous creations are the work of Nick Cave, an artist from Chicago.

via @twurner

Finally all that time in front of the ‘reflect’ option in Photo Booth on the macbook pays off (though they don’t attempt to create genitalia once, somewhat missing a trick). Good job.

Will sent us his work back in October – a ridiculously busy few months however has meant that a lot of submissions which should have gone up on the blog haven’t quite made it. This needs to be seen though.

The combination of found images in his compositions hint at massive alien-like landscapes, probably a product of his background in model-making, but look closer and each item is fairly pedestrian in nature – a telegraph pole, parts of a watch. Some really interesting and crazy-atmospheric work going on here.

Check Wills work out on his site.

Coming from a self-confessed post-it-noter (check out my carbon footprint yo) these are pretty damn cool. Obviously you wouldn’t just go around using these willy-nilly, oh no. These are for special occasions, the birthday post it for example. Or maybe for drawing a willy on and attaching to a colleague’s computer screen/back. YOU CAN’T JUST WRITE ANYTHING ON THEM! If I see even one nacho post it with ‘need milk’ written on it I’m going to fucking flip out.

Have a look at the nachos/cookies etc. here and the sushi here.

This trailer for a new animated short The Chase directed by Philippe Garner of french animation studio Space Patrol is pretty visually impressive, however it’s his earlier work, Stop Pain, which really caught my eye. A sad tale with a surreal twist at the end. Worth a watch.

Philippe’s Vimeo channel is here – worth subscribing to for future use we figure.

Boom. Here is the new video for M.I.A’s single ‘Bad Girls’ – it only premiered live on Noisey about an hour ago.

‘It was dope to have so many people from so many different backgrounds speaking so many different languages come together to create something that we believed in,” says M.I.A about the video. “I thought I was gonna die on the shoot when I saw the drifting. It was a four day shoot so everyone was on edge the whole time specifically ME when I had to do bluesteel singing to the camera while the cars did doughnuts on the wet road ten feet away. In my mind I was thinking how I was gonna deliver the video to Vice with no legs.”

Subscribe to Noisey here for more of this sort of shit.

The single is the first from Worker Records – an internal label at BETC London – the younger British brother of the Parisian adfolk behind those Evian roller babies.

And that’s not all. If you’ve got a pet (either living or deceased) who you’d like to see warbling along to ‘Back In The Day’, you can do just that at Petchoir.com.

The creative team responsible for the taxidermised troubadours are a young placement duo, Mike Whiteside and Ben Robinson, who’ve managed to find the time for a quick chat with SSZ about their experiences, ambitions, and that video.

SSZ: So guys: where are you from and what has been your journey to date?

B&M: Well, Mike’s from Bournemouth and Ben’s from Reading. We met on the excellent Creative Advertising Course at the University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham, which is always bit of a mouthful. That’s why we’ve now moved to London. Easier to say.

SSZ: How did you find yourselves at BETC? Are you finding the placement useful?

B&M: We exhibited at D&AD’s New Blood, which was visted by Neil Dawson, our creative director. Neil saw our work and must’ve liked it, which is surprising considering the focal piece was a gross spec ad we did for Veet for Men.

Anyway, we’re very glad he did and we’re learning a lot. It’s great for us that BETC isn’t a huge agency here yet. It means we’re learning from people who, in most agencies, it’d be hard to get any time at all with.

SSZ: Where did the inspiration for this taxidermy masterpiece come from? And where did you get all the critters?

B&M: We were briefed to come up with some album covers and posters, around the concept of ‘broken joy’. We scribbled down the taxidermy idea, half-formed along with a few others, on a piece of paper. Neil saw it and sort of went, ‘yeah! Let’s do that!’

The critters were all part of the collection at London Taxidermy, which is an amazing, if slightly unnerving, place. We were spotting new dead things all day and we think you could probably say the same if you were there for a whole year. That’d be a weird year.

SSZ: You guys are on placement at BETC right? How did it feel to have such an exciting creative brief so early on?

B&M: Yeah it’s been a really great project to be involved with. This is our first placement, so we dunno, maybe they’re all like this. But we suspect we’ve been pretty spoiled here on that front.

SSZ: It seems unusual that an ad agency would not only set up a record label but devote so much time to what is effectively an internal project. What do you think BETC are looking for out of this?

B&M: BETC’s got a fantastic attitude to creativity and they want to foster a really strong creative culture here. The office in France has set the bar incredibly high and the London office are keen to do the heritage justice and just make great things, some of which will be ads.

SSZ: 30,000 views in under a week – does this make you viral superstars yet? What are your ambitions and are you now addicted to the medium of the music video?

B&M: We’re really chuffed with how it’s going down. Saying that, we saw a video this morning of a dog with human hands eating Dairylea Dunkers. It had over 400,000 views so we’ve probably got a little way to go yet.

We don’t think the best creative stuff’s necessarily advertising, so we’d love to get involved with more projects like this in the future. For now though, we’re just enjoying learning and improving.

SSZ: Any advice to other young teams or single creatives? Any golden rules?

B&M: In one word, persist!! We’ve got more detailed advice on our blog though, so have a read.

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For more on Mike & Ben’s work, visit their website – the aptly-named www.mikeandben.co.uk.

If you’re London-based there’s only one place to be this saturday – the opening of Boxpark, a shopping mall (centre, for us brits) made entirely out of shipping containers. FUCK YEAH. And what’s even better is that it’s slap bang in the middle of shoreditch, right under the station in fact. Brands like Nike, 55DSL, Levi’s and Evisu are running containers in the space and there’s a 20% discount the first weekend. But apart from that, it’s just a really cool idea. Check out the Boxpark site here.

If you’re not about this weekend though, our mates and super-collaborative brand 55DSL are launching their popup container TONIGHT! The space will be centred around their ‘Studio 55′ project, inviting anyone to collaborate with them. We will be there and you should totes go too, especially if you like metal containers full of people and sweet tees. Just Sayin’.

As someone who loves videogames and has attempted on more than one occasion to build one (I’m proud to boast of a 100% failure rate) this looks pretty much like my dream film. The passions of a few ubergeeks as they create their games -it’s gotta be good right! Check out the website here.

Man the christmas shopping comes back every year doesn’t it. It’s hard to budget for everything around this time of year but …  hold on … you’re a creative kind of guy right? Why don’t you just design up a lovely christmas card and get it sent round to a thousand people this christmas, and whats more pocket a nice little christmas wad while you’re at it. Just think how happy Granny will be when she gets her Xbox with Modern Warfare 3 and an extra controller! *yoink*.

Runners up also receive Stack annual subscriptions – which we raved about here. Well worth picking up a pencil for.

Check out the competition here.

Just got back from this event at the Wilmo in Clerkenwell: an eclectic selection of talks hosted by interactive experience agency Specialmoves. They included Katy Beale from Culture Hack, who helped start Coding for Kids, a group that is looking at ways to introduce programming into the education system which I think is hugely important if we want our kids to innovate in the future. Ben Richards from Jotta talked about the intersection between art and digital, showing off this epic water projection from Latitude Festival 2010, a whole year before Jordan Melo:

Ciaran Park from Specialmoves got technical on responsive web design, made the interesting point that designers are constrained in their thinking from the moment they set the page dimensions in Potatoshop. Then furniture designer Gareth Neal gave an epic talk about some fairly inept experimentation with CAD software that resulted in some serendipitously stunning designs, like this table with segments machined out to reveal the sexy curve of the legs:

His combination of computer design and hand finishing gives his machine-made work an individual lo-fi quality. The individual charm of bodging continued with Jane Unpronounceable-surname from Sugru, with her inspiring tale of the invention of the ‘next blu-tack’. Then there were some ‘young gun talks’: James from Hyper Island confirmed our views that it may be the best course ever, Mike from YCC told it how it is and our boy Jonny said a swear.

And they gave us pogs as beer tokens.

As the first of a series of regular events, ShellsuitZombie brings you a film screening from the largest short film network in the world, Future Shorts.
The creators of Secret Cinema, Future Shorts are world renowned for supporting short film and the lineup for this festival is no exception. A haul including Oscars, Baftas, Sundance and Annecy Festival awards just goes to show that the films you will see are amongst the best in the world.

Official Programme

1. Deeper Than Yesterday

Filmed on an old decommissioned military submarine with 35mm cameras, Deeper Than Yesterday tells the story of a Russian crew who suffer a rather savage form of cabin fever. Directed by Ariel Kleiman, a graduate of the VCA at the University of Melbourne, recently said  “The more uncomfortable I feel making a film the better it will be.” Jurors have compared the film to “The Lower Depths,” Maxim Gorky’s best-known play – very Russian with long period of isolation and madness.

Winner of International Short Filmmaking Award at Sundance.

2. The External World

A boy learns to play the piano in this rather dark but occasionally humorous mediation on the anxieties and fears of a modern civilized society. Created as a lo-fi animation, The External World is a surreal seventeen-minute collection of vignettes which borrows themes from pop culture, cinema and videogames – classic and contemporary. Some have heralded this short as “a unique reconstruction of the universe” while O’Reilly recently noted in an interview, “I like creating experimental films that have an emotional function.”

3. Incident by a Bank

A detailed and humorous account of a failed bank robbery: A single take where roughly 100 people meticulously recreate an actual event that took place in Stockholm in June 2006. Directed by Ruben Östlund, these events were witnessed first hand along with his producer Erik Hemmendorff while on the way to the Swedish Film Insititute. The film questions the reality of how, really, robberies happen, and what they might or, should, look like. “Making ‘Incident by a Bank’ is a way to correct the false images of robberies we see almost daily in action movies made in Hollywood,” says Östlund.

Winner of the Golden Bear at Berlinale.

4. The Eagleman Stag

The Eagleman Stag is a unique 9-minute stop-motion animated film that depicts a man’s haunting obsession with the passage of time and his unorthodox relationship with a beetle. Directed by Michael Please, the production was a highly ambition final year film produced while studying at the RCA – it is based on a story he previously wrote entitled “The Life and Time of Peter Eagleman.” Orchestral music was integral to this film and composed in tandem with the animation process.

Winner of Best Short Animation at BAFTA, and Special Jury Prize at SXSW.

5. God of Love

Matheny, who wrote, directed and starred in this 19-minute inventive comedy about love-inducing darts won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short in 2011. A recent film student graduate at New York University, God of Love was produced as his thesis film project while enrolled at NYU’s MFA program. At the Oscars, he was hailed as delivering one of the best acceptance speeches of the evening and thanked his mother for her contribution to the movie.

Oscar Winner in 2011 for Best Live Action Short Film.

6. Luminaris

Inspired by the Argentinian instrumental tango piece entitled “Lluvia de Estrellas” (Star Rain), Luminaris tells the story of a man living in a world controlled by time by light. Each day inhabitants of this fictional world awake and are pulled, as if by some otherworldly force, to their jobs by sunlight. Combining pixilation and stop motion techniques; the surrealist short pairs styles reminiscent of art deco with black cinema. Zaramella explains, “Originally, I approached the project as a puppet animation story, but doing some pixilation tests in the gardens of Fontevraud, just for fun, the seed of the present short was born: the idea of sunlight as a magnetic force.”

Winner of the Audience and Fipresci Award at Annecy 2011 International Animation Festival

The best thing is, the whole thing will be introduced by one of the Future Shorts team. Plus you can go to the bar and still see the screen! Yeah boi.

GET YOUR TICKETS HERE

see you there chums.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Noses. The internet has been waiting for this tumblr ever since duck-dog-mask-gate.

The Agents of Change are a loose group of street artists based all over the UK and beyond. This video from last year has been criminally underwatched for such a fascinating little insight into not only their working paractices but also a strange little corner of Britain, a deserted Scottish 1970′s village built to house workers for an oil rig that was never built.

Check out a profile on them as one of several Honda Cultural Engineers here.

Quick! Brag about how great your festival season was/how edgy the first band you went to see was (mine was Wheatus, deal with it) on the Dr. Martens website and win gig tickets to the slightly wimpy British Sea Power, the more shouty Rolo Tomassi or the er… welsh… The Blackout. Sounds good eh. Then tweet all about it with #firstandforever as your hashtag to carry on bragging.

GO HERE TO ENTER BOYO.

A few days ago ShellsuitZombie (along with Paris-based Triangle Mag and italian blog FrizziFrizzi) was invited out by Vice Magazine to a beautiful city on the outskirts of Venice, Bassano, to visit the HQ of 55DSL, a streetwear company founded by the son of Renzo Rosso, the guy at the head of Diesel.

Andrea Rosso, unwilling to accept a job in his fathers company, chose to take his own path producing a line of clothing inspired by surf skate and snow and with emphasis on collaboration with exciting artists, designers and photographers. The company is now 16 years old and has stores in 22 countries around the world. Not bad eh.

Upon arrival we were immediately treated to traditional italian food (meatballs and lasagne ftw) before getting our hands on the SS2012 55DSL collection. A collection of their collaborations including Will Bryant and Gavin Watson continue the long line of artists and creatives 55DSL have worked with and supported during their time – not only a refreshing change to the nameless tees of rival brands but also a nod to the keen eye of Andrea, who (along with his design team) select each artist personally. After pocketing some clobber we had a chat about the brand before heading off to Bassano to stand on the bridge and sip a delicious local drink called Mezze mezze*.

After that we had a long and delicious dinner before a grappa to send us to bed. My hotel-mate, a lovely blogger from Triangle Mag in Paris, then stayed up until 4am writing articles for her ‘day job’. Not me, it had been a long day.

Check out our flickr photos here.

*definitely could have got that wrong.

Over the past year They’ve pimped people’s profile pics, created customised royal plates and even commandeered an ice cream van to deliver to people’s doorsteps. Now, to celebrate the end of year 1, Poke have helped Orange bring back a popular item from their feed, Secret Portraits.

People describe themselves in one comment – they can either use the #SecretPortrait hashtag, or they can submit their description via the Facebook page – A bunch of illustrators then bring these descriptions to life.

Check out past illustrations here, then get tweeting yeah?