Alias

So, I’ve been doing a lot of work on the directing side of things lately.

This is my latest commercial:

Slaughterhaus Five: Freedom Day

Director: Alias Cummins
Editor: Lydia Morgan (Bonehouse Productions)

Two new flyers for Slaughterhaus Five:

Art direction and photography: Alias
Models: Laurence, Jo

Art direction and photography: Alias
Model: Alex Anderson

I haven’t done print advertising for quite a long time. It’s still fun though.

Art Direction by Alias Cummins, Photograph by Hellen Burrough

So, this hasn’t really been documented very well, so I’ve pulled some previous posts and thought I’d redo them with a bit of context for the whole thing.

So, Slaughterhaus Five (which is London nightclub a club I’m a managing partner in) did an event called “Ratification”. This sprang from the seeds of discontent with the fact that Gordon Brown is now the unelected ruler of the UK, and we wanted to do something to sort of complain about it. So we decided to do an election of our own.

As you know, Slaughterhaus Five is set in a sort of dystopian, orwellian parallel universe, where a military industrial complex is all powerful and one of the mottoes of the state is “Weapons, Not Food”. We produced three short films for the campaign, which form a sort of basic story arc. For me it was a big and exciting challenge - writing, along with my business partner Chris De Bie (aka Chris Damage) , a rough script and getting people in to shoot for it. The whole thing involved building a green screen in my basement, creating a makeshift lighting rig, lots of late nights and mixing bisto and ribena to make fake blood. I’m hoping that if I do enough of these, I might actually get good enough at making films that someone might pay me for it, someday.

We also partnered with NO2ID to distribute their material and try to drive membership signups. Everyone recieved a NO2ID info pack on the night, containing a badge, a membership form, and a booklet on how to win in an argument over ID cards.

The films are best watched in sequence:

We wanted it to span the range between funny, satirical and actually disturbing. I’m not sure whether it succeeds at that, but it was a fun project all the same, and I was pretty amazed at the performances we got out of all the cast - none of whom were actors. It was all shot on DV and edited in premiere and after effects, for a budget of less than £200 (and that’s counting the green screen).

In the end, the night was a total success. The event was held on the same night as the Russian Election (which was probably slightly more free than ours, but only just). We filled the club to capacity, and I think we really turned a corner getting NO2ID involved.
As part of the performance, everyone was asked to vote, and be photographed with their ballot. You can see the full gallery of voters, and who they voted for, here…

Online promo for Slaughterhaus Five - After The Harvest, Weapons Not Food. Shot on DV, on location in Cockfosters in about 6 hours, for a budget of under £50.

Music is by Laibach. Used without permission.

So I’ve actually had some spare(ish) time lately, and I’ve been wanting to expand my skills a bit - so I thought I’d have a go at directing some short promo videos. A club I VJ at, Strength Through Joy, is rebranding and moving to a new venue (and, ahem, making me a partner ), and they wanted to do a campaign to reflect this. Here’s the first two videos: