BANKY'S DISMALAND: THE OFFICIAL-UNOFFICIAL FILM BY JAMIE BRIGHTMORE

Text by Jamie Brightmore, designer and filmmaker

 

When I first heard about Dis­ma­land my ears lit-up. The place looked set to be an amaz­ing play­ground for mov­ing image expres­sion, I imme­di­ately wanted to film it. With a strong his­tory of banging the refresh but­ton, I man­aged to score some ini­tial even­ing tick­ets for me and some friends. In typ­ical fash­ion, it’s abso­lutely pissed it down. That’s fine, I thought, cosy late sum­mer nights is not what this is about. Water and cam­eras how­ever are not a match made in heaven, but a seasoned out­door film­maker makes do with what he can and I got a couple of shots in the can, with my tri­pod I might add. More import­antly, this open­ing sea­son trip also gave me an oppor­tun­ity to revel in the spec­tac­u­lar art on show, and reccy the site.

 

Sur­pris­ingly the next week I scored two more tick­ets for solo mis­sions to lay down some solid found­a­tions for the film. On an over­cast (dis­mal – per­fect) Wed­nes­day after­noon, after a pro­longed queue to get it, my poor tri­pod was refused entry, so I left it with the secur­ity guards and pushed on. On entry to the now famil­iar bemuse­ment park, I was some­what deflated as I’d planned some cool exper­i­mental motion con­trolled shots, which are just impossible without a tri­pod. How­ever I dug deep into my aged sack of ini­ti­at­ive and man­aged to bag some free­style shots. The fol­low­ing week I scored yet two more tick­ets, my luck was in and my refresh but­ton skills val­id­ated – for a third time.

 

As with all of Banksy’s past events, the over­all tone of the Dis­ma­land exper­i­ence is frankly hil­ari­ous, you can’t help but laugh and smile at the absurdity of where you find your­self. It was cap­tiv­at­ing, absorb­ing, and fun. How­ever it’s easy to get caught up in this and for­get about the under­ly­ing mes­sages being presen­ted, some were obvi­ous (like the ones pic­tured), some more lat­ent, and some purely audi­ence par­ti­cip­at­ory. I wanted to draw atten­tion to these in part, whilst also cap­tur­ing the eph­em­eral event in a cine­matic way for posterity.

 

I aimed to cre­ate an aes­thetic which mar­ried cre­at­ive visu­als and sound, which would trans­late the essence of Dis­ma­land, so those who didn’t get to go –could get a fla­vour– and those who did could warm their memories. In this age of con­tent over­load, I’m con­stantly try­ing to dif­fer­en­ti­ate myself in the pro­jects I under­take. The night before my first solo trip to Dis­ma­land, I had a late night flurry of excit­ing ideas…

 

The ‘Dis­mal­scope’ concept is inspired by past cre­at­ive cinema and uses some little tricks here-and-there to pop ele­ments out of the frame, giv­ing a new spin on the faux 3D effect. Look out for things like the over­spill­ing clouds and tracked motion on ele­ments hanging out of / into the frame.

 

Sound was an crit­ical ele­ment in con­vey­ing the essence of the exper­i­ence, so I mixed samples, sound effects, and record­ings cap­tured on loc­a­tion to com­pli­ment the visu­als and their under­tones. Hope­fully I achieved a subtle sub­con­scious flow as you travel around the vari­ous art pieces and attractions.

 

Over­all the pro­ject was tricky and took com­mit­ment. From; chal­len­ging film­ing con­di­tions and lengthy post pro­duc­tion, to a hugely involved sound design phase. Nat­ur­ally, as with any edit­ing pro­cess, many changes were made and I was tweak­ing and pol­ish­ing for days to get the final look just right. It was import­ant to grade the film cine­mat­ic­ally even down to adding film grain, using RAW video helped immensely with this endeav­our allow­ing me to build more detailed cus­tom LUTs that do the piece justice.