Arts Council England and the UK Film Council’s New Cinema Fund are proud to announce the launch of Single Shot – a major new initiative that provokes new ideas about the ways we view, interact with, and understand the moving image.
Single Shot is a multi-platform touring programme of moving image works drawing on two distinct commissioning strands; a series of specially commissioned works by well-known artists working in film and video (including George Barber, Ori Gersht and Paul Rooney), and works gathered from an open call for submissions from new talent, seeking out anyone with creative ideas.
Single Shot will launch this November in London – simultaneously screening in galleries and cinemas, on outdoor screens and other non-traditional spaces, as well as on the internet, and available as downloads to your mobile phone or video iPod.
Touring the UK in 2007 to Manchester, Newcastle / Gateshead, Birmingham and Leeds / Bradford (further information available), Single Shot also has an online presence at www.single-shot.co.uk.
Gary Thomas, Head of Moving Image at Arts Council England, comments; “The concept of the single shot has consistently inspired both artists and film makers. Harnessing the power of two mindsets, both with artists working in film and video and traditional film makers, provides the catalyst for a re-thinking of the moving image, and what it can offer creatives of all
disciplines.”
Filmmaker Sir Alan Parker has voiced his support for the project. “Single Shot is such a great idea, using all the new technological tools to unlock and unite visual talents wherever they may be found.”
Ori Gersht, Pomegranate (2006) Paul Rooney, Dust (2006) George Barber, Automotive Action Painting (2006)
Sean Dower, Automaton (2006)

You Only Get One Shot…
Leading British artists and exciting new talents seize the chance to make vibrant singletake pieces for multiple moving-image platforms
Launch Date – 3rd November

Single Shot Artist Commissions
Film and Video Umbrella, the UK’s leading commissioner of artists’ work in film and video, has commissioned six artists to create works around the concept of the single shot.
While the selected Single Shot pieces demonstrate a wide diversity of approaches, what they share is a desire to create a work of power and complexity from the most basic of cinematic elements — the single, unedited shot. Whether humorous or poignant, seductive or disturbing — or indeed all of these things — what each work attempts is to catch the viewer’s eye and
hold it, unblinkingly, until the end.
Working under such technical constraints has pushed some of the artists towards works of great formal control; for others, this disciplined focus has been a stimulus for liberation and invention.

George Barber - Automotive Action Painting Observed from an overhead camera, a man stops by the roadside one morning and empties the contents of a number of large cans of paint over the tarmac. As the light rises, along with the level of traffic, the cars spread the paint along the surface of the road, creating
an abstract smear of vibrant colour.

Clio Barnard - Dark Glass
Shot on a mobile phone, ‘Dark Glass’ is a taut micro-drama that visually recreates a spoken description of family photographs recalled under hypnosis. Although the recollection appears incredibly compelling, it also possesses an inherent instability, so that we are never quite sure what we’re hearing or seeing, something further emphasised by the unsteady nature of the image itself, which lends an apparitional quality to this apparent act of truth-telling.

Sean Dower – Automaton
Using a motion-control camera rig most often used in the production of special effects, Sean Dower takes the camera on a dynamic three-dimensional journey round a full-sized drum kit. As the camera weaves around the highly reflective black and chromed curves, it tracks the detail of a complex and shifting drum solo, in which both drummer (Steve Noble) and camera are locked together into a
single resonant performance.

Ori Gersht - Pomegranate
In a carefully composed scene reminiscent of a Juan Sanchez Cotan sixteenth century still life, a pomegranate fruit stands out from a muted, theatrical backdrop. After a few moments, this highly symbolic fruit is exploded by a high-velocity bullet; seeds spilling from its disintegrating carcass in extreme slow-motion, and with an eerie and terrible beauty.
Mike Marshall - Birdcatcher
Mike Marshall's short film consists of a mesmeric tracking shot through a forest in India, its smooth mechanical movement contrasting
with the complex natural environment it explores. Suspended above the verdant terrain, the camera is seemingly drawn along by an
atmospheric soundtrack of precisely orchestrated birdsong, modulating continuously in time with the passage through the trees.

Paul Rooney – Dust
Set on a commercial freighter mysteriously marooned within touching distance of land, Paul Rooney’s seven-minute handheld travelling shot, restlessly circling round the deck of the boat, evokes a state of personal limbo, whose rising anxieties are reflected in an elegantly dissonant Brecht/Weill-influenced soundtrack and in a half-whispered, half-sung monologue haunted by memory and history.

Single Shot New Talent
The second strand of Single Shot features nine works collated from an open call for submissions, open to anyone with creative ideas which took the form of, or were inspired by the idea of, the single shot.
Maya Vision International, an independent film and television production company, worked closely with the chosen ideas to give them a professional finish, which included re-shooting, editing and professional post-production.

Shane Davey - I’ve Been Single Too Long
Whether a declaration of yearning or an admission of an overheated imagination, the title of Shane Davey’s single shot work offers an insight into the scene being played out before us. Rising from his bed, the listless male protagonist wanders through his house and into his hammock in the garden, oblivious, it seems, to the many young women — wearing only their underwear — lounging all around him.

Ben Dodd - Surprise
In this stylish short thriller with Hitchcockian overtones, a man lies lifeless on a bath, while above him looms the figure of a woman, a large knife lying at her feet. As the scene unfolds — running backwards in time — our surprise at what has happened is perhaps as great as those to whom it has.

Matthew Grinter – Tea Leaves
Press Release SINGLE SHOT
Doing the rounds of the tables in a crowded café, the camera glides slowly past the assembled clientele. At the start of the circumnavigation of the room, a customer spills his tea, setting up a domino-effect of interconnected events, which builds to a conclusion as the piece completes its circuit. An illustration of the principle that what goes around comes around, you can read
‘Tealeaves’ as a set of random actions or as a reminder of the inescapable role of fate.

Julie Hill - Glass Gun
A figure of a gun, formed out of glass and suspended in space, explodes into myriad shards, light shimmering through the tumbling fragments. Julie Hill’s clever collapsing of cause and effect is a vivid reminder of the fragility of things and of our underlying propensity for violence.

Christian Krupa – Vanished Point
Stretching the notion of a ‘single shot’ to its extreme, or at least into a parallel, virtual dimension, Christian Krupa creates a fantastical, almost futurist, architectural vision using a digital assembly of images taken around London’s South Bank Centre.

Hyewon Kwon - Bittersweet
To the list of easy-to-play piano melodies that can be readily performed with two fingers can be added Francis Lai’s sugary ‘Theme from Love Story’, Here, the twist is that the pianist (who has the congenital condition ectrodactyly, or split hand/foot malformation)actually only has two fingers on each hand. This single-take close-up of them caressing the keys is both disconcerting and deeply poignant.

Matthew Murdoch - Being There
In this charmingly self-referential cameo, the static camera zooms out slowly to reveal a section of Hadrian’s Wall. As it does so, we listen to a taped phone conversation between the artist and his father as they finalise their travel arrangements to go and see England play Scotland at rugby in Edinburgh; a journey that involves a stop-off en route to shoot the scene we are currently watching, an entry for a ‘single shot’ project remarkably similar to the one in which the piece is now showcased.

Tula Parker and Anna Weatherston - Beach Jam
A sample-heavy funk track provides the revving and screeching sound effects for a toy car as it is ‘driven’ along a stretch of sea wall, from the ‘metropolis’ of a snow-shaker past a ‘Weekend’ tail-back of traffic before arriving, in the wheeltracks of Thelma and Louise, at the breaking surf.
Dave Richards - Comb & Paper As a kind of rude awakening to The Mamas and the Papas’, ‘California Dreamin’, three men, or rather three raggedy clones of another, rather different relic of the Sixties, add their own impromptu solo to this timeless and mellifluous pop classic.

Feature Projects
Alongside this project, UK Film Council and Arts Council England continue their support of innovation in film by supporting the development of four feature-length ideas, with the opportunity for two of the selected projects to be awarded production funding by the UK Film Council’s New Cinema fund. The four projects under consideration are by Paul Hamlyn award-winning artist Clio Barnard , artist Ergin Cavusoglu (whose work featured prominently in
British Art Show 6), multimedia artists and digital innovators Hexstatic and Turner Prize winning artist Gillian Wearing.
Arts Council England and the UK Film Council’s New Cinema Fund will invest £250,000 in two resulting films.
"Artists and film makers need to be able to experiment and challenge audiences, and the New Cinema Fund has a key role to play in this. Our initiative with Arts Council England is another much-needed stepping stone to create an environment, in which such experimentation is possible," commented Paul Trijbits, Head of the UK Film Council’s New Cinema Fund.
“We need to encourage talent who may choose to work with a variety of moving image formats to bring their ideas and approaches to cinema. Some of the UK’s most visionary filmmakers, such as Derek Jarman, Sally Potter, Peter Greenaway,
John Maybury, have come from the visual arts and we are now seeing artists such as Sam Taylor Wood and Tracey Emin making films for an international cinema audience.” Gary Thomas, Head of Moving Image, Arts Council England


www.single-shot.co.uk