Documentary Films: Exploring Graffiti, Street Art & Urban Art

Ten skateboarders and a lot of powder - The idea for this short film is really extraordinary! Imaging, your skateboard and yourself are totally dusted with powder and you’re riding your board through a nice skate-park. The impressions for people around you must be great. The powder creates an unusual dust behind you after every move or jump and it seems that you disband yourself. The ten minutes film “Wizard Smoke” presents this very interesting impressions. The Salazar Productions crew filmed pro-skateboarders, like Bradley Sheppard, Alien, Nate Lacoste, Chris Connolly, Nate Roline and others and recorded for this reason the colorful clouds in their wake. ...

Wow, this is a impressing time-lapse film - Andreas Doppelmayr shows parts of the two Japanese metropolises Tokyo and Yokohama from fantastic perspectives! “This video was filmed during a couple of nights in Tokyo and one evening in Yokohama. It begins with a few clips from/ of/ around the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, continues with a short clip from the Akihabara electronics district, then a few shots of some construction work near Shibuya, some clips from Ginza, a shot of Shibuya, a few clips near the Imperial Palace, some stuff in the metro, and finishes off with a clip of the Yokohama Bay Bridge and skyline.” (A. Doppelmayr) ...

In early October, Lueneburg was visited by 35 world-renowned street artists, because of freshman students’ first week. The freshmen were ordered to hold document this event and the university charged another team with the documentation of the start days. During this time, “The Art of Control” was also made. It’s the only independent film that tries to show the ambivalence of the project: Street artists express their opinion about illegality and the difficulty of contract work and the university’s chairmanship comments specific planned art projects for the future. ...

Joao Wainer is a photographer who lives in São Paulo and documents the Pixação Graffiti in his hometown. He already released several photographs and videos about that unique urban art and writing style, which comes from the favelas into the big Brazilian cities. For this reason, “Cool Hunting” did a nice and interesting Pixação graffiti video with him. In this short documentation, he explains some letters and talks about the ideas behind that graffiti movement. Unfortunately, the video is some month old, but a must to see. And because I haven’t wrote anything about Pixação yet, I will now show you this nice film. ...

Their names are Dezio, Popil, Mr. Lan, SAIL, AEK, Lamian, Shier, and HKER and they’re eight of Shanghai’s top graffiti writers! Recently, the community for youth culture in China “NeochaEDGE” and the “Chinese Knowledge and Innovation Community” (KIC) collaborated to bring these 8 protagonists and about 16 other creative groups together. The result was a four week event series in Shanghai, called “Search for Creative City”. ...

Yeah! Some minutes ago, I found a great time-lapse graffiti mural video…There are a lot of graffiti and mural art videos in the internet, but they’re rarely as good as this one! Three crews, the Pirates, Stereofarm and Spring69 got together to create a fantastic colorful masterpiece and a amazing time-lapse video of the making-of for the international “Central Illustration Agency” (CIA). ...

3D video projections on buildings are a never ending story! There’s no week without new videos and photo of those great light projection artworks. These technically complex art installations are en vogue and possibly the urban communication tool of 2009. “Impressive and stylish projections on buildings, a renewing way of communicating.For those who want to carry out a message in a striking and visually attractive way with guaranteed exposure.” (NuFormer) ...

I like skate-parks. I like it to make some nice shots of boys and girls skating, flying and falling down. I like the atmosphere of those places, where young urban people spent their spare time. And I love it, when there’s some colorful interior! In Swiss Lugano, a urban art collective, named Nevercrew, painted a whole skate pool some time ago. Now it’s really a pool - a fantastic octopus pool! The Nevercrew is specialize in creating murals, graphics, videos, comics and sculptures. ...

For graffiti artists around the world, fire extinguishers become more and more popular. Whether Katsu, Moral, KR, or others, everywhere urban artists use the high-pressure tanks to paint their tags in oversize. But there’s at least one disadvantage with that modern technology of mural painting - when the pressure capsule is empty, you can throw away the fire extinguisher… More comfortable is it to use smaller pressure sprayers. Yes, I mean those (pesticide) tanks you can buy for little money in every DIY market. The guys from Just Straight Photos recently made some action with there own ink tank! It’s nice to see, how good this special high-pressure tank works for painting some big tags… ...

He’s one of the best-known young graffiti artists worldwide, his artworks has a high recognition value and he is a friend of very popular writers around the globe. Yes, I’m are talking about Brazilian urban artist Nunca! He was part of the graffiti festival in Gdansk, painted at the Tate Modern in London and collaborates with Jonone at the “Graffiti meets Thalys” event in Paris some weeks ago. Latin American cable television channel I.Sat recently published a documentation, called “Talking Walls” about the unique world of street art and graffiti in São Paulo, Buenos Aires and Mexico City. One of the protagonists is already Nunca! ...