Documentary Films: Exploring Graffiti, Street Art & Urban Art

The global graffiti documentary Bomb It 2 is in its final stages of post-production and will be released in fall 2012! After all the different Bomb It 2 video parts were already published back in 2010, this is the final step… In the sequel to Bomb It Jon Reiss travels to Bangkok, Jakarta, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, the Palestinian refugee camps on the West Bank, Perth, Melbourne, Copenhagen, Chicago and Austin and features artists including Klone, Know Hope, Great Bates, Huskmitnavn, Ash, Phibs, Stormie Mills, and many more. ...

If you start loving to watch lime-lapse videos of metropolises from around the world (here Dubai and here New York & Istanbul), there’s no way to stop watching them… Recently I stumbled upon this very time-lapse video of the Russian capital Moscow. Belarusian photographer and film-maker zweizwei created this beauty around four months ago, using different camera bodies and several lenses. It shows Moscow at its best and is in my eyes, one of the best time-lapse city portraits I ever watched! ...

For all fans of influential street artist Invader, a dream becomes true: Shot in winter 2011, this movie invites you to spend one night in Paris with the French street artist Invader! Invader, well-known around the globe for the amazing space invader tile artworks he puts up during so-called city invasions, is one of the leading street art heroes since the early days of the street art hype. He is not just travelling the world (check out his stuff in South Korea), but was also featured VNA Magazine and in Banksy’s Exit Through The Gift Shop! ...

Shepard Fairy aka Obey The Giant is not just the head behind the well-known Obama election poster and this cover for Time Magazine’s Person of the Year 2011 issue. No, he also is one of the early-birds of the international street art movement, a true legend if you like to call it that way and for that reason got his tribute in one of the latest The Simpsons episodes! Now, Shepard is going to get his own first film: Obey The Giant - The Shepard Fairey biopic… ...

French graffiti artists Sowat (DMV) and Lek, invited 40 urban artists to paint an abandoned supermarket in the north of Paris since they discovered the great, decayed building in summer 2011! Just to make it clear, imagine an old, four storey supermarket and dozens of talented graffiti artists who paint and paint an paint…and film the results! Including stuff by Apotre, Bims, Blo, Bom.k, Boyane, Brusk, Deap, Dem189, Fléo, Gris1, Hobz, Honda, Jayone, Jaws, Kan, Katre, Monsieur Qui, O’clock, Onde, Outside, Rems, Romi, Sambre, Seth, Siao, Skio, Smo, Spei, Swiz and Tcheko, the building has now become - similar to the Ghostvillage or Underbelly Project - an illegal artistic residency. ...

A few days ago, the Welcome To Detroit exhibition by Evan Roth (the guy who invented the Graffiti Markup Language) finished and after presenting several new works, combining popular culture with a certain hacker’s philosophy, what persists is all those great short-films, Roth created documenting his Propulsion Paintings series… Evan Roth has been living and making new work in Detroit for the last month, gearing up for a solo exhibition that opens this Wednesday at Eastern Michigan University: Welcome to Detroit. His new series of artworks is called: Propulsion Paintings. As part of his residency at Eastern Michigan University, he’s teaching a course called Art and Hacking where he had the students create their own Propulsion Paintings as their first project. (todayandtomorrow.net) ...

UR{BNE} Films is an urban design and architecture film festival, coming up in Brisbane this May and in London this June! The main intention behind this very interesting project is to showcase films that inform and inspire about urban design, architecture, public spaces and collaborative design process, where communities and city design can be the subject, the background, the actor and lead role in the wide mixture of feature films, documentary and shorts… ...

Do you remember How & Nosm, Nunca, Retna, Faile, Andrew Schoultz and around 25 other urban artists painting those old, abandoned (military) airplanes for the Boneyard Project? Recently, this new official video produced by filmmaker Jason Wawro was published, documenting mainly the ideas of this unique art event with statements by Faile, Andrew Schoultz and Bast, talking about their ups and downs (gravity and liquid aren’t friends!) during the creative process. The video also includes several amazing images of different plane painting processes and background info about the entire process. ...

Old-school ways of printing, like screen printing, are currently re-experiencing another revival with artists, using those very technical and manually adjustable proceedings to create limited print editions with a rough and sometimes vintage style… Regarding Paul Collier, another of these revival experiencing printing techniques is letterpress printing. When I stumbled upon the nice and intimate Upside Down, Left to Right letterpress film by Danny Cooke, I immediately felt like a small kid watching his grand-dad working! I’m a big letterpress fan, mainly because of that certain feeling you have by stroking the printed surface and the knowledge of how difficult creating good letterpress prints can be, for what reason I really loved this short film. ...

3D is in and trendy, Hollywood is showing is that with almost every new movie they throw on the market and although the 3D technique is not yet as convincing as is probably could be, I really like the idea of the new Taken By A Vandal graffiti documentary, bringing graffiti action three dimensions into our living rooms! Graffiti as seen through the eyes of the artist While watching this action-loaded documentary, we’re following the happenings as seen through the eyes of the 18 graffiti artist, who filmed themselves using head camera. This, and the fact that they decided to add a certain stereoscopic 3D effect, makes Taken By A Vandal become somehow confusing but also unique and very interesting. All in all you could say, this graffiti documentary shows train-graffiti action as just a minority has seen it before… ...