Darren's blog

Monday 20th August 2012 saw the UK Premiere of Samsara at The Soho Hotel in London.

Mark Magidson and Ron Fricke were in attendance.  It was a intimate showing.  Mark and Ron gave a nice Q&A session afterwards.

The SpiritOfBaraka competition winners Kirsten and Julius loved seeing Baraka.  Julius hadn't seen Baraka, and was literally speechless after seeing Samsara.

A massive thank you to everyone at Arrow Films for hosting the premiere, and accommodating our competition winners.

This was my 4th time of seeing Samsara, and I love it more every time that I see it.  It truly is the successor to Baraka than I think we have all hoped and longed for.

Word wide showings are soon at start, so check the showing lists below and go and see Samsara!Read more >>>

Samsara's World Premiere was on 11th September 2011 in Toronto, Canada, at the Toronto International Film Festival.

I have run this website for 10 years as a guide to Baraka and other nonverbal films.  I love Baraka, it is my favourite film, and has inspired my life of travel and exploration.  When Mark Magidson invited me to the world premiere of Samsara I was delighted and thrilled, and quickly booked my flights.  I visited Toronto via New York, and Niagara Falls, being very much the tourist.

Meeting Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson

I had arranged to meet Mark Magidson at 11:30 am, to collect my tickets for the premiere of Samsara, later that day.  Mark was giving a talk called The Art of the Impossible, about making films in difficult conditions.  Read more >>>

This website has a new design and layout.  I hope you like it.

This update has been well overdue, but I finally found the time to do it.

The website has a lot of information, such as the comments and suggestions people have made to the images from the films.

Moving this amount of data between websites is normally a difficult job, that can cost a lot of money.  Luckily I am a professional website developer, so I just needed to find the time to do it.

Now that the website is much easier to update I will (and already have) been updating it more frequently.

Thanks for visiting.

I have just returned from a 7 month trip through India, Nepal, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. I have created a travel blog about my trip, with lots of photos and daily blogs.

Many of the photographs were taken by Abby. She specialises in travel photography tips, and works freelance. Her passion is for portraits and people, but also loves landscapes and just about anything that can be captured on film or memory card.

Mr friend Brian has been building and selling log cabins and wooden buildings for 20 years.  His business has become one of the best in Cornwall, where we are both from.

However, Brian being an enterprising chap, has branched out a bit.  He has launched a new company offering excellent, cheaper, log cabins, and other timber buildings.  Because these buildings are designed and cut at the saw mill, they are cheaper to make, and therefore cheaper to everyone to buy.

The cabins are of high-quality.  The mill at which they are made used modern CNC saws and mills, meaning that the timbers are cut perfectly.  All of the parts for the cabin and cut and packed, then transported to your home or business address.Read more >>>

I thought I'd mention that I have a new website about my travels in my camper van. It has lots of information including how to build your own camper van. The information mainly comes from a 9 month trip I took through France, Belgium, Spain and Portugal. There is also information about VW camper vans and hiring a camper van.

On the trip I did climb the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and took a photo of the statue which Ron Fricke shoots in Chronos. I also took photos of Stonehenge in England, and Mon-St-Michel in France. Obviously my photographs don't compare the moving images in the film, but I'll show them anyway.

Stonehenge from ChronosRead more >>>

This is great website about the best web hosts. All of the leading web hosts are compared so that you can find the best one for your website. The reviews and feature comparisons are particularly good.

There are pages for the best php hosting, best wordpress hosting and the best drupal hosting.

Lucky People Centre International is available on DVD from Amazon.de
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000EQ4420/ref=nosim/spiritofbar04-21/

The quality is great, however the film has permanent German subtitles, which cannot turned off. This is a shame. It would have been much better to add the subtitles using the subtitle feature, rather than overlaying them over the film.

I saw Baraka on a big screen at Falmouth University media centre. Luke Laszczak emailed me a few days ago letting me know about the showing. Tash and I went down and watched the film. It was the first time I had seen Baraka on a big screen. Luke and Neil, the head of the film society, are keen to show more films, and I hope to be involved.

I am trying to find Lucky People Centre International on DVD or VHS. I like the film which is a montage of clips of cultures, peoples and civilisations from around the world. It's very underground, but I like it a lot. I have contacted the official website and the person listed as the UK distributer, but I've had no reply. If you should know how I can get a copy please let me know.

I have completed the page for the film Fascinating Nature by Gogol Lobmayr. It's a great film. More of a nonverbal landscape documentary, and less spiritual or moving than the other films featured on the site. I have added image for the film, which are beautiful.

The website has had a black colour scheme since it was first created. This is because the images from the films look better on a black background. However for some time I have wondered if the black puts people off? I think it probably does. After reading this article on the BBC web site I am tempted to change the colour scheme.
Ultimately I want this site as a Drupal powered site. Drupal is a CMS that I have used to create other websites. It is very powerful and allows many features such as forums and polls to be used with very little configuration. I had decided recently to not make any more functionality or structure changes to this web site, instead I would move to Drupal. However I may now change the colour scheme.

I have received a rental DVD of Man With a Movie Camera. This film uses techniques found in the nonverbal films, but this film was made in 1929. I will take a look and give more details in the blog.

I have received a rental DVD of Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana. This film has good images of desert landscapes, and is some 10 years older than Koyaanisqatsi. The content is limited though, and does contain dialog. I will take a more in depth look and write more on this blog.

I have a copy of Rivers and Tides by Andy Goldworthy & Thomas Riedelsheimer. This film has landscape images, but seems to have a plot and actors. I'll take a better look and post info here.

I was not enjoying the black design of the web site anymore so I have created a new fresher look. I have removed some old film logos, and changes just about all of the colours. I have improved the slide show by adding thumbnails for the next and previous image buttons. I've also changed the colours of the forums and the blog to match.

I was surprised and delighted to notice that Winged Migration was shown on British television on 27th December 2005. It was shown on a satellite or digital channel (UKTV History I think). Baraka and Koyaanisqatsi have been shown in the past, but only on a few occasions. I am British and live in Cornwall in England. Until recently we have had only a limited choice of TV channels. The introduction of satellite and digital channels has generated many new channels, which are able to show more underground films such as Winged Migration.Read more >>>

You may be interested in the process that allows me to extract the images from the films.

I have worked for many years in the IT industry, primarily as a computer programmer. My skills allowed me to write an application that extracts the images from a DVD. I set the period at which images are extracted (for example, one image every 100 frames) and these images are written to my computers disk.

I then spend a long time choosing which images to use. Once I have done this I create thumbnail versions of each of the images. I also optimise the full size images to ensure the smallest amount of bandwidth is used. This web site uses a lot of bandwidth, mainly because of the high number of high quality images used. I think these images are an integral part of the website, and the effort and cost are worth it.Read more >>>

I have decided to keep a blog of the progress of the Spirit of Baraka website.
My passion for this website has grown constantly, just like my passion for the films. Over the last few months I have added lots of new films and other content to the Spirit of Baraka web site. This blog will serve as a series of notes explaining how the site is progressing.

I watched the extras on the Koyaanisqatsi DVD last night. I have decided to add information from these extras as articles on the web site. I believe people will find this information very interesting. It will help to add extra information about each film.

Godfrey Reggio's comments about Ron Fricke and Philip Glass being essential to the creation of Koyaanisqatsi are very interesting. I knew Ron Fricke provided much of the cinematography for Koyaanisqatsi, but it seems that Ron Fricke contributed more than I had thought.