Sanela Kurtek

Guillaume Juin is a French filmmaker, with a pretty incredible portfolio - he does everything rom commercials, events, drone photography, to motion design and narrative. But his most prominent videos are the ones from his travels. He's always on the road and on his Vimeo channel you can find videos from Argentina, Peru, Turkey and most recently Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. 

For our next video of the week, we've chosen the short film he created during his trip to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. On this trip Guillaume visited the most important natural sights in both countries. First on the list was the Ustyurt Plateau in Kazakhstan. This area of around 200,000 square kilometres is also called an "island", because of its edge cliffs of over 300 metres high. The colour of the cliffs ranges from white to pink, with no green in the sight.  

Keep reading Kazakhstan - Kyrgyzstan

How much do you know about Kyrgyzstan?

Located in the Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan is a landlocked country with mountainous terrain. It's farther from the sea than any other individual country in the world. The mountains of Tian Shan cover over 80 percent of the country, which is what gave Kyrgyzstan the nickname "Switzerland of Central Asia".

Kyrgyzstan is also the home of the second largest mountain lake in the world - Issyk-Kol lake, which translates to "warm lake" in the Kyrgyz language. The lake never freezes despite being surrounded by snowy mountain peaks.

Keep reading Issyk-Kol

When someone mentions a skate video, the first thing that comes to mind is a compilation of skaters doing crazy tricks, falling down and getting back up to try again. It's what most of skate videos are after all because it's usually amateurs who are filming them for the sake of the tricks. These days it seems that more and more visual artists have found a big source of inspiration in the skating scene and they're looking to create fresh stories out the rides and tricks.

Such is the case of the Berlin-based visual artist and the creative director at FLVR series, a skateboarding brand and art collective based in Berlin, Youri Fernandez. Together with FLVR and Nowness, he created a mesmerizing monochromatic skate video titled Skater's Paradise: ON/OFF.

Keep reading ON/OFF

Do you ever wonder how many times your face appeared in strangers' photos from all around the world? We are in contact with masses of people every day, but we never meet all of them, we never see all of them. But at one point in time, we are at the same place at the same time, breathing the same air and admiring the same views. How strange is it that we're so aware of our surroundings but so unaware of the people surrounding us.

Julien Vallée and Eve Duhamel make the Vallée Duhamel duo, known for their "high class lo-fi" work profile. Based in Montreal, Vallée Duhamel specializes in both images and videos and 'playful and experimental approach toward work'.

After collaborating for seven years, in 2008 they decided to team up and launch a studio:

We started to create animated and video projects, and they eventually became the main request from clients and agencies. After a couple of years developing these lo-fi, handcrafted films, we were able to build a team [and]…it didn’t make sense any more to be co-directors.

Keep reading Les Inconnus | The Strangers

Martin Heck is a time-lapse artist and cinematographer based in Southern Germany. He started making time-lapse films in 2009 with a basic point-and-shoot camera. Soon enough he realized he's not going to get far with the time-lapses unless he uses better technology, so Martin bought himself a DSLR, but never stopped searching for better and more effective ways to show beautiful landscapes on video.

With growing expectations to quality and composition motion-control gear became quickly a main focus of my work. I started developing and building sliders and jibs to create more dynamic shots than it was possible before.

Tech is always a driving factor behind my work. With sensor-technology quickly evolving, new lens-designs and new post-production techniques I currently specialize in ultra high-resolution visuals in 4K and 8K resolution.

Keep reading Patagonia 8K

Hello, old friend. It's good to see you again. I've missed our adventures that grow without end.

We've all at some point in our life experienced the pleasure of returning to an old hobby that made us so happy once. It's like rediscovering yourself again, remembering the person you used to be and choosing to keep and cherish the pieces you liked.

This is the feeling DreamRide 2 evokes. It makes you want to get up, get on your bike and go riding, or give that old hobby of yours another go.

In the video, sponsored by Diamondback Bicycles, produced by Juicy Studios, Mike Hopkins, a professional freeride mountain biker from Rossland, British Columbia takes us on an adventure that doesn't seem to have an end.

Keep reading DreamRide 2

Liesel Kershoff is a South African landscape and time-lapse photographer. She's based in Caledon, in the Western Cape in South Africa. When she was a child she used to walk down to the Bath River and enjoyed sunsets with her cat and her dog.

I have always had a close relationship with nature and was certain that I would become a wildlife photographer one day.  

After graduating from high school, she decided to travel the world. At one point, she worked at a flower farm in Israel and keept travelling and in her spare time. After a while on the road, she decided to start a fruit and vegetable shop with her sister back home.

It wasn't until her husband bought her her first SLR camera (film) that she decided she wants to be a photographer. She enrolled in a home course and found her calling.

Keep reading A Drowned Forest Exposed

Rogerio Silva, a commercials, music videos and short films director, based in Cambridge, used to design award-winning video games. He worked on ENSLAVED and wrote and directed the Devil May Cry expansion Vergil's Downfall. After a decade of involvement with video games, he decided to move on and become a filmmaker. In film he found his true calling:

I always felt a need to say or express something, and now I know that film is the language I'm meant to use. Whether it's a short film with dancers or actors, it doesn't matter.

The main topic of Silva's dance films are the ups and downs of relationships expressed through the art of dance. As our video of the week, we've chosen Abaddon - a CGI meets dance poem of love and destruction.

Keep reading Abaddon

Mathieu Le Lay is a French cinematographer, based in Annecy, France. His passion for cinema and nature led him to study at IFFCAM, the French wildlife film school. He then graduated in wildlife conservation at Salford University in the UK and since 2008 he's been expressing his fascination for the relationship between man and the wild nature by filming documentaries, for which he has won 18 awards so far.

Le Lay's documentaries testify of his passion for nature and mysterious atmospheres surrounding. He connects the vast big world of wildlife with humans, by creating a contrast between the big force of nature and the smaller but very persistent, presence of humans. He seeks out ruthless, but beautiful circumstances and places to film his videos to show the great might of Mother Nature and still point to her precious gifts to the mankind, freedom being the most important of them all.

Film with natural sounds and music give another emotional dimension and this very emotion is what I want to share.

Keep reading A Sense of Wonder