Raum doesn’t really break any barriers, but nor was it intended to. In the late ’70s and early ’80s their sound became slicker and more cinematic, soundtracking films like Sorcerer, Thief, and even Risky Business. Their first studio album, 1970’s Electronic Meditation, featured eerie found sounds among more conventional rock instruments, and from 1971’s Alpha Centauri onward-three years before Kraftwerk’s Autobahn-Tangerine Dream threw themselves into electronic instrumentation. Like the Dead, Tangerine Dream were once innovators, a kind of proto- Kraftwerk best enjoyed semi-horizontally while ensconced in a bean-bag chair. According to Thorsten Quaeschning, who has been with Tangerine Dream since 2005, Froese and his wife Bianca made plans for the band to continue after his death, and Raum was produced with access to Froese’s Cubase arrangements and tape archive of recordings from 1977 to 2013. Raum is the second album the group has released since Froese’s passing, and he features in both spirit and sound. It's a great film even if you didn't know how it was shot and once you do, it sets the bar for what can be achieved with a phone's camera.Even the death of founding member Edgar Froese in 2015 could not stop a band as enduring as Tangerine Dream. Like the film's characters, the camera is in near-constant motion and fizzing with kinetic energy.īeautifully shot, strongly acted and frequently laugh-out-loud funny, "Tangerine" recalls films such as "Trainspotting" and "Spun" in the way it exuberantly scrambles through the darker corners of human experience, yet always finds the humanity and the life. The camera is incredibly mobile, bobbing on the shoulders of the characters as they pound the pavement or swooping over their heads, even soaring over the street in one dizzying crane shot. And it crackles with hugely cinematic energy, thanks to a combination of quickfire editing and the mobility afforded by a smartphone camera. Mya Taylor is excellent as Sin-Dee's stoic best friend, who just wants her friend to watch her sing.Īlong the way they encounter drugs, pimps and occasional violence as the film delves into some pretty sordid corners of LA life, yet it's shot through with tenderness and effervescent comedy. Kitana Kiki Rodriguez explodes off the screen as the motor-mouthed Sin-Dee Rella, an acerbic and fearless transsexual sex worker combing the city for her cheating boyfriend and armed with an instant put-down for anybody who crosses her path. Often shot in tight close-up, the film is literally in your face in both the way it's shot and the subject matter. It feels alive.Īgainst this backdrop of the teeming streets of LA, the larger-than-life characters more than hold their own. ![]() It feels as transparent and up-front as the characters and their story. It's the perfect backdrop for the slice-of-street-life drama - the characters walking, driving and arguing their way through the lurid colours of LA, from sun-soaked day to neon-sparkling twilight. That might sound distracting, but in fact it fits well with the tone of the film. ![]() The signs, the billboards, the stickers on the window. Not just the characters in the foreground, but the passers-by in the background too. Rather than artfully blurring the background, the camera records everything. ![]() The most immediately obvious way in which the look of the film is dictated by the use of a smartphone is the fixed depth-of-field of the iPhone's camera. The results are nothing short of stunning. The smartphones were fitted with a Moondog anamorphic adapter to capture widescreen images and mounted on Tiffen's Steadicam Smoothee to allow for smooth camera movements, with the focus and aperture controlled by the FiLMIC Pro video app.
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