Žagar Clips Play Well at Video Awards Ceremony

We return this week with more big news on the local music video front. PPM produced and co-produced videos were big winners recently at Hungary’s video award ceremony, Magyar Klipszemle, held in Budapest at the Toldi Cinema. Both videos were for local indie/electronica star act Žagar.  The Dream of A Machine, co-produced with Kinopravda (just like the buzz-generating Yvein Monq clip), won for Best Camera Operator (Gábor Garai), while Space Medusa won for Best Director (Danila Kostil).

While the atmospheric videos are both conceptually straightforward, the band itself exists between genres, bridging the gap between indie and electronic music in a way that has captivated local and international audiences. According to their Wikipedia page, “Their sound is based on contemporary electronic music, jazz and indie rock adding with experimental scratches by DJ Bootsie. The results are heavy beats, atmospheric mood and sound clips from the psychedelic era of the late 1960s.”

About to embark on a European tour that includes stops at Prague’s legendary Roxy and Berlin’s Badehaus, Žagar is an outfit on the rise. In addition to numerous local accolades, their music has also been featured on the American series CSI: Crime Scene Investigations, and CSI: New York, and on BBC radio. Moreover, Žagar was nominated for the best local act in the MTV European Music Awards in both 2008 and 2009. Both PPM-produced clips were from the band’s 2013 album release Light Leaks, which, according to the band’s site, “received warm critical acclaim in the international press and left quite an impression on music blogs and radios worldwide.”

Both clips are embedded below. Look, listen, and enjoy.

PPM Film Services is a Budapest-based film company offering an inspiring and creative work atmosphere for its host of clients from around the world. Since our inception, our focus has been providing the best of the best in terms of local production resources, locations, cast and technical teams to ensure that whatever the production we’re charged to create, we do it with no compromise. To sign up for the PPM Hungary newsletter, have a look here.

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What We’re Up To: Yvein Monq’s TWUN

We’re proud to present the official video for Hungarian electro act Yvein Monq’s track TWUN. It seems to have become a ‘buzz’ clip, getting coverage for its high concept and high heels from such sources as nowness.com, thefader.com, and GQ online, which calls the video, “mesmerizing.” Additionally, Vimeo just named the video as one of their Staff Picks, heightening its profile significantly. Elsewhere, on YouTube, the video has been viewed over 100,000 times in just a month.

The Hungarian portion was co-produced by PPM Hungary and Umbrella. Along with the film collective Kinopravda, the three organizations have a proven history of collaborating on fun, lively videos (like this one, for Hungarian act Zagar’s track Space Medusa). Directed by Hungarian Viktor Horvath and Kinopravda, the video for TWUN was shot in both Barcelona and Budapest. You can see opposite ends of Budapest’s broad spectrum of appeal here, from the bleak Socialist panel housing, to the turn-of-the-century gilded interior of the sumptuous Boscolo Hotel (utilizing the lobby, staircase, and cigar room). The entire Hungarian portion was shot in one day, which is an accomplishment considering the trek from the outer 13^th District location to the very central hotel.

Stylish, atmospheric, frustrating and funny, it is easy to see why the clip is getting so much attention. Along with the music, the shoes are the stars here, and stars don’t come without a little controversy. Apparently Lady Gaga was also in town shooting her own video, and her team coveted some of the unique shoes used in TWUN. In the end, a compromise was reached, and both camps walked (shakily) away with all the shoes they needed.

Women falling all over the place in fancy footwear: what does it all mean? Nowness.com puts it best: “A parallel can be drawn between broken beats and losing one’s balance, and Monq’s brilliantly skittish track matches perfectly the unpredictable and humanizing act of stumbling.” By all accounts, the shoot went smoothly, except for the few jaunty steps the models had to take in these ultra-high heels; but of course, that was part of the plan.

PPM Film Services is a Budapest-based film company offering an inspiring and creative work atmosphere for its host of clients from around the world. Since our inception, our focus has been providing the best of the best in terms of local production resources, locations, cast and technical teams to ensure that whatever the production we’re charged to create, we do it with no compromise. To sign up for the PPM Hungary newsletter, have a look here.

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SPY Heavies Go Public with Praise for Budapest

You know you have a good thing when people do your PR for you. We stumbled across this press clip for the recently released Hollywood film Spy, where director Paul Feig and comedic rising-star Melissa McCarthy absolutely gush about Budapest as a location. Along the way, they highlight the reasons we return to again and again that make Budapest one of the most attractive locations for shooting. But don’t take our word for it: here’s an excerpt of an (edited for clarity) transcription of Paul Freig’s interview, followed by a word from the film’s star.

“We went to Budapest where you can make things a little cheaper. There’s good tax breaks, the nuts and bolts of movie-making…I’d always heard for years how beautiful it was…When we got there it was so beautiful, we looked around and we were like, this section of the city could double for Paris, and this section could double for Rome, but the whole second half of the movie was supposed to take place in Paris, so I was like, let’s just set it in Budapest, because Budapest is so beautiful, why would I want to hide that? I want to take full advantage of this place, because anywhere you point a camera in Budapest you’ve got an amazing shot. So when we were prepping I re-wrote the script to make it take place in Budapest, and I am so happy we did, because you get so much production value out of it.”

This is followed by a few breathless words from Melissa McCarthy: “There’s places we shot in that… I’ve never seen anything like…the architecture and the age of it and just how pretty it is, and the variety of locations we got, I think it would have been a very different movie without being in Budapest…a bunch of the film takes place in Budapest, and I love that.”

To sum up: cost-effective, adaptable, beautiful, and unique yet universal. There you have it. We didn’t’ even pay them to say all that. Spy the clip below, with a longer version of the interviews, and you can see, Budapest as a filming location, is star-endorsed, and tough to beat.

PPM Film Services is a Budapest-based film company offering an inspiring and creative work atmosphere for its host of clients from around the world. Since our inception, our focus has been providing the best of the best in terms of local production resources, locations, cast and technical teams to ensure that whatever the production we’re charged to create, we do it with no compromise. To sign up for the PPM Hungary newsletter, have a look here.

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