Coming & Going

Emily Tracy and I are working on an animation installation at Shunt Lounge, a really exciting space under London Bridge. We've just got a couple of weeks, it will be opening on the weds 7th October. Here's a little photograph of my lightbox for now.

well hello there ..

This dashing fellow is one of many beautiful drawings created by a female relative of mine a long long time ago. He is waiting until I have some time to create a little romance for him. Can you guess what his name is?

Ignition for Engine

Last night there was a screening and discussion to mark the ignition of animate's new web place Engine. They gathered Tal Rosner, Gaelle Denis and Quaynola to talk to Chris O Reilly from Nexus about the relationship between their own projects and commercial work. O Reilly's introduction made working as an animator in the commercial sector in 2009 sound tremendously complicated and fairly unappealing, (at least to this practitioner) so it was refreshing to hear Gaelle Denis provide a healthy counterpoint. She likes to be entertained by her commercial work and uses it as a chance to be playful, use new techniques and meet interesting people. Tal Rosner has executed a serious animate commission, Without you but has also put his singular editing skills to the Skins title sequence, both of which seem to fit within his practice without compromise. Quaynola focuses on his practice and adapted the imagery to fit a commercial project when requested. I've slightly missed an opportunity to use the words throttle and choke, but time is pressing. Have a look at engine.

Large Blue

I've been remaking a film from 2006 called Little Skipper, it's hard to remake it the same so actually it's a sequel called Large Blue. I showed it in Austria and realised that I liked it a lot but the quality wasn't high enough for screening so I'm starting again. For Little Skipper I made butterfly prints of butterflies in a notebook and animated them to make a one minute film. I had used video to capture the stills but the quality wasn't great in this instance because it's hard to keep the leaves of the notebook still enough and they look a bit between one frame and another. This time I'm using my digital stills camera and Final Cut Pro.

d a u m e n k i n o - t h u m b c i n e m a

My friend Abigail sent this, it looks pretty good:
FLIPBOOK call for visual and media artists, musicians film makers and architects animators and other to create and submit a flipbook, which is based on their own practice (and express how this is related to time). The flipbooks will be showing in an exhibition, which will take place at bookartbookshop, Pitfield Street, London in November 2009.
The deadline for submitting the flipbooks is Friday, 23rd October, 2009 at 5pm. Please contact infoatabigailhirschdotnet for guidance, for any other enquiries and for the postal address where the flipbook should be sent to.

LIAF 2009 - Best of The Fest

Muto by Blu won the best film of LIAF, truly an ambitious 'ambiguous animation painted on public walls'. It's an amazing feat, he doesn't just paint on walls, he also explores adjacent ceilings, floors and holes near walls and there is some interaction with objects within the surroundings, which adds to the pleasure of watching the film. Good choice I thought. Of the other films screened I appreciated the tone and style of The Collection by Philip Warner about a group of refuse collectors. I enjoyed LIAF very much this year, I saw some very good films, and there were also a lot of other programmes I would like to have got to. The Renoir is a bit more roomy than the Curzon. Next year the focus is going to be on New York and Cameraless Films, which will be great.

LIAF 2009 - British Panorama

I went to the British Panorama last night. It was a varied programme that seemed very British to me, a mixture of homemade, beautiful, and a bit dotty and some very funny pieces, in particular The Surprise Demise of Francis Cooper by Felix Massie and Little Face by Matthew Walker, two films I'd been looking forward to seeing for a long time, (they both have good blogs). I most enjoyed Suky Best's Animate film Early Birds. Best has made silhouettes of birds from the dawn chorus as they emerge from feeding their young or balance on a telegraph wire and the detail in the movement is sort of thrilling to watch, there seemed to be some inbalance in the sound mix because it was sometimes hard to hear the interviewees over the birdsong, but since they were talking about how surprisingly loud the dawn chorus can be, maybe it was apt if not intended. Bruce by Tom Judd is splendid and truly dark. An overweight man makes a little man mammal using a lump of meat and his USB cable, inserts a chip into his naval and can operate him with his games console. I wont reveal the ending except to say that the man behaves with appalling carelessness towards the little man mammal. The horrifying tale is told with great precision, there's not an extra frame in this film. I wonder if it will appear tonight in Best of the Fest. Hope so. More on that later...

Little jobs

We spent the day giving our allotment a trim, having left it to Nina and Tim for the whole summer and then we had to compare pastries with Neil and Vicky, UK vs. Vienna.

Maya!

Here is one last snap from Vienna, it's a lovely picture of animator Maya Yonesho tucking into some heurigan fayre on our great evening out with the Tricky Women team. Maya makes wonderful films but also creates a connection between many animators by finding time to eat cake with friends around the world.

LIAF 2009 - International Programme 3

We came back from Vienna just in time for some of LIAF. Last night I went to International Programme 3 at the Renoir with Shelly. What a strong programme of works, it was almost relentlessly masterful, I kept hoping for a low key or plain rubbish film to have a zzzzz. Of all of them Bill Porter's film On Time Off was the most striking. Many poseurs on a beach in various shades of puce morphed into the hundreds and thousands on an ice cream, but rather than just being snazzy animation, the film was about just that, hundreds and thousands of people on a beach melting like ice cream until there's a fire and everyone goes home. A tiny shot of some aeroplanes sets the broader agenda without being heavy handed and then a not so puce male arrives for the evening. Maybe a local person, or Jesus, Al Gore or Leonardo di Caprio. My favourite part was a man trying to get into his little trunks, just a couple of frames repeated three times, what a good film.

Black Dog's Progress by Stephen Irwin stood out for me too, hundreds of flip books tell the story of an unwanted pet forced to find his way in a dark world. It deserves a second or third viewing, it was very clever. The Bedwetter by I. Schiller and S.F Mueller seemed like a singular student work at first but turned into a deftly executed pixellation film with many unexpected turns. I had my mouth open for the whole 5 minutes.
The Gallic Black Tea by Serge Elissade was really popular with the audience as was This Way Up by Smith & Foulkes.