Actual films online

Quick note to both my readers...short films, trailers, and experiments are now being posted twice a week on Instagram ...Highlights, Lowlights and random nuns.
Also, I'm leading up to an animated advent calendar to be posted daily from 1st December.
Don't like Instagram - then try Vimeo

Goin' Posh

 Hastings Tall Sheds. Not, as family legend had it,
tall inside for mending fishnets (or fishing nets),
but a 3 storey shed, to exploit limited beach space.

Well last year a kind reviewer  (Eugenie Johnson) described one of my films as a breath of fresh air...but also as Crude line drawings... http://narcmagazine.com/review-sunderland-shorts-opening-night-sunderland-minster-2-7-15/ . Now I'm going to up my game crudewise - specifically to make the original drawings on a larger scale that wont get crudified so much by being enlarged on a big screen. Having resisted this for a long time because of the limits of the size of the monitor I'm working on, clearly its time to invest in some bigger better techno. Meanwhile an experimental pilot project (with a storyline around gender and specifically gender in cartoons) should help sort out what else needs to change with size - the scale of marks? the type of marks? - and how much longer will it take to complete?
Also, I realise it is some time since I attempted to animate an inanimate object...like a shed. This raises interesting ideas about the nature of the word animat/e/ion and why anyone would think a shed was not already animated by the dense layers of history and human intervention...and fish.

Let Joy be Unconfined...

unlikely fish-person-hero: protagonists don't have to be heroes?
...

... Finally finished the latest animated short! An attempt to use only black and white  and to use texture without getting horribly visually confused. I made this for a particular film festival, with a theme, and have duly sent it off. & will be sending it further afield...But really of course I made it to see what would happen, to wrestle with the temptation to cut corners or suddenly use red and teal blue, and - as with most narrative work - to find out what would happen to the protagonist in the end.

Networking

 I just found a facebook group for networking artists and musicians...it seems pretty quiet but I met a certain musician who is looking at composing something for Fresh Air. Although the original version has a sound track with foley and some Radio Quiz noises - which I voiced myself - I'm interested in considering multiple versions of the same short film with different soundtracks. Watch this space to see where this one goes!

Feature-length Shorts

No, it just feels like it. At over 5 minutes, "Islands" was massively time-consuming for a solo project, not least because the visuals were full-colour and intricate...lots of experiments with patterns and patchwork quilts. This, and ASGC took up most of the year. It was a more expanded narrative and seemed to be more concerned with "beauty" that most of the films. Working on the glorious technicolour of ASGC seems to have had a lasting effect...so far. This is another project which made me look carefully at how gender is represented; its obvious to me these characters are all women/ when seen in relation to the men (hint: the men have wings) but is that what an audience conditioned to default to "man" when it sees a semi-abstract figure would see??

Grunting and Sniffling Noises

2013 saw the completion (FINALLY) of  Eeny Meeny Miney Malcolm, using a style of drawing inspired by memories of linocut (Brighton Printworks in the 80s, and BAA Corsham in the 70s) - a development of what I started in Box.  Malcolm was also an experiment in using split screen to show two simultaneous stories (Sliding Doors with cake)... but also in using non-dialogue people noises. Thanks to my patient colleagues and friends for wasting considerable time squealing, grunting, laughing and sniffling into microphones. And this is (only one of the reasons) why I love my job

Split-Screens & Flying Machines

Box was an experimental film in terms of the drawing style - loosely based on lino-cut and subtraction rather than addition as a drawing method. It also uses split screen/ changing screen size as part of the narrative... an idea I carried over from the PhD days and experiments with projected interactive works (Just don't! galleries won't touch them with a bargepole, and most of them don't even have a bargepole.)

Box was selected for both Wimbledon Short Film Festival, and Bradford Animation Festival. yay! and they give you a badge to prove it. One day I hope to combine visiting a film festival with showing at it and actually gauge some audience reaction to the work.

Colin the Dog and his Travelling Blog

2013 was also the year Colin the dog went on his adventures North...in an animation created in response to a specific festival theme. They didn't want it, but ultimately Sheffield university did.  North was selected for Leamington Underground Cinema festival 2013 , and for " North:Mapping Cinematic Norths " conference, Sheffield May 2013 Working to a theme is always an interesting challenge...worth taking up even if  the individual festival you are aiming for is a longshot. Colin was inspired a little by Gromit, and by good friends Darry & Bob's incomparable beagle, Carter. (take inspiration from anywhere you can get it). This animation was an experiment in doing it - i.e. the narrative arc/ character development - by the book... and in limiting the colour palette (black white green)