and afterwards, they schlepped

Yes...after the joy of making the film, hawking the finished product round, trying to get exhibitions or showings, doing the paperwork and creating special versions of the film just for one portal is deeply boring. and the downside of being a one-woman band is that you have to do all that, when the only bit you are competent at is long-completed and your head has skipped ahead to the next story idea

(There will be FISH. Inside someone's head. an expanding head. and people with REALLY long arms. and maybe dancers. and men which turn into women and women which turn into men. the fish might come out of a book. maybe the people turn into fish...why? why not?)

maturing. fermenting? or just preserved for later... 

Ideas crash together like in dreams, throwing up images from the recent holiday (black-and-white sea. mermaids. tiny ponds), Thursday's Dance performance (more anatomically-correct characters, so the distortions of a limb or a movement are more apparent?) and random things seen or heard (knitted sheds! pop-up cards, summerhouses on a mountaintop, an ancient man practicing the organ in church while the churchbell chimed 3pm. Running into an old friend and having a random conversation about cocktail dresses)

Something is needed to stir these up and precipitate out a useful narrative. Apparently, the annoyance factor of crappy technology (mine or someone else's) can in fact provide this. The screaming frustration of non-user-friendly systems with outdated technology (WHY do you still only accept onscreen viewers in 4:3? Hands up any animator not using 16:9?? WHY do you think it wont matter if you squash my movie to fit, just as though the visuals weren't important. It's a film, not Jam. Oh, wait...Jam??)

I understand some festivals operate on a tiny budget with harassed volunteers, and I am happy to support - with patience if possible - underfunded artist/filmmaker-led indy initiatives. But when festivals with a long pedigree and a big budgets, or festival portals which broker applications get it (the technology, the interface design, the dead links and translations-into-English which suddenly aren't, the missing vital information (we ONLY accept DCPs))wrong you feel like asking - AGAIN - why is it always artists paying for the right to beg to show their work? If the arts are big business, and Art is the commodity, why is the artist the one who doesn't make any money out of all this. If film matters, if animation is interesting, then how come all the ticket money doesn't provide the successful filmmaker with even a measly return of the entry fee?

and, instead of getting steamed up about this, can I make an animation about it?

Technology

The complete collapse of the Wacom graphics tablet. Which I use every day. Aargh. Comically, it didn't just stop working but started issuing random commands to the computer, putting keyframes in wherever it fancied, turning layers on and off in a series of variations of its own devising - sometimes the opposite of what I had keyed in, but sometimes a more interesting set of visuals. Trying to tell me something? At this point of course one reflects on the over-reliance on technology (I couldn't look up the phone number of the computer repair shop, because it refused to input any text to the google search box. Of course I had recycled my Yellow pages (bah! Old technology! Dead trees!) so I had to drive there just to ask if they still did repairs...) but also on the abrupt stupidity of the mouse as a drawing tool.

 I had a friend who taught life drawing and made the students draw with pointed, wooden 18" sticks...but even he and his faithful students would have been frustrated by drawing with a cigarette packet on a piece of string. But, whilst I wait for a replacement tablet to arrive, this is what I attempt to do. Unfortunately, as I am in the middle of a film, the change in style will not be helpful...but perhaps it is a reminder to explore the extent to which we can make experimental gestural marks with the computer. The new tablet promises  more responsiveness, a lighter quicker touch...which frankly sounds more like an advert for a condom, but I'm hoping it will translate to a greater autographic sensibility. Disappointingly, some of the graphics tablets on offer have interchangeable textured mats (to mimic different papers). Sorry, but if you want the effect of drawing on Fink-Nottle's cold pressed watercolour paper with a wax crayon...then why not, you know, draw on Fink-Nottle's cold pressed... I'm still hoping there are interesting marks which are the computer's own and not a pale imitation (or even a really convincing imitation) of some other process. Computers can, and do, do so much... can we not also let them be computers?