Something to balk at...

'House Guest' will make its next stop in Serbia (Belgrade, to be precise - and why not, I ask you?) on Thursday October 8th at Balkanima '09 - 6th European Festival of Animated Film. It's part of the Student Competitive Programme 4 which begins at 4pm. The full festival runs from the 6th-10th and includes a lot of very interesting films, including Laura Ratta's (who recently graduated from the same MA that pulled 'House Guest' out of me like a gooey, screeching infant last year) elaborate and highly-polished piece 'The Legend of Geb & Nut'. The full program can be downloaded here.

Fantastic Mr. Duck

"House Guest" has made the shortlist for the Delta Film Award at next month's Festival of Fantastic Films in Manchester. While it's fared quite nicely on the international festival circuit, the film doesn't really get shown much in the UK, so it's a nice bit of news. The screenings will take place from 16th-18th October at the Manchester Conference Centre.

Like Pulling Teeth

Here are a handful of stills from my in-production short "A Cautionary Tale (Of Coital Mishap)", the delightful romp about sex and dentistry, a pairing that I felt needed more exposure. Rather than go into too much detail and ruin the story it seemed like a better idea to just have the images speak for themselves. I'm also a lazy fuck and can't be arsed to type much today.


The film's coming together in a fairly atypical way. Rather than having the whole film storyboarded and written, I'm finding myself continuously writing more material as I animate. After its initial, inaccessible length of ten seconds, the revised version is about two minutes. My plan, cackhanded as it is, is to continue to embellish and flesh it out as I go, until it takes the shape of a coherent, appropriately-paced short film. Probably somewhere between three and five minutes. It's an experiment and it may end horribly, but I have to say I'm having a lot of fun working on it and the animation itself is turning out far better than that of 'House Guest' and 'Ground Running'. If nothing else, it'll make for plenty of new showreel footage.

Me Me Me Me Me

Shameless tool that I am.

Looking back over recent entries, it's dawned on me just how much of a sickeningly egotistical celebration of my film's reception this blog has become. I'm an utter tool. Thinly veiled as a resource for festival information, all these updates really say is 'look how great I am'. How tempting must it be to just track me down, backhand me, then sneer with disgust as I gaze at the floor, knowing I've done wrong.
The only logical thing at this point if I want to salvage the measliest scrap of humility would be to delete all the offending entries and lay off the self-congratulatory bullshit in the future.
I'm not gonna do that. I'm just saying it'd be the right thing to do.
Fuck being modest. I'm going to milk 'House Guest' until it's droopy, wrinkled and all dried-up. Come December it'll hopefully be out on DVD and the festival season will be done and dusted anyway.In the meantime, I'm well into production on my third film (my second, 'Ground Running', still inhabiting a sort of limbo while I decide on the best way to go about re-editing it). The film I'm currently working on is autobiographical, though it will hopefully offset my onanistic praise by depicting me as a morbidly obese sexual inadequate. But, y'know, in a cute way. This is an extension of a ten-second animation I produced for a competition that never happened due to a number of irreconcilable technical issues - the number being 'one' and the issue being that the guy with the projector got baked and never showed up on the night.As ten seconds wasn't really enough time to cram the story in, it consequently came off as a bit of a clusterfuck. I put together an overly-ambitious pitch for a ten-minute film that would detail a number of regrettably slapstick sexual encounters, usually ending in irreparable physical and emotional damage. While pursuing that film without funding isn't a feasible proposition given its length, I'm opting to produce a short that falls somewhere in the middle.
As it stands, the plan is to have a three-to-five minute animation elaborating on the story in the ten-second version, incorporating dialogue, foley, music and all the other stuff that makes a film watchable.
I also want the overall look of the film to be a tad more polished than that of 'House Guest'. I've identified three main factors that should help in this regard.
1. Better animationThe film has very little dialogue, the action mainly playing out while I narrate offscreen. As such there will be a lot more 'full' animation shots, as with 'Ground Running'.

2. Thinner linesIn abandoning my beloved Berol Color Fines for proper, art-store, extra-fine drawing pens, the visual quality takes on a more professional look, especially when scaled-down and in motion.

3. More love for the backgroundsWhile the background designs for 'House Guest' were knocked out at a pretty fast rate (there being call for about a hundred of them), I'm taking more time to draw detailed and textured backgrounds. A little bit more time in Photoshop takes a lot of sterility out of the finished shot.
On that note, let's end with a couple of said background designs, because I can't think of something funny or clever to write that'll wrap this up.

Bruce Campbell would be proud...

In a couple of weeks the Netherlands will be exposed to a vast panoply of grim, underground, seedy cinema via the self-proclaimed trashfest that is the 'B.U.T. Film Festival'. In amongst the appropriately gritty shorts and indie flicks is a delightful romp wherein a lovable duck finds himself the !!*>>>'House Guest'<<<*!! of a curmudgeonly hunter.
I am a shameless fool.
This whole festival really looks like my cup of tea. Cheesy horror, low production values and lots of good wholesome fun. As ever I can't go, but I've been looking around and spotted some interesting inclusions, such as 'Dark Reel' (nice to see Ed Furlong and Tony Todd still around), Bill Plympton's 'Idiots & Angels' and 'Hot Dog', as well as a guest appearance by John Waters.
'House Guest' will be part of the Short Film Block B screening, starting at 4pm on Sunday 13th at the Electron building. To get that information in the form of colourful blocks, you can have a gander at the program schedule below:

I thought it was just called Bosnia. I always sucked at geography.

'House Guest' has made the official selection for Banjaluka 2009 International Animated Festival in Bosnia & Herzegovina. The festival is scheduled to take place October 22nd-27th. Much love to Banja Luka for the inclusion.
More info (exact date/time etc) to follow.

Skill-et Accreditation

More good news in regard to my zombie duck's gradual world takeover, 'House Guest' is one of the films included as part of the Film Skillet International Film Contest. I'm very excited as it's a great opportunity for the film to be viewed by a potentially large online audience, and getting it seen is really what I'm after. That being said, I'm not above admitting that two boxes of ziti wouldn't be a tremendous help in these lean times.
It's a pretty standard process, the general public and filmmakers/producers alike can cast a vote per category (comedy, drama, documentary and, in my case, animation). I don't want to rally votes here, but I'd encourage everyone to check the whole contest out as a lot of the other films are pretty decent and you'll have a jolly old time watching some free entertainment if you visit the site. To vote I think you need to register, but it takes no time at all, is completely free and it's a great means of networking with other filmmakers and producers.
Watch 'House Guest' online!

Bangkok Dangerous

The duck goes to Thailand next, with 'House Guest' being selected for the 7th edition of the World Film Festival of Bangkok this November. This is probably the most advanced notice I've ever been given of any festival inclusion and as a consequence there's not much published in regards to exact times, venues or dates just yet. But the website is here and shan't be going anywhere for a while I'd imagine.
Many thanks to festival director Victor Silakong for the opportunity. Now I'm off to whip up some Thai duck curry in celebration.

Feeling Festive

Just to follow up on some of the recent festival news, I now have dates and times for when each one will be showing ‘House Guest’. I figured that, rather than post a separate entry for each one as I found out, it’d be better to just go through them in one post. Excessive blogging is very wasteful to the environment, doncha know…
Fresh Film Fest will include the film as part of their ‘Ordinary Madness’ panorama screening at 10:15pm on Friday, August 14th. More info here.
The Monterrey International Film Festival screens ‘El Invitado’ at 6:30pm on Saturday 22nd, at 9pm on Tuesday 25th and at 4pm on Thurday 27th. All screenings are at the MM Cinemas Leones, screen 8.
Among the other films included is a personal favourite of mine, ‘Our Wonderful Nature’ by Tomer Eshed. If you can’t make the festival I’d recommend you go ahead and watch it on Youtube. It puts the kibosh on any possibility of ‘House Guest’ winning a prize, but it cracks me up regardless. This is the kind of film I’d love to be able to do a few years down the line.
At BornShorts in Denmark, the film is being shown at The Old Mill on friday 28th. The screening starts at noon, for further info and a complete schedule go here.
At the Busho Film Festival ‘House Guest’ will be screening as part of their Informational Screenings throughout the festival, 2nd-4th September. Truth be told I’m a little unclear as to how this will be presented, but the festival can be contacted at their website for more info.

I'm not going blind. Which is nice...

I visited the eye hospital this week and was finally given the name of a visual condition I've experienced for the last four years or so. It's a type of entoptic phenomenon and is apparently quite common. I'd venture to dispute that, as in four years no doctor has ever been able to give me an explanation until this week (and I'm pretty sure the guy I saw only knew because he experiences it himself). Essentially I can see the billions of blood vessels traveling through my eyeballs when looking at brightly-lit areas, like the sky during the day or a computer monitor turned all the way up. It's one of several inner-eye visuals I am aware of, including the always creepy Purkinje Tree and vitreous floaters. Generally these aren't noticeable, or at worst nothing that sunglasses can't take the edge off. On overcast days, though, they all combine and it can be a bit like walking around in a shook-up snow-globe. 'Rosebud', yo.
The reason I'm babbling about this all is that I was initially misdiagnosed as having a degenerative condition of the optic nerve that would have led to blindness by my thirties. I never really bought into this as the symptoms didn't quite match up, but it's still a huge relief to get confirmation that what I have is, in itself, harmless. Sometimes you don't acknowledge just how much things can gnaw at you until you don't have to worry about them anymore.
So, with my vision intact (knock wood next month's Glaucoma test will be clear) I'm able to carry on boring the world with more blog entries and animation-ey crap.
Here are some follow-up sketches for the retro-style music video I'm working on, including the earlier character designs put together with textures. It really makes a lot of difference in terms of creating a faux-cutout look:


To end with, here's a quickie After Effects test to see how the Photoshop characters might work in a moving environment with visual effects. For this test the motion is very random and not indicative of the way things will look in the end, but with more attention to detail in that regard I think that there's some promise.
Hopefully you haven't clawed your eyes out.