Because I can't really put it off any longer

International Anifest

Now, let's get the slightly ugly bit out of the way first: I really didn't enjoy this one. Teplice is a lovely town and would probably be a decent place to retire to but don't ever go there if you want to have a party. Unless you're bringing lots of loud friends and intend to start one yourself. I didn't have lots of loud friends, though, and given my complete inability to speak Czech I didn't really have many people to talk to. There were english speakers there, of course, and there were a couple of people I saw repeatedly over the course of my stay who I could have conversations with, but they tended to have other commitments or groups of non-English-speaking friends, and I couldn't really introduce myself to anybody as I'm pretty certain I was the only British film-maker there.

So, socially, a bit duff, but oh well, that's not everything. I got into all the screenings free (one up on onedotzero, hoho), and in fact I didn't even have to pay for my hotel, so I shan't begrudge the organisers. Maybe the Trebon part of the festival was better. Onto some film reviews.

Planet A (trailer link partway down) by Momoko Seto was an extremely strange but very beautiful piece, which seemed to consist largely of footage of salt crystals forming. I think that's what it was anyway. Slow, but I was captivated for all of its 7 minutes and 40 seconds. The feeling of a barren, alien world was really convincing.

Sur le Fil (Razor Edge) by Benjamin Dupouy (they spelt the poor guy's name three different ways in the festival materials). My favourite. Unfortunately I can't find it online, but it's real graphic genius, the screenshot above is really only a vague hint of some of the clever games this film plays with lines and fills. You'll just have to take my word for it, of course!

Le Couvre Chef (Headgear) by Marie Delmas. Very, very witty, and I love the timing of the animation. It's very varied and tailored to each individual scene, but each method used is distinctive and attractive in its own right. The colour design is pretty nice, too.

Volgens de Vogel (According to Birds) by Linde Faas. Another extremely slow, exquisitely atmospheric piece. There are some really meticulous bits of animation in this. Also, major kudos to Linde for doing the whole thing in pencil and somehow completely avoiding the nasty white fringe it tends to cause (as a result of cutting things out with the magic wand tool in Photoshop).

Traverser (Crossing Water) by Hugo Frassetto, an unbelievably slick sand animation. Damn Frenchmen. I don't know where they get it from.

Nice Day For A Picnic by Monica Gallab (no vide link, sorry). Very strange. Won the Prize for Best Student Film.

I also caught a couple of features.

Tokyo Marble Chocolate (Naoyoshi Shiotani). A rather sappy love story, and while I'm not one to go out of my way to watch romance stuff, it was pretty nice. Amusingly, most of the audience left after the first part not knowing it consisted of two parts, har har.
Also it was fun to watch with both Czech and English subtitles.

I also decided to watch Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind...in French, with English and Czech subtitles. It's far from my favourite Ghibli movie (though still leagues ahead of Howl's Moving Castle, which I hated) but I still enjoyed it.

And that's that, really.

I'm not very good at this "blogging" thing, am I?

So what have I been doing for the past month?

I had a bit of work with my good mates at Treat Studios but other than that I've found that the age of "getting work for no effort" has passed and I must actually go looking, thus I have been putting my showreel together. I've now got 10 delicious DVDs which I will be passing out to London studios on Monday, hopefully (if I can get my act together and do covering letters for all of them today). My efforts were hampered a little by my long-suffering laptop finally dying, but I've at least got a spare computer so I'm not completely sunk.

I also haven't done any construction studies for the past few weeks as, if I'm honest, after the ones I posted last I actually started getting worse, and got so depressed I gave up. I finally started doing more again today, but sadly can't post any for now as I can't get this computer to work with my scanner (but it'll print fine, oddly).

In other news: I saw The Boat That Rocked (it was okay); watched the first disc of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection (there seem to be an awful lot of okay-but-not-amazing Friz Freling cartoons on that one); watched Lolita (Stanley Kubrick version, was awesome, very funny in a dark way); read all of Death Note (incredibly awesome, can't decide if I should bother with the anime, though); and have been watching Hidamari Sketch (maybe not the sort of thing I should admit to, but there's so many lovely games played with colour, graphic design, and editing that I might actually make a post about it, if I can summon up the courage to speak publicly about a moe high-school slice-of-life anime series).

Don't know if I'll have anything to report until after my trip to the Czech Republic on the 7th. Czech is a really goddamn difficult language, by the way.

Also check this out.

I saw Persepolis yesterday.

I've been wanting to see Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis for ages, and yesterday the roulette of my Lovefilm rental queue finally allowed me to. I have to say, I liked it! Much better than Waltz With Bashir, that's for sure.
I won't say too much, since the films 2 years old by now and people have probably heard most things that could be said about it already. I'm not always sure about drawings like this, since figures and movements can tend to look stiff and mechanical, especially when the thing takes itself too seriously (hello Waltz), but there was a sense of humour and whimsy about the whole thing that carried through to the animation, and I thought it worked very well. Occasionally I felt some accents could be stronger or faster, but overall I thoroughly enjoyed it. Also I find young Marjanne to be infectiously cute (I never quite understand why, but sparse styles like this make young characters really appealing for me). I also felt it was graphically stronger than Waltz, at all levels of the hierarchy (that is, from the whole image right down to individual characters).

Also, I've belatedly started another blog for constructions studies and other such hoo-ha here. Maybe I will post some more soon. Who can tell?

exposures

For this I was required to venture into the forsaken wasteland of the north once again, as it was held in Manchester. I had passed through on my way to Bacup, but now I could truly take the city in. Turns out it's cold and the streets are really badly signposted. At one point I spent about two hours trying to find one of the venues only to realise that I was one street down from where I thought I was. Amazing. I was also propositioned by a prostitute on my first evening (though not on any subesequent evening, interestingly).

To be honest this was kind of my least favourite festival. The selection was rather weak and there wasn't really anything going on socially until the last evening. However, there were still highlights.

There were a few feature previews. The first I saw was Duane Hopkins' Better Things, focusing on three parties, a schoolgirl tormented by her jealous ex, an elerly couple struggling with a past infidelity, and, would you believe it, a hikikomori girl, whose main human contact is her dying grandmother. I felt it was enjoyable enough but not massively memorable.

The second feature was Phil Hawkins' The Butterfly Tattoo, based on the Philip Pullman novel of the same name. It's not the kind of film I'd usually go out of my way to watch, but I did rather enjoy it. This may have been helped by the fact that at least half the audience consisted of the cast and crew, which provided a great atmosphere, and the Q&A session afterwards was great fun, too.
The last I saw was Lindy Heymann's Kicks, about two girls who are so obsessed with star footballer Lee Cassidy they end up kidnapping him, but things swiftly go very pearshaped. This was, again, not something I would normally have gone to see, but was in fact very entertaining.
The shorts were divided up into categories. Rather than running through all of those, however, I'll just pick out the films I felt most noteworthy. As I mentioned, though, I felt this selection particular was a bit weak so there may not be that many.

Camille e Mariuccia (Samuel Romano) (sorry, link has no subtitles): About a young man, Elio, and an old man, Piero, both of whom are missing their other halves. Piero bugs Elio to drive him to the nearest police station to identify a body that may belong to his senile, wandering wife, while Elio is still coping with his breakup with his girlfriend. Like so many of my favourite films at this festival, this was a simple but poignant character study, and really enjoyable.

Hair (Stewart Comrie): It's about hair. You never would've guessed, would you? I'm good like that. It's all done in stop-motion with real hair, and it's actually quit impressive, to be honset I'm at a loss as to how he actually managed to pull alot of it off.

What Lies Behind Smiling Eyes (Robert Brandon): I'm not gonna spoil it as the twist is too good. A genuine surprise, I loved the hell out of this (enough to heckle the director when he got up on stage at some point, I don't remember why, as this apparently wasn't up for a prize or anything).

I think that's all, really.

A bunch of mates also had films showing here, including Andrea Malaskova and Danny Boyle, who I studied with, and Matt Marsh, who also studied at Kingston in the year before me. I also bumped into Mike Please, whom I sort of knew through contacts at Picasso Pictures, and Flynn, who I met at Bacup! It was kind of amusing to see him at both the first and last festival on my rounds. I also, to my great amusement, met Blaire Mowat, whom I knew through a rather ill-fated project I did with some colleagues, again, at Kingston. We all had a jolly drink up on the last night.

And that's that, I believe. At least, until I go to more festivals. I've got into the International Anifest in the Czech Republic (which is where Andrea hails from, coincidentally). I plan to go, as long as I can get my lazy ass round to actually booking the travel! It's a spa town, apparently, so I hope the weather's good. I will, of course, write a really boring account of that, too, only it won't be as belated as all these. I hope you enjoyed them, by the way.

Please Say Something

David O' Reilly, who I mentioned before, recently released his 10-minute short series Please Say Something publicly, having shown it at the 59th Berlinale festival and won the Golden Bear for best short film. He says spread it around, so I'm spreading it!



It's touching, experimental, honest, funny, sad, beautiful, ugly, intense, serene, and many other things. You may not like it. That's fine. But I love it and think you should watch it.

There's also a very brief interview with the man on BoingBoing, in which he reveals that he cut out the rendering process entirely by using only viewport previews. THIS MAN IS A GENIUS.

Today I just finished a fairly big job so I'll give you the long-promised exposures festival entry very soon. And more construction studies over the weekend and next week.

I'm drunk

Just had a belated birthday drink up and felt like I owed the world an entry as thoughts are in my head.

Me and my friend and infinitely respected peer Matt Layzell exchanged words in the lower floor of Bar Kick, and got our paired heads buzzing with thoughts on what we're gonna do with our careers. We both feel a general dissatisfaction with the animation industry as it is now, but it became apparent that we have some very conflicting views (he overall liked Waltz with Bashir and feels animation should be able to be more like just a different lens on a camera or something, I dunno, shit I'm still drunk) but this makes me excited. I hope that in five or ten years our different views will have led us to make advances in completely different directions in the field. Maybe we won't but shit we're gonna start something. It's gonna be really interesting.

I'm gonna study like hell and really improve my construction drawing. I got the Preston Blair book for my birthday, and just did my first studies from it, even though I'm drunk. Here's the picture proof.

Yeah, starting at the very beginning. Once I'm happy with my Preston Blair studies (HOWEVER LONG IT TAKES) I'll start drawing from actual Looney Tunes cartoons, as well as some of the fantastic comic book covers John K posts on his blog from time-to-time. I might post some of them on here, or I might start a seperate blog for them if I deem it worth it. We'll see.

I actually only have one more festival to make an entry on: exposures. That's coming. Soon.

Encounters Short Film Festival

Encounters, which I think is a fairly high-profile event, takes place in Bristol, which is a fair way over to the left for me, but thankfully my stay there was made simple by my good friend Michael Rokes, who worked with me at Cartoon Network earlier that year (incidentally, their offices are really fucking nice, and the hot chocolate from the coffee machine is top-notch). I remember it being spectacularly cold while I was over there, and it was a fair walk from Michael's place to the Watershed where the festival took place, but nonetheless I braved it for the two-and-a-half days I was there.

I lost my copy of the program which has all my notes, my plan for what I was going to see, and Richard Williams' signature (more on that later) but somehow I can actually remember almost all the films I saw. I'll try to pare it down as best I can.

I got there for the first evening, on Tuesday the 18th, and saw the Opening Highlights and Waltz with Bashir. My opinions on the latter are pretty well documented. I'll keep accounts of what I saw in the former to their own sections, as I would see all the noteworthy ones again later. The Emerging Talent 1 screening, which included my own film, was also on that evening, but I was going to see it again next day anyway so I didn't bother.

First thing on the next day was Emerging Talent 2. Keith Reynolds Can't Make It Tonight was kind of like xkcd, in that it used stick figures and alot of very dry humour. The Weatherman was a likeable, if inconsequential stop-motion film. I've had the stupid music from Last Time in Clerkenwell stuck in my head all week, and was only able to remember where I'd heard it when I came to do this entry. The most noteworthy film was Khoda, which I actually saw at Bacup (and would later see again at exposures), but failed to mention in that entry. It's basically a full oil painting for every frame, or at least looks like it. It's pretty pretentious, but it could've been a really good film rather than just a stunning technical achievement if the soundtrack weren't so unimaginably awful. I don't understand how anybody could be so painstaking in the visuals (apparently it took two years and over 6000 paintings) and then allow it to be so completely ruined by such an awful soundtrack. He also never picks the best frames for the promotional images. Oh well.


Next I saw the Cartoon D'Or Finalists. There were just 5 films here, but I only really liked one, A Mouse's Tale.

The red, white, and black art direction is pretty clichéd at this point, but it's still effective, and it was a well told story, and the cut-out style animation was extremely well executed (this is the kind of thing it really works for). It went on to win the Cartoon D'Or, too, so looks like I wasn't the only one who felt this way for once!

Next was Emerging Talent 1 (which I skipped the previous evening, as mentioned). I think this was interrupted by a fire-alarm, which led to it overrunning, and me leaving early to catch the next thing on, fruitlessly as it turned out as subsequent screening were sensibly pushed back. This would have led to me missing the one really good film in this selection, but thankfully it was shown again in another screening. That was Stand Up (why I'm having to provide a MYSPACE video link I can't fathom, it's not even complete, but it gives you an idea).

I think it used rotoscoping, but it really pushes what can be got out of the technique, as it didn't just put a graphic style over the top, the animators really pushed the movement. It's hard to explain but even the brief clip I posted gives a pretty clear idea of what I mean. It's a real treat visually and very funny. It seems to have won a good few awards too, which are well-deserved.

After this was a talk and screening on the work of Alexander Shiryaev, who was a ballet dancer by trade, alive in the latter half of the 19th century, but, after the recent rediscovery of his work, seems to have pretty much been doing animation of any sort before anybody else. He did hand-drawn animations of dances for instructional purposes , and ridiculously elaborate stop-motion films (up to 15 minutes in length!) at least two years before Ladislaw Starewicz, traditionally credited with having invented the medium, produced any of the sort. Pretty interesting stuff.

The last event of the day was Desert Island Flicks, a talk with genius British animator and film-maker Joanna Quinn (who some might know for films such as Girl's Night Out [flashing imagery warning] and The Wife of Bath, which I sadly have no link for). The format, as one might expect, was borrowed from Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, so we got to see a bunch of films that have inspired Joanna.

Highlights included Bill Plympton's Your Face (which is the only film of his I can't find on Youtube, TRAGIC as it's his best), The Hill Farm, and the Tex Avery cartoon King Size Canary. All in all the selection was great, and Joanna's a very entertaining personality, so it was a highly enjoyable talk.

Thursday started with Best of British: Made in the South West. This one was pretty high-standard on average, though there was alot that was included in others screenings, and the only film that really stood out for me was Leaving, about a woman trying to build up the courage to leave her abusive husband. Like most of the live-action films I've been picking out, it was the acting in this one that made it stand out for me. Hilariously, the male actor's name is Johnny Harris.


Best of British 2 was up next. Apart from Stand Up, nothing in this really stood out for me, though there were some points of interest, such as Time is Running Out (which I had to see twice to get) and Akbulak...though sadly I have a video link for neither of those, so a fat lot of good that is!

Next, however, was the Canon of World Short Films, which had some very interesting shorts. Au Bout Du Monde (At the End of the Earth) is an unspeakably hilarious 7 minute animation about a house perched on the top of a mountain (an interesting parallel to The Hill Farm).


Balance shared a similar theme, about 5 men stood on a floating platform, with every tiny movement changing its tilt.


La Vis. Almost too weird for words. Here's a synopsis stolen from here. "Mr. K is very good with his hands. He is kept busy building a UFO (in French: Voluntarily Unidentified Object). He was about to stick the sharpened strip of his screwdriver into a screw, when he realized there was no slot in it. How horrible and disappointing. After an unforgettable dispute with his wife, he decided to go and fight with General Administration of the State Department Stores of the Non Ferrous Metals... " One of those films where the whole world and all the characters in it have this great feeling of complete artificiality and contrivance. Worth seeing.

The next (and, for me, penultimate) screening was International Panorama 2. Most of these were actually pretty interesting, but this entry is getting very long and I want my dinner so I'll only pick out Szalontüdö (Tripe and Onions), worth seeing just for the punchline.


Last up was International Panorama 3. There were two films here really worth mentioning.

Dennis (partial video) , about a massively muscled man with a very young mind, who still lives with his mother. Sounds standard, and it is, really, but it's so sweetly told I have to mention it.


Skhizein, where a man his hit by a meteorite and ends up displaced 91cms from where he should be. This was, besides the Joanna Quinn talk, the highlight of the festival for me. Genius concept, very well executed. If you get a chance to see it I'd very highly recommend it.

Wow, that was alot of writing and pictures, wasn't it? Well, it was one of the most memorable of the festivals. I might even go next year.

Afterthought:
Now, earlier I mentioned Richard Williams' signature, which I lost. Yes, the man himself was actually there, promoting his new 16-DVD box-set The Animator's Survival Kit Animated. And, as I mentioned, I got his signature in my encounters festival program (I didn't have my own Survival Kit with me as I didn't know Williams would actually be there). I then lost it. Truth be told, though, I'm not actually bothered. While it may not be my place to criticise somebody who's been in the business as long as he has, and as helpful as the original Survival Kit book is, I'm not sure about Williams anymore. I tried to watch
Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure (which he directed) for the first time in well over a decade a while ago, and found myself unable to stomach more than 20 minutes. It wasn't just the constant insipid musical numbers, but the animation itself is just so...excessive. Constant, RIDICULOUSLY elaborate movement, often for no reason other than itself. It feels too much like hollow showing-off for its own sake. Masturbating onto animation paper. I mean, check out the intro to the animated Survival Kit: all the characters from the cover of the book spend a whole two minutes elaborately joining a grand walk-cycle bumsex parade. It's all very well but

What's the fucking point?

I need to check out Who Framed Roger Rabbit again.

onedotzero: adventures in motion

This festival was probably the least interesting socially, as it took place in my native London. So not really that much of an adventure: between screenings all I could really do was sit around waiting, the South Bank being far too expensive for me to be able to actually do anything. The fact that I didn't get any sort of concession for being a film maker apart from for the screening my film was in also made it somewhat less fun compared to say, Filmstock, which let its film-makers get into pretty much EVERYTHING free. onedotzero had the most consistently high-quality selection of all the festivals I went to, but somehow this actually makes it seem worse in retrospect, since everything just blends together and its hard to remember the highlights. There were highlights, however, (and low-points, too, but I'll get to those).

There were screenings over three days, grouped thematically or in other specific ways. I'll just pick out the most notable films that I can remember from each one, of course. I'm lazy tonight so you'll only get thumbnails and links for the REAL highlights. I'll also list them in ascending order of memorability, cleverly creating a build-up of tension resulting in a climax.

New British Talent 08:
This featured, suprisingly, films made in Britain. I've got "cheat neutral", "Procrastination", "big boy_74", and "operator" written on my program in massive fat purple marker, so I guess they must've caught my eye at the time. I can remember three of these: cheat neutral, a mockumentary making fun of the idea of carbon offsetting by comparing it to offsetting cheating in a relationship by paying other couples not to (yeah...); big boy_74 sees a man about to commit suicide in his car accidentally involved in a sexy rendezvous arranged online, was a little predictable but charming; and operator, which I'd seen before online, I think, in which a man phones up God and asks him why he can't lick his elbow.

citystates:
I remember this being fairly good, but to be honest I can't remember any of it. Alex Robinson, a mate of mine at Kingston had his film London showing alongside mine. However, the daft cunt in charge of editing fucked mine up, and edited together the three parts I had to provide it in without removing the overlap. I almost walked out, and certainly gave the first staff member I could reasonably hold responsible a very thorough talking to. Oh well.

j-star 08:
I remember thinking this was pretty interesting, too, but I can't remember anything from it either. I'm really on form today, aren't I? Oh, there were three episodes of the profoundly stupid Usavich. Make of it what you will.

studio aka: a retrospective:
Dedicated entirely to the work of London studio...studio aka. Most notably there was a showing of Mark Craste's new short Varmints, based on the illustrated book. It was okay. Looks very nice, though its environmental message was a bit hamfisted.

wow + flutter 08:
The theme of this was supposedly experimental work (if I understand the ridiculously flowery blurb correctly), but most of the British animation industry seems to be trying to be "experimental", so I don't see what good dedicated a whole section to it does. Oh well.
I say that, but actually, looking through the program, some of this stuff really WAS experimental, even by British standards.
Actually, when I say "some of this stuff", I really just mean David O'Reilly's WOFL 2106. I was going to skim over it as a mere curiosity, but in searching for it to link to I found his site and realised he's actually genuinely an insane genius. Seriously, he made a music video consisting almost entirely of video compression artefacts. And the absolute most ugly, jarring, visually offensive piece of moving image ever made. And all the props and illustrations for Son of Rambow, apparently. But seriously, fuck anything you've ever seen that you think is experimental. This man truly doesn't give a fuck what you or I or anyone thinks. And that makes him awesome. I personally think that alot of people that DO manage to be experimental don't seem to me to communicate any honest intent in their work, making it just difficult for the sake of being difficult and leaving me cold. But I find David's stuff incredibly compelling. He's apparently very successful, but unlike alot of genuinely original and successful people, the superficialities of his "style" haven't caught on, become mainstream, and subsequently been ruined. I hope it stays that way.


TOKYO!:
My personal highlight of the festival. This was a triple-feature, with the theme being fairly self-evident, I think.

Michel Gondry directed Interior Design, in which the female half of a couple staying with friends until they can find a flat feels useless, until she turns into a chair and is able to be useful to some random guy who picks her up.

Leos Carax directed Merde, about an insane, red-bearded, green-suited troll of a man living in Tokyo's sewer system, who occasionally comes out and scares people, then one day throws some grenades into some crowds, is arrested, and turns out to speak a language only spoken by two other people in the whole world, one of whom looks like his mirror image and defends him in court.

Bong Joon-Ho directed Shaking Tokyo, about a hikikomori (wowee!) who falls in love with a pizza delivery girl and forces himself to leave (this one sounds really mundane and obvious but it's alot cleverer than this synopsis implies). All three were very interesting and compelling.

As well as Alex Robinson and London, Danny Boyle who I also studied with was there with a special preview of Slumdog Millionaire. It was very well received, and I gather it's been doing very well lately, so congrats to him.
















Okay that was a lie, it's not that Danny Boyle, but I couldn't resist, even though that whole palaver has actually long since blown over. He was actually there with The Grand Old Duke of York (Danny where the hell's your website I want to link to you), in the "Top Draw" section, which I didn't see but which he said featured far too much rotoscoping. Matt Layzell joined us for merry drinks afterwards. It was a treat.

Apologies for the pared down reviews and sullen-to-surly tone of this particular post (I don't actually mean any offense to any experimental artists you may happen to like, either). I'm working tomorrow and it's past my bedtime. Hopefully I didn't offend the two people who (maybe) read this blog (hi, "Catherine"!)I think the next festival is encounters, which left somewhat more of an impression.

Film Stock 2008 (better late than never!)

Set in the sprawling dystopian metropolis of Luton, this wasn't such a big treck as some of the other festivals I paid a visit to during the latter part of the year, at least geographically. In filmwatching terms, though, it was to prove a marathon: two-and-a-half near-solid days of short films, with plenty of drinking in the interims. It was also the most enjoyable event I went to.

I arrived a little confused, and spent a few minutes finding the cryptically named "Hat Factory", which eventually turned out to be right next to the station. I met Neil, one of the two organisers of the festival (the other being Justin), Alex Barrett, a fellow film-maker who I would end up tagging along with for the rest of my stay, and a few other very welcoming and friendly people. Neil showed me to the pub he'd organised a room for me at (a rather nice place, actually, which somehow maintained complete silence in the rooms despite the pub itself being very noisy every night), then came back to begin the film-watching.

The Hat Factory
As I hadn't come on the Thursday, and thus couldn't see Choke, based on Chuck Palahniuk's novel, the first thing I saw was Fear Strikes Out, based on the true story of Jimmy Piersall's battle with being-bloody-crazy to become a big baseball star (which he eventually did). It was pretty good all-round.


This was followed by the first round of short films, which is what the entireity of the rest of my weekend's stay would consist of. As there were so many, I will try to restrict myself to one from each session of about 9 films.

Die Seilbahn (Claudius Gentinetta): A rather lovely animated film about an old man travelling up a mountain in a cable car, but his sneezing shakes it to pieces and he tries to hold it together with masking tape.My Blue Heaven (Yee-Wei Chai): A young boy living with an abusive father watches one of his porn videos one day. Hilarity ensues. Only not, in my opinion. It was beautifully graded but horribly forced and unfunny, with the worst child-actor I've ever seen. Ever. It won an audience award, though, apparently, so maybe I was missing something.
People Were There (Antoine Bourges): The film-maker filmed some random footage in the city while he and his friend talked about nothing in particular, then did some clever things with text in After Effects on top of the footage. It sounds super-lame, and sadly I have neither a link nor an image, but trust me, it was pretty cool.
Solitude (Mehrdad Sheikhan): Animated film about, um, loneliness (sidenote: along with my film and a few others this seemed to be a bit of a recurring theme here). Specifically, a sad rock-man living on a big rock cube floating in the sky. Far too long, and a bit dodgy in places, but had some very nice moments.E Finita La Commedia (Jean-Julien Collette): A father and son sit in a car, discussing life, sex, and "the mother". One of my favourite films of the festival, the dialogue and the whole thing in general were just very well done.
Arcadia (Adam Butcher): Very strange: an office-worker's computer starts talking back, while one of his co-workers says he's writing a second bible. Used actors shot against blue-screen on top of tiny built cardboard sets. The blue-screen was actually pretty badly done but it was such a profoundly weird film that it kind of added to it.
Also, judging by this, I think Adam Butcher is clearly some kind of insane genius.
Side Effect (Jae-ha Myung): A woman has to live with the consequences of her son being a criminal, specifically the abuse it gets her from her neighbours. Another one of my favourites, with some incredibly powerful acting. No picture here, either, sorry.
Tony Zoreil (Valentin Potier): A young man born to a family of big-eared people, on having to deal with how it affects his life. Poignant, charming, and well put-together.Ducks (Adam Young): Horny old people playin'. Sweet and rather interesting.
Sick (Mike Rymer): "As Brian's story slides backwards through 15 years of therapy, his daughter's crashes forwards." That's taken from the blurb in the Filmstock brochure, as I can't really sum it up any better myself, mostly because I can't remember many specifics. I've got "Great" written next to it in my Filmstock brochure, though, so I'd better mention it.
Cheeese (Huseyin Tabak): "A Kurdish family waits for help from American troops during the Iraq war, in the basement of their collapsed house." Poignant and sensitive, the title comes from the very clever and effective device of occasional photographs, taken by the son on a polaroid camera, which remain static on the screen for several seconds at the moment of their taking, with the dialogue continuing over the top. Another of my very favourites. I think my film came immediately after this, which was a bit intimidating, to say the least.
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (David Ross): A ridiculously abstract film, the blurb calls it "A three-part pan-dimensional journey", but to be honest you could probably call it just about anything. A bit like watching screen-savers for 10 minutes, but it was kind of worth seeing in a theatre, it was just such a strange experience. You can check out the Youtube link (first of three parts) but it's really not the same as watching it in a dark theatre...half delirious after watching probably about a hundred short films over the course of a three-day-weekend. Apparently I wasn't the only one who (sort of) enjoyed it as it won an audience award.
Liminal (Stephen Keep Mills): Two naked girls arguing over the sort of thing only girls would argue about, a sweater that, to quote the blurb again, "Ina thinks makes her look good and Joy thinks makes her look too good." Once I was able to stop staring at their vaginas it was actually very interesting and engaging.
Lullaby (Kevin Markwick): A woman who lost a child years ago goes to the special place she always visits on his birthday to finally leave his memory behind. Very touching, with effective, understated acting. A favourite.

That was alot of films, wasn't it? There were a good few I had to omit but that's as many as I can really be bothered covering. The quality overall was up-and-down, but as I've said this was my favourite festival, chiefly because everyone was so friendly and welcoming. It really helped that I turned up at a quiet period when everybody was just sitting around chatting, but that would've meant little without a generally welcoming crowd. Dinner and drinks on the last night (for me: the festival itself went on well past just the Short Film Weekend) was a real treat, so thanks to Neil and Justin the organisers, Alex Barrett and Rahim Moledina for putting up with my following them around the whole time, and everybody else I spoke to and who was nice to me. I'll have to go back next year, whether or not I have a film of my own to enter.

Oh, actually, one more thing, they do something rather lovely and get people to write short comments on films they liked, and email you the better ones afterwards. I got some lovely responses, my favourite being "'Who amongst us hasn’t felt like locking ourselves in a room to get away from the outside world? And how great was Jonathan’s animation? The expression on the main character’s face was worth the price of my stockholders pass.' – Bill Greenberg". Somebody else also told me at the time that the characters was pure "Eeyore", which made me very happy indeed. So thanks also to Bill Greenberg and the other nice man whose name I sadly now forget.

Merry Christmas all!

I've been insufferably lazy lately. I'm currently at the family house ("family" in this case consisting of my mum, my sister, and the retarded cat) having just celebrated Christmas. I'll return to my own lodgings in Stokie on the 27th, most likely (after shouting at Barclays for conning me out of lots of money, but that's another story), and I think once I do that I'll blitz through all the remaining festival posts as fast as possible, as I know people probably don't care about them THAT much, and I do of course have tons of other more interesting things to blog about.

Speaking of which, this is what I got for christmas, sorted by category and in alphabetical order by author, because I know you're all dying to know:

Music:
The Bug - Pressure; Deerhoof - Milk Man (apparently Reveille is coming too, I was spoiled!); Juno Reactor - Labyrinth; kid606 - ps I love you.
Manga/anime:
Kiyohiko Azuma - Azumanga Daioh complete collection (DVD boxset with Chiyo notepad and pencil, hell yeah!); Junji Ito - Uzumaki vol. 3 and Gyo vol. 1: The Death Stench Creeps (I kind of want to do an analysis of these two, actually, it was interesting to read them after John K's recent posts on "itchy" drawing); Hayao Miyazaki - Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind vol. 3.
Games:
Metal Slug Anthology (PS2)
Stocking stuff:
A bunch of Lush items; Gloves; Socks; After Eight mints oh god yes.

We had pheasant for dinner, but not before watching the new Wallace and Gromit, which was pretty cool, though not able to top The Wrong Trousers, or my personal favourite A Grand Day Out. Christmas has felt a bit of a non-event for me this year, probably due to it occuring right in that most uncertain time of life, between finishing uni and finding really steady work. However, I'm still happy, and hopefully everybody reading this will have had a very enjoyable Christmas (or whatever other seasonal holiday you may celebrate)!