Not too much new around here -- unfortuantely the Beirut International Documentary Festival has been postponed due to the "current stressed environment" in Lebanon right now, but hopefully it'll go up sometime next year.

On the home front, the first half of Novemember was littered with rejection letters, but the second half blossomed with invitations from other festivals. It seems some representatives from different festivals who saw 'Warming' in Planet in Focus and the NYC Shorts Festival now want to invite it to their own festivals, which is exciting.

Hopefully I'll have some more news regarding 2008 festivals in the next month or two, but for now....happy holidays!

eye weekly article

Warming has wrapped up its screenings in New York and Toronto as of this weekend, and got a nice little mention in an article over at Toronto's Eye Weekly.

"The free Children's Programme (Oct. 27, 11am, Innis College, 2 Sussex) features Colleen MacIsaac's animated short Warming, a poetically spare meditation on our overheating sphere. The images are arresting – a school of submerged pop bottles hovering like jellyfish; a polar bear slipping forlornly into the water – and the tone is gently melancholy rather than strident."

Nothing else new to report around here!

Halifax to Ottawa

This was a busy weekend for warming, with three festivals screening it, none of which I was able to attend, unfortuantely. I was in town for the Atlantic Film Fest, but left for the Ottawa International Animation Festival (which warming got rejected from) on the morning that my film screened in Halifax. It was kind of sad, but I got to enjoy a week of some great films beforehand as well as in Ottawa.

Some of the highlights for me in Halifax were the two frame x frame animation screenings (many of which were repeated at the Ottawa festival, so it was a treat to see some of them twice or more), finally getting to see Paprika which I had missed by a few days in Vancouver, and seeing the Canadian and Atlantic shorts (I also saw an International Shorts screening but it wasn't as strong, I felt).

In Ottawa my favourites were Madame Tutli-Putli, Zhadarkha (I know I'm spelling that wrong, but it was an AMAZING children's cut-out animation), Sainte-Barne, (again, I can't remember the exact title but it was an NFB co-production done in stopmotion), and too many others to list. My big dissapointment was not getting to see Persepolis which I had really been looking forward to, but the weekend made up for it with great short films, fun times with friends, and crazy side trips to a ghost walk (CREEPY) and the national gallery.

So the news for warming right now is that it got into the Beirut DocuDays Documentary festival in Lebanon, where it will screen in the beginning of November. So far I've gotten about half my submissions accepted to festivals and half rejected, which seems like a pretty fair balance to me.

website online!

The website for warming is finally up!
You can go see it at http://colleen.radarfriends.net/warming, and it has all the info on the film up, including upcoming screenings at film festivals! Yes, it's actually gotten into a few, and a couple of them have already gone by. In the next few months, warming will be screening from Serbia to Edmonton, stopping in Toronto (twice!), Savannah, Halifax, and Colorado in between.

In other news, warming is now distributed by Ouat Media Distribution, a fine company based out of Toronto. I'll be putting most other updates about the film up at the website, but if there's any exciting news I'll post it here as well.

done!

Well, I basically finished my film a week or so ago, had the first screening on Friday at preview night, and then graduated and had the second screening the night after! It's been really interesting seeing people's reactions to the piece.....it definitely is still a more controvertial topic than I had thought. It feels really good to be done though -- it still hasn't quite sunk in I think.

In any case, here's the poster, the films will be screening at Emily Carr every day at noon in the south building lecture hall until Victoria day, and we also have the external show (see below) coming up this weekend!


Here's the external show info, in this lovely poster designed by Daisy and Marie-Lou. If you're in Vancouver you should come out and see, if there's any tickets left!


So I guess this is it! I'll still be posting things here, but I'm not sure what exactly. Perhaps film updates in terms of festivals (if it gets in to any) and screenings? Sketches from the upcoming summer? Some crazy comic project? I'll figure something out.

Thanks, guys!

So, it certainly has been a while! Things have been pretty crazy, but we're down to two weeks left (3 days until grad panels), and I think I'm going to make it. Here's some things from my desk(top) as of late:

Screenshots from the completed coral sequence, before and after!



The polar bear, looking upwards. After I animated her doing that, I realized that I had essentially animated the Nelvana logo. hahaha.


The cityscape scene! Suffice it to say that I apparently don't know what actual cities look like. Actually, the "tall building" reference photo that I had gleaned from the internet was this great shot of sunrise over Tehran, though I didn't really end up drawing from it too much.


And that's about it from me....I guess I also have the background image for my poster up at my livejournal if you haven't seen that yet.

The end is nigh! Best of luck to everyone.

sandbags

I've been working on a lot of things recetly, but as there was a lot of walkcycles and less postable things, this is the first that I've decided to throw up here. This is the background for the sandbag scene, without the sky and foreground and people walking.

coralicious

So, I've been working on my coral sequence this week, and I need some help. Here's all the unmoving parts of the foreground for the coral sequence (I have various fish and moving sea-grasses and such as well).....it's a panning sequence, so you never see this whole thing at once -- it starts with a pan down through the water to the lefthand, colourful side, and then moves over to the bleached stuff on the right.

My question is, should I make the white-ish thing there (just off the right side of the big middle "divider" rock and the finger coral) into something colourful so that the colour/bleached change isn't quite so sudden or complete? I think I'm doing a bad job describing this, but hopefully you get the picture.

If so: what's your opinion?

these boots were made for

One of my favourites of the walkcycles that I did for the crowd sequence. Not particularly great animation, but I like her character, even though all these walks are pretty much as bland as you can get. But anyway.
Click the (unfortunately compressed JPG image) to view.

progress

I've been kind of stalled on my film again recently as a result of Too Much Other Stuff. I've done all the 9 walkcycles for the crowd scene, but that's about it. But one thing I did do is a piece drawn from the waterbottle scene for the show 'shift', which is on at the Concourse Gallery right now and deals with environmental issues.

Since my camera was nearbye I decided to take pictures of each stage of this (pretty simple) piece, just for fun. So I figured I'd post them just for the heck of it.

01 - weaterbottles drawn and outlined in brown pencil, labels painted.


02 - inside of waterbottles painted

03- basic "water" background filled in.

04- water painted over bottles

05- all water gone over, darkened. At this point I was rather upset with the piece because it really wasn't looking as good as I wanted it too (I'm really still quite a dunce with watercolours since though I'm using them for my film it's in a quite slap-and-dash manner)

06- the next morning I went in and darkened the outlines around all the bottles, and I was a bit happier with it, which was good as I had to get it in to the show that afternoon for placing.

07 - and here it is on the wall! I titled it "Water(bottles)" just because I am a jerk and like brackets in titles, as ridiculous (pretentious?) as they may be.

2007!

It's a new term and I'm back into the swing of things, pretty much. First up: crowd scenes. Here's some stills from walk cycles I've been doing of background characters. They're all in brown/earth tones -- the kid in front of them will be blue and green so he pops more....and also for the (somewhat too) obvious symbolism.

I hope to be updating this thing more often, weekly at least. Productivity! Hopefully it'll all happen.