new film / old film

Belatedly I will mention that Warming was in Athens, GA last month at the Eco Focus Film Festival. 

Kate and Bradbury is off to a good start, and when I have a chance I'll finally post some visuals here! I haven't started any production on the film yet, but we had the animation workshop over the weekend, and it was fantastic! Basically down the street from my house is the animation facility (shared with NSCAD, which is doubly awesome if I end up going to school there), and not only does it have an animation hole punch, but a line testing facility as well! It speaks to how little-versed most of the live action-oriented members of AFCOOP are in animation that no one there (or at NSCAD for that matter) knew that it was around when I was asking. Actually this whole experience has really made me realize the amount of technical knowledge that I learned at Emily Carr. There is the tendency to think of it as a less technical program since it focuses on the experimental and conceptual aspects of animation, but boy did we ever learn a lot compared to what your average live-action filmmaker knows about animation.

Fortunately AFCOOP and CFAT have their share of animators with a large knowledge-base, Heather Harkins being one of them. She showed us all the basic workings of the Oxberry stand, and we got to do a bit of cameraless animation as well (the same sort of markers-on-film thing that I had tried out while learning how to teach the Hands on Animation workshop this past summer). I have a feeling I will definitely be going to her for help in the future. Also I got in touch with my mentor, Jim McSwain. I'll be meeting with him on Thursday and hopefully having an animatic ready at that point, so I'll probably post about that once it happens!

one minute film

It's official! Workshops have already started for the One 

Minute Film Scholarship program, and our proposal was 

accepted! That means that I'll be writing here from 

time to time about the film's progress and fun stuff 

like that.

The first workshop was all about story, and after a few examples 

and talk about the mechanics of scriptwriting for film, we had a 

roundtable panel going over everyone's project individually. I'm 

the only one doing animation, but it looks like there's going to 

be a lot of great films being made.

Because I don't think I've mentioned it here yet, here's the 

basics on our project:

Kate and Bradbury: A hand-drawn animated short about the 

relationship between a kite and a bicycle.

When Kate, a free-wheeling bicycle, fails to propel herself up a hill, she becomes 

despondent. However, soon afterwards she comes across Bradbury the kite, 

who is having trouble catching a breeze. When the two make a connection, 

they learn that they just might be able to help each other out.

For our submission we sent in a brief summary of the plot and 

then rough storyboards, which I may post here eventually. 

My turn under the microscope at the roundtable was pretty 

painless; the main suggestion that I reveived was that some 

of the random "biking around" scenes could be shortened down 

and get right to the point (the hill), which I definitely agree 

with and will help with the time limit.

Tonight I go in for the first "Intro to 16mm" class, on which I 

will report back later.

I finally got around to fixing my website for the film....it had been misaligned for a long time because I am horrible at coding things, but I figured a different way around it and now it is all good (I hope).

It's pretty neat that warming is still making "the rounds" -- it's been almost a year since I actually submitted to any festivals without being solicited, but thanks to the exposure that it's gotten in festivals such as Short Shorts and Planet in Focus, I've been getting lots of festivals requesting screener copies. I haven't been sending to all of them (since I'm really not focusing on warming any more in terms of getting it "out there"), but there's definitely some interesting ones that I have sent copies to.

To correct myself from my last post, Next Floor is actually a Canadian film, and a very good one at that. Also at the AFF I ended up seeing two other feature-length animations, Waltz with Bashir (an astoundingly animated and hard-hitting film about the casual terror of war as told by a former soldier) and Sita Sings the Blues (a mish-mash of styles brought together to tell the story of Sita, accompanied by blues songs and a storyline about the filmmaker getting dumped--  which wasn't always successful --  but was a charming and funny film nontheless). 

Also I was luckily able to see all the animated shorts program -- kudos to Mark Flindall for programming the excellent FrameXFrame programs. The new Docs section this year of FrameXFrame was especially enjoyable, and featured the world premiere of i am so proud of you, Don Hertzfeld's latest piece. There were definitely some people in the audience who were expecting it to be another Rejected (did they somehow miss everything will be OK?), and guffawed loudly at everything until it became evident that the tone of the piece was a lot more sad and serious than they had expected. The Canadian animation Passage (not to be confused with Passages, which was also a remarkable film) was a somber black and white rotoscoped piece about the filmmaker's trials at the hospital during the birth of her daughter. From the regular FrameXFrame screenings my top pick was Procrastination, a hilariously true and expertly told RCA grad film that I think most people can relate to (or I can, at least). Plus if you click on that link I think you can actually watch it!

It definitely feels weird to be using this as an actul blog versus a "remind myself where my film has screened so I can look it up later" notepad to myself, which is kind of what it has been for the past year. So yeah, these winds of change that are blowing? They are totally called "next film". Today I dropped off my submission to the One Minute Film Scholarship at AFCOOP. More on that later.

hello india!

warming will be playing on Saturday, Sept 14 at the Voices from the Waters film fest in Bangalore, India.

In other filmish news, I'm currently working for the Atlantic Film Festival here in Halifax, which means that I've been able to see some pretty amazing films, such as Passage (a docu-drama about the search for the Franklin expedition), Idiots and Angels (an indepandantly animated feature-length film, probably my favourite of Bill Plympton's films to date), and Next Floor (a bizarre and visually astounding film from, I believe, France).

Also, warming will be playing on Air Canada flights on the Movieola On Air TV Channel, if you happen to be flying around any time in the next few months.

short shorts

Just wanted to note that as of today, warming is in the middle of its run in Tokyo at Short Shorts.
You can go here to see the full list of films in the Stop! Global Warming competition, and also to see a 1 minute web-preview of warming (about halfway down the page).

Warming and The Unforeseen

Warming will be screening twice daily from May 30-June 3rd (excluding Monday) at Metro Cinema in Edmonton along with the feature-length film 'The Unforeseen', which I haven't had a chance to check out but which looks awesome. Here's some more info on the screening and the feature film.

Warming will be in Spain at the beginning of June at the Catalonia Environmental International Film Festival, which takes place in Barcelona.

Warming has been invited to be a part of the DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver in late May/early June. Additionally, it will be screening some time in the near future at the Ontario Science Centre as part of some Earth Week presentations.

Both of these screenings are thanks to Planet in Focus, which really is quite an incredible organization.

More news: 'Warming' will screen April 18-20 in the Lake Forest Film Fest, just outside of Chicago in Lake Forest, IL.

As well, it was accepted to the Short Shorts film festival in Tokyo, Japan, in the 'stop global warming' competition and the DerHumALC Human Rights film festival in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

I haven't updated the actual website in a long time, since somehow I accidentally sabotaged Netscape Composer, which I had been using for easy editing. Hopefully I'll be able to fix that problem soon.

viewfinders

at the end of April, warming will be in Halifax again for the Viewfinders International Film Festival for Youth. It'll be showing on April 22nd as part of the 'Quest for Adventure' screening, alongside such amazing (incredibly amazing) films as 'Zhiharka', a Russian animated short adapted from a folktale.