Monday 31 May 2010

Acting like nothing ever happened to me ever

Hello, not written for a while, which I am sure has kept you awake at night wondering about our exploits. Well, I am now (sort of) recovered from the ending of Lost (it was so sad and bittersweet), and so I can tell you.

First up, we've been showing at a lot of festivals and screenings this month, and there are lots more to come. I am quite surprised by this; I thought A Film about Poo would be at the end of its festival cycle as it's 9 months old. So this is a nice thing! If you'd like to go along to any of the screenings, just take a click on the right on Forthcoming Screenings, as I am pretty good at updating that section of the blog. Thanks to all the nice festival people who have selected the film so far!

The other thing is our funny old Bolton project, Stories of the World. We have started production!! Definitely an event worthy of two exclamation marks. Still tweaking the storyboard though, so at the moment we are just picking off bits to animate that we know are staying. We've been working with Dan and Matthew at the Bolton Museum, and it is going really well I think. Hopefully Emily and I will be taking another visit to the archives in a week or so. Here is a picture of a cotton plant:


Not the most exciting thing, but there you go - there will be more plants, it will look pretty. I will ask Emily to give me the leopard and put that up instead - he is supercool.

And the final thing is that, incredibly, Emily and I will be teaching a masterclass in animation! This will be for the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, as part of the Stories of the World celebrations. We're still planning what we are going to do, and talking with Wendy at the venue, so I can't say much, other than if you are 14-19 years old and in the vicinity of Manchester on 24th July, you should come. Yes!

Tuesday 4 May 2010

Happy news

One of the best things ever happened a little while ago, but I didn't mention it in case it turned out to be a dream. Anyway, it's definite now, so mention it I shall: Emily and I have been commissioned to make a film. This is very wonderful for us as we have never been commissioned or funded before to make anything. It's going to be a five minute animation for Bolton Museum, celebrating their industrial textile past. They are refurbishing their local history section, and wanted a new piece of art for it, so we pitched for it, and won it, and here we are. I really am so excited about it, I am just holding back on ending every sentence here with an exclamation mark.

I guess I will put up designs and developments and stuff as we go along - the film will be completed by September, and the private view is around October I think. We're working on the animatic at the moment. In the meantime here is a picture of me taken by Emily, as we did some research in the Museum Archives.

Blue gloves, very important.