Monday 12 November 2012

This Autumn seems to have been filled with workshops, and all of the Liverpudlian variety.

Back in September, I ran an animation workshop with a group of military veterans, at FACT. They were a larger group than I have worked with before, and it was more like back-to-back sessions, so a bit of a different timetable from usual. On the morning of the first session I helped the group to come up with their story idea, and after some healthy debate (!) they wrote a script imagining the statues of the city discussing art. The military veterans do a lot of art-based workshops, so this script was a natural extension I think of their meetings.

A couple of the group members are keen photographers, so the animation style and process was based around that, however I mixed that in with some drawn bits and bobs, including lip sync. The script features the voices of the vets, which we recorded on a little digital dictaphone. I showed some of the group how to edit the individual sound snippets together and cut it with the storyboard frames to create an animatic. From there we pieced in bits of stop motion and animated whatnot, and now we have a finished film!

Statues Taking Liberties will screen later this month at FACT, along with photography and poetry by the vets (I told you they were an artistic lot). In the meantime, here are some stills from the film, featuring John Lennon, Ken Dodd, Queen Victoria, Liverpool Resurgent and Bessie Braddock, in statue form:






Sunday 4 November 2012

La cu-ca-ra-cha, la cu-ca-ra-cha!

It's exciting times as myself and Anne begin work on our next short film, when I say short I really mean  long as it will be closer to 15 minutes, a daunting prospect! For now I shall say it is going to be a film and a musical about an outspoken and troubled cockroach who goes by the name of Archy, inspired by the fabulous series of poems by Don Marquis, archy and mehitabel.

We are developing our film with the scheme Filmworks, and we are part of a lovely and inspiring group. You can read everyone's blogs here and find out about all the wonderful ideas that are formulating:http://www.filmworks.org.uk/participants-blogs/

We are all at very different stages in our production but it's very exciting to see how things are developing...


Friday 2 November 2012

And ain't it a beautiful day



Hum will be showing in Bournemouth at BUtiful Film Festival. It's on in a couple of weeks, so if you are around that way you should go and see our film! I command you.

BUtiful is only in its second yeah (I think), so if you fancy showing some support and liking their Facebook page, I am sure they would be happy. While you're at it, you can like us too, hahaha.