blowing bubbles

Yes, one cup of furry cuteness.

Just wanted to share this brilliant drawing by Scott C. These are the sort of drawings I used to really love as a child. In fact they remind me vaguely of Quentin Blake’s drawings – long time illustrator for Roald Dahl books, which I used to read when I was younger. This one was done for an upcoming Fantagraphics book about mythical creatures. Worth keeping an eye on if you ask me.

If you want you can send Scott C a comment on his blog.

A long time fan of his work I was absolutely delighted that some of his animations are now available for viewing online at YouTube.com. For those of you who haven’t heard of Lye or haven’t seen his films, he was a New Zealand sculptor, photographer, writer and film-maker who worked with motion in various ways and was an early pioneer of colour film in the 1930s. His films are vibrant and usually playful. Read the rest of this entry »

Fark i’m tired!

Edit: Yes, after being up for 16 hours after a 3 hour sleep and working on the set alongside a – thankfully – professional crew, we got the shoot wrapped up. The editors had edited about two minutes at 10pm and were going for around 7 minutes. I hope it all went well, as I slept right through all that. And now the film has been submitted. Hopefully! I haven’t seen it yet, but from the moment that it’s online I’ll post a link. It features a really great gnome.

The weekend of filmmaking as mentioned in my previous post has now officially started. Each of the 400-odd teams had to pick a genre out of a bag and were each given a name for a character, a prop, a line of dialog and a characteristic of the character. Those are the constraints for the film and a jury will give extra credit to people who incorporate those elements well.

Our team got the genre “Fairy Tale”, which I think is pretty awesome. In any case I’m glad we didn’t get the wonderful opportunity to make a musical over the weekend. The other constraints are:

Name: Robin Slade
Characteristic: eternal optimist
Prop: mirror
Line of dialog: “That’s what I’m talking about”

Our initial brainstorming session yielded a lot of interesting ideas for a story and now a few writers are making them into a coherent plot. We start shooting tomorrow morning at 8am. More as the story evolves!

What happens when you use a scanning electron microscope (SEM) to look at a snow crystal? You get amazing imagery revealing the math in nature, that’s what! Click the thumbnail to see for yourself.

More about SEM and more amazing images on Wikipedia.

This weekend is film competition weekend in New Zealand.

An initiative called “48Hours” aims to get people out and about making short films – writing, shooting and editing – in, well, a 48 hour time span. It’ll be a weekend of complete mayhem I’m sure, with hopefully a bunch of nice films as a result. And the logo has a gorilla in it!

I’m on one of the teams as a tape logger, so expect a link to our short soon. The 2004 and 2005 films can be viewed online at nzshortfilm.com.

Some photo groups on flickr are great for visual inspiration. One of these is Typographical Happenstance.

Visit the group photo pool here.

Some of you might instantly recognise that quote from the movie “Freaks” by Tod Browning (1931). I recently bought the new DVD release. It had been a few years since I first saw the film and I was pleased to find that it hadn’t lost any of its power. Read the rest of this entry »