It's like The Wrestler...

...except it isn't at all.

I've stopepd blogging. I know. I had a brief burst of energy and work time to blgo in, then work time got taken up with actual work so I stopped once again.

Just as a taster I've been workign on a short film - Jenny Ringo and the Monkey's Paw for Brother Chris.

See here for great detail -> Jenny Ringo

I've been a set wrangler, a prop wrangler, an animation wrangler, a food wrangler, a sound wrangler, a camera wrangler, and acting wrangle and sometimes a people wrangler.

Based on this wide range of task I've been involved in during the making of the film, in a similar blog to Brother Chris, I plan to write my own behind the scenes experiences of the life of a crew man.

For now, I'm to bed.

PS the final Scott Pilgrim book come out this week. I'll blog about the series as a whole at some point too.

Feeder video...

I wanted to see it. It needs a stage. What better stage than this.

A little normality here please...

Ok, so nobody said moving flats was simple but I never anticipated on it being this complicated/annoying/hazardous/idiotic/stupidic and most of all toatally stressfull. And I've kind of done the main part.

Anyway I've been trying to get back to normal for a while now without the slightest bit of luck. For a short time it was working, begining with character sheets for a new script I'll be workign of with Brother Chris'. However with his impending wedding and writing hiatus I may go it alone for a while.

Then things got stressful once again and I lost the ability to write (this wasn't really due to the stresses of life more the joys of life when I replaced my TV/Monitor with a larger TV which I temporarily use as a monitor so any prolonged exposure to slowly burns out my already damaged retinas.

Anyway the latest adventure of normality I had was showing the music video I finished before Christmas, Bitter Ruin's Soldier, at Son of Moviebar last night. The crowds seem to be dwindling, which is a pity as the nights are always interesting but the film went down really well. I managed to spit out a few sentences this time around and was excited to find out that someone in the audience knew the story of The Steadfast Tin Soldier, on which the video was based. So finally a small victory it would seem.

Anyway, I'm cutting this short as I need to do some "proper" work. Breaks over guys.

However, before I go, without further ado, the most excellent Scott Pilgrim trailer:-


It really is awesome.

The It's Alive baby is back, but this time there's three of them...

Yes this bears littel relation to the actual blog, apart form the fact that for now it looks like new life has been injected into it in the form of a new job with internet connection. No I'm not stealing time with a sneaky update I'm having a quick break from scanning endless files.

Alas there is too much to report on. Nothing particularly interesting films wise more life wise.

So as for now that's all there is. I need to ease my way back in.

Plus this break is going on for quite a while.

Oh yeah, THE FREAKING SCOTT PILGRIM TRAILER IS FINALLY HERE. I CAN HARDLY CONTAIN MY EXCITEMENT AS I'VE NOT HAD THE CHANCE TO VIEW IT. HOWEVER THE PICS LOOK AWESOME. CAN'T WAIT.

How long will this thing last...

Here's a review of 2009 which seems ages ago, and this is a little late. Plus as I blogged for most of it there's not much I wanted to say.

2009 - Left old job, visited Manchester, visited Cardiff – evil dead play (Awesome), moved to brighton, wrote Jimmy Fight script, old PC died when editing the making of Dark Furutre, bought New PC, Ten Dead Men DVD released, left another job, made another E4 thing, geeked out at conventions, attended Phantasmagoria – Uwe Boll, Neil Jackson and Michael Armstrong, got a new job, went to see Kevin Smith Q&A, Showed some films at Moviebar, completed Bitter Ruin video "soldier".

Here's some music I witnessed live:
Bird Eats Baby, Supersuckers, Wednesday 13, Devo, Kinky Friedman, John Otway, Alice Cooper.

And some films: My Name is Bruce, Coraline, Star Trek, Drag Me To Hell, 500 Days of Summer, District 9, Inglorious Basterds, Zombieland.

Finally games I played.
Batman Arkham Asylum, Rock Bands, Guitar Hero, Alone in the Dark, Darkness, Kane & Lynch, Fallout 3

Also discoverd Scott Pilgrim, really looking forward to the final volume and the Edgar Wright movie.

That's that done. I may be back...

Review of the year: 2009

I'll get around to it sometime early in space year 2010.

Hope you had a good Christmas, and have a Happy New Year in the meantime.

"Soldier" - Bitter Ruin

So I completed the music video so details can now be revealed. I suppose the main reason for not giving out much information about a project is to svae you from any embarrasing confrontations if the project fails and the interested public continually ask "Whatever happened to the music video idea, it sounded awesome".

I decided to take this further and just not reveal what I was working on, even when I was pretty much finished. This was mainly due to not having the time to blog about it.

So here we go, the complete making of the music video Soldier by Bitter Ruin.

I first met Bitter Ruin back in June at the BirdEatsBaby album launch party. When performing they asked a very casual audience that they were interested in a video and if anyone had any ideas to let themselves known. I had no ideas, however bought there second EP and emailed them a day later to say I was interested in making a video for one of their songs. They happily agreed and that was that, Soldier was made.

At least I wish it was that simple.

Over the next couple of months I worked on ideas thinking of what would work best, and how I was going to make a video. The last full animation (and by full I mean animated short) I made was back in 2005, In Case of Zombies. Chris gave me the idea of doing something Jan Svankmajer-esque from there I remembered the story of The Brave Tin Soldier by Hans Christian Anderson. Now I don't read much so I just presumed any knowledge I have of stories will be common knowledge, not the case. As with John Otway on Jonny the Pessimist I had to remind a whole load of people about the story of a one legged tin soldier who falls in love with a ballerina and has an adventure to get to here only to end up in a fire with here at the end. (Here's a link if you want to read the full story - The Steadfast Tin Solider)

So I storyboarded the video and met up with the band to explain my ideas. All was going smoothly, I gave them my ideas, and they gave me their thoughts. The premise was that "someone" was building a War style diorama so had set out a variety of tool son the table, sewing things, work tools and paints along with the set "they" were building. This was where the soldier saw the ballerina. However rather than just recreating the story I flipped it around so that it's the ballerina trying to reach the Soldier, influence from the Jean Pierre Jeunet film A Very Long Engagement.

I was set to begin. I wanted a lot of actual First World War footage to play in the background of the soldier set. Therefore my plan was to create a lot of the video on the computer using Combustion to alter camera movements and so on. This was to avoid any lighting issues I would have with an actual green screen.

So at the end of July/early August I began work on the preparation side, building the set, designing the ballerina and guttering any props I needed.

Production kind of began towards the end of August when I took photos of the soldier and the set ready for composition in the computer. At the beginning of September I animated the ballerina. This went surprisingly well. I'd planned on having to pull an all-nighter just to get that thing done but found that id didn't quite tae m that long. Maybe watching A Mighty Wind and Hairspray helped. I don't know, but I finished all animation over a couple of days. Now things began to get complicated. In theory I had the majority of the scenes and could begin editing. Which I did to a degree. The soldier scenes couldn't be completed until I had the chosen war footage. The footage was all sourced online from the Internet Archive from the video, America Goes Over. I left this side of the film a while and worked on the ballerina. Most of this was simple, just a case of speeding up the animation. However there is a scene in the middle that in my head was simple but in practice drove me insane.

There is a shot where the ballerina is dancing go the edge of a table but as she is there a wind blows an assortment o f objects off the table. This was fine until I wanted the objects to fall off the table. It's pretty difficult animating with gravity. So I had a lot of importing and exporting, green screen masks and layers and composited the whole thing together. It was not simple however I was finally happy with the result, which unfortunately is only on screen for a few seconds. Did I waste my time? I don't think so, that's kind of the point of animation. Although you may not notice it the film just wouldn't be the same without the scene.

I met up with the band once again to update them on how things were going. They informed me of an idea that they were planning on having a screening launch night. I thought it was a great idea and agreed on the beginning of November. A couple of days later after working on the video some more, I changed the date to early December.

So production moved along until a fateful day in October when I got a job. This is a good thing, but it slowed done production having my days taken away. But still I plugged away. Until another fateful day in October WHEN MY PC BROKE. This caused me no end of stress and general anger. Especially when I had to take if back to PCWorld and couldn't find out what was going no until two weeks later when I got it back. So once again I began work. Until a further fateful day in October when I got a cold. OK so this wasn't so bad, but it was the first weekend I had on the video for a while and was planning on getting a whole chunk completed, and then I got instantly ill. I did as much as my brain could take and then had to focus on getting better. Now I had just over a month the finish the video.

So I spent the next three weeks filming the last remaining scenes, filmed the band and melted the soldier. This was obviously done last in case I needed reshoots. I managed to get the video completed by the last week of November, in time to have my birthday free, and giving me just over a week for any changes, which was needed.

The final cut was fine however there were concerns over the look of the film. I had opted for a black and white video to match the whole silent film feel of the video but it was later agreed that the original colour cut looked more visually appealing. I'm still fond on f the black and white though and it will probably appear online one day.

So it was complete, the last four months had been spent working on the video and it was time for the launch. In that time another video was being completed for the band to share the evening, and annoyingly it only took Mark Withers about two weeks.

Regarding the night, it was excellent. The audience really seemed to enjoy the whole thing. BirdEatsBaby provided support which put a whole full circle end to the story and the videos were screened to a great reception. The two videos are completely different to one another which is good as I was worried that the night would be spent comparing two pieces of work.

I had to provide a short speech, which I'm becoming a dab hand at, sort of. I said something, can't really remember what but it was relevant so all was good.

And without further ado, here's the complted video.




So that was the saga of Soldier from start to finish. Since completing the video I haven't really done anything. It is Christmas after all. That isn't to say that my brain is empty, I'll be spending the New Year writing another feature with Brother Chris (shhh!) and hopefully at some point get a long awaited live action short off the ground.