Some stuff happened...

So yeah, some stuff happened.

Fine, I'll elaborate a little. Yesterday Brother Chris and I had a meeting regarding said script that was co-written and moaned about previously.

I'#m not sure exactly how much can be revealed at this stage in case, in a fit of rage, we destroy all memory of said script, only to be remembered as a fun anecdote in those winter nights of the future.

"Remember when we wrote a script?" Brother Pete excitedly declared. "Yes." replied Brother Chris.

Saying all that it went pretty well. Brother Chris is continuing to redraft form the plethora of notes given and hopefully we can successfully complete Level 2. So enough of that for now.

However, that is not the end of this story. I have also been resurrecting an old script I had originally sent to Screen West Midlands, only to be told that it was "Visually, narratively and stylistically a mess."

So a little disheartened was I until I realised that they knew nothing. Especially as I wasn't making a two people in a room film about the death of the world, juxtapositioned with the lack of Wheatabix left in the box on a Monday morning.

so I'm pulling the script out or retirement and moving ahead. Basically, I had written a short introduction to said project, but until I'm actually ready to go, I think I'll save the announcement until a few blogs later.




But it is coming...

Rob Zombie stole my ears...

In a Brother piece to Brother Chris blog, which can be found here, I also felt the need to make you all wish you where with us last night. Rob Zombie was amazing. Seriously, I have proof.




During this next one at about 4:46 Rob Zombie left the stage an was a mere foot away from where we were standing. This was cool. Also at about 9:20 listen out for The Munsters theme. By this time Rob zombie was somewhere round the back.



These videos do make me wonder whether getting so close to front is worth it. The sound is a lot better on these videos than what we heard thanks to the giant speaker we were next to. Also we had a couple of strobe lights in our eyes. And were standing next to a large cannon. We didn't explode though thankfully.

Saying all that though, you can't the replace atmosphere of being close to the stage. I'm sure the next gig I'll have this same discussion, and still end up at the front.

That's the only way I can actually hear the music.

Strange things are afoot at Circle K...

It's all a bit odd at the moment. I can't gauge how this year is going. On the one hand we had our first MovieBar which went down surprisingly well. A couple of sound related hiccups but nothing too disastrous.

We also showed Elasto!. Yes Elasto. For those in the know, Elasto is a film I made just out of College with my Dad. I still had the fresh creative urges and needed something to keep them busy. So he provided a music tack he had from 1982 called Elasto. now this is where I like to remain tight lipped. There is an explanation to Elasto. Quite a simple, yet mundane explanation. However, I feel it actually speaks for itself. You can take what you want form it. At the root of it all, it's just plain weird. And Awesome.

Elasto had a good response. There was a short Q&A where I tried to remember how long it took and why I'd made such decisions. Once again, I think I left everyone just as confused as the film did.

Anyway, MovieBar is working and continues next month. The complete rundown of the first night can be seen on the MovieBar blog here

So far so good.

Then came the email conversation. I'm not too good at covering these things. Brother Chris has already post his frustration with the state of play at the moment.

In short, as we previously joked, I loaded in Chris' Save Game and have joined him co-cooperatively on Level 2 of script writing. It would seem I obviously don't have all the necessary experience points as he does and couldn't afford the bionic arm power up, but I continue plugging away the best I can. I just have to learn to block more.

This whole game analogy has gotten a bit messy. What I mean to say anyway, is we had a script, production company was and is interested, but only it seems once we've defeated hoards of enemies. We're talking Level 2 here, not final boss. Things shouldn't be this difficult. I mean if this was the same with every game, how do things like Sharktopus ever get made.

Anyway, you can read the in depth frustration here.

Imaginary games...

So I was sitting at my PC, editing the new MovieBar logo, in it's seven part logo. I split this up with checking the Internet for randoms as one does when I happened upon on an XBox 360 game trailer about psychics or whatever. Initially this looked a bit run of the mill, however from memory, the end of the trailer had a really cool twist. I continued to work, then checked the time, suddenly it was half seven and I thought it best to get some dinner.

So away I went, ate some food and returned to the PC to continue the logo. At this time I remembered how cool that game was but couldn't remember the title. Mind Warp or something along those lines. I decided to look for it online. However I didn't seem to be able to find anything about this game.

I then thought back, I couldn't actually remember watching a video online. This trailer just happened to start playing, but I couldn't remember where I'd seen it. I don't think it was on TV and I hadn't watched any videos online, that would be preceded by a game trailer.

At this point I started to freak out a little as the only explanation I could come to was pretty far fetched. Whilst editing the logo, I must have blacked out and dreamed about the trailer. this would explain why it didn't exist, and the sudden realisation of the time.

I'm sure I'm probably jumping to conclusions, but until someone can show me that game, and the cover art for confirmation I am convinced of my theory.

Blacking out whilst editing logos. That's not so good is it!

**UPDATE**
And it totally didn't happen. It's good to know my brain isn't about to explode from a hidden tumor, or a scanner.

I found the game. It's called Mind Jack. Check it out. Luckily it still looks alright.



Blacking out at the PC. Seriously, like that would hap ...

Long time no see...

...or write.

Ok, I've neglected this blog in recent times. I'll be honest. I'm lazy, and didn't have much to say. Actually I did have things to say, but I was likely to go off on a rant, therefore taking up time that could best be spen on other activities.

So way back in October I was plannign something. At that time I thought this was best represented by quoting Back to the Future, click here to remind yourselves >>>

Ok so that was supposed to be the start of something big. And then it got too big, and I didn't move forward at all and it slowly became simply a blog post with a Back to the Future quote.

However, I'm getting back onto the proverbial horse. I will release bits of information regarding whatever projects I'm working on.

This is also due to the fact that I have, at this time 7 projects on the go in some state or another. 8 projects actually as I'm going to drag another out from the past.

This means that things are going to get more interesting on here, but also equally as vague as I still believe in the idea of not giving too much away.

Just think if I'd announced the project back in October, and still no closer to actually showing anything. Damn. I should have actually said it was just a Back to the future quote. Now if I had a DeLorean I could go back and change what I said. Actually I suppose I could just scroll to the top and remove it.

It's been said now. I suppose I'll just leave it for future generations to see. People will want to see how it went down.

And I suppose that's the point of the blog. In years to come the Future Men and Women will look back at this blog. Wonder what happened in the gaps but ultimately will see how it all went down.

That is if my career mirrors Bill and Ted and at some point I'll have to fight a future robot version of myself and save the world with film.

Be excellent to each other and party on dudes!

Jenny Ringo Needs you...

Well it needed me actually. Here's my account of workignonf Jenny Ringo and the Monkey's Paw.

So there I was minding my own business when Brother Chris suddenly announced it, “I’m making a short film and I need you to do some animation.”

With nothing better to do I jumped at the chance...


...Ok so it didn’t really go exactly like this. Well actually, pretty much. This was before the exact details had all been worked out. You see it started as me filming 20 seconds of Animation, tops. Then it stretched to me becoming half of the art department. This naturally led me onto the Prop handler/wrangler and finally settling on general dogsbody, including a bit of Fake Shempery.



But I still jumped at the chance. If Chris could pull it off, this film would be mental, and prove that all short films didn’t need to be about two people arguing in the director’s living room.
Here be my experience on Jenny Ringo and the Monkey’s Paw.

I’ll split this into 3 separate sections due to the different jobs I worked on.

Animation

So my initial task was to use my animation skills to animate (obviously). There were two short sections. Now I don’t want to give too much away with any of this so I’ll be brief. I needed to animate a Monkey, which I can say, as monkeys clearly play a large part in the story. This was just a ten second clip to visualise a monkey doing stuff. (I’m good at hiding the spoilers).


For this I used my tried and tested technique:-storyboard the clip, film it to get timing right, start drawing on paper, frame by frame. I then scanned the pictures and composited the whole thing together on the PC. This sounds simple, and relatively is, but takes time. I think the drawing, scanning and compositing only took about three days max. After an evening of tweaking, the first scene was complete.

The next scene once again needed to visualise some stuff. I had a chance to elaborate a little with this though and managed to come up with a cool little scenario for a famed Russian playwright/Star ship navigator. Somehow this one didn’t take as long. Well, I say that, but when I finished this one it was the early hours of the morning. This scene ended up being about 15 seconds long.

There’s nothing too complicated with these scenes. But hopefully they help to take the film that extra level to show what can be done with low budget independent shorts.

Art Department/Props

None of this is chronological by the way. I didn’t animate until after principal photography had finished. Before that I was given the task of Art Department along with Charlotte my girlfriend, and we dived straight in. There were 4 major areas. The living room, kitchen, hallway and one bedroom.


We basically had to make Brother Chris’ flat not look like his flat but like someone else’s flat. With the living room we needed to make it look as though we hadn’t just added a load of cool looking things on the shelves but that someone actually lived there. This was fun to go round and collect what we already owned and buy a few odd looking objects to fill the spaces. Here are some of my favourites:

The Creepy Doll – Strangely I felt safer with this after I bloodied it up.



The Brain – You always need a brain.



With the Kitchen, we were tasked to mess it up. Not just mess it up, it needed to look like it had never been cleaned. As if no one had ever even thought of cleaning it. As if no one would dare clean it. The trick for this is canned goods. Beans, macaroni and cheese and the slightly worrying meal in a can. I think we chose the all day breakfast as we couldn’t find the one with the omelette in.

Messing up a kitchen is easy. Lay a few unwashed dishes around, leftovers from lunch, add more dishes for effect and cover with beans and so on. Please note this will create an unpleasant smell and a sight you hope never to witness in the real world.


Once the scene was complete we got to tidy the Kitchen up. Lucky Us.

The hallway and bedroom was simply a case of dressing doors or walls with stuff that the characters might have decorated with, whilst subtly revealing a bit of their character in the decoration. Jenny was always going to be spooky, gothy and halloweeny. Gavin was never really explored deeply. Just a slacker type so we opted for an assortment of posters torn from music magazines.

Fake Shemp and Everything Else

I also appear in the film in a couple of Fake Shemp roles. 1 looking terribly like the ghost from Carnival of Souls and another, well let’s just say I got the role because apparently I look smarter in a suit.


Further to all the above, I was generally there for most of the filming. Helping out where I could. Whether this was as a drinks wrangler, monkey wrangler, sound wrangler or safety pin wrangler; I was always happy to help out.


Yes the days were long, and there were a couple of occasions where I had to sit in a room on my own until snacks/drinks were needed; but this is all part of the fun; because at the end of the day, I was part of something truly original.

I just hope the curse never catches up with me when I cut of the monkey’s paw in the first place.



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You can see more of Pete's awesome animations on his YouTube channel here and keep up to date with what he's working on next at his blog here (which you should follow to encourage him to update it more often!).

This is heavy!

If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour... you're gonna see some serious shit.