Geraldine
By Ian Lumsden | June 30, 2008
Arthur De Pins, 9min—When viewing the work of Arthur De Pins one is in familiar territory of the born cartoonist. He is a natural artist able to turn out comic caricatures seemingly at will. I could have selected any of three films to feature though his 2001 Géraldine was his first film and launched him into the animation business.
Topics: Animation, YouTube, Comedy, Twisted | No Comments »
En Tus Brazos
By MarBelle | June 22, 2008
dir: François-Xavier Goby, Matthieu Landour and Edouard Jouret, 5 min—The one thing that surveying films in all their vast variety on the internet teaches you is that great work can spring up from anywhere. A kid working away on a laptop in his bedroom is just as likely to blow you away with creativity and talent as something that’s come out of a high profile production house. That being said, there are films that pretty much come with an implied seal of approval that guarantees your time won’t be wasted, and, when it comes to animation, France’s Supinfocom is at the top of its game. That’s not even a judgement call on my behalf, last year 3D World magazine after applying criteria such as festival prizes won and student film distribution gained, ranked the school No. 1 worldwide.
Topics: Animation, Love & Romance, Student | No Comments »
The YouTube Screening Room
By Andrew S Allen | June 20, 2008
For the past few years, YouTube has been the ultimate democracy willing to take in every tired, poor, and huddled video. But just this week, YouTube has decided to put on its curatorial hat by establishing The YouTube Screening Room—a site highlighting a few high quality films each week. Sound good? I thought so too. They’re releasing four short films every two weeks (a good starting pace) with the open possibility of releasing a feature film should the right one come around.
Topics: Ramblings | No Comments »
Checkmate
By Scott Lamb of BuzzFeed | June 17, 2008
dir: Casimir Nozkowski, 9:44—Dallas Penn and Rafi Kam are two guys from New York. They both have day jobs and their own separate blogs, but together, under the nom-de-vid the Internets Celebrities, they create short, bristling, funny documentary essays on topics ranging from how to remix the Big Mac to the role of the bodega in the urban ecosystem. With plenty of R-rated language and humor, Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: YouTube, Amateur, Life & Society, Documentary, Politics | No Comments »
Marry Me
By Jason Sondhi | June 11, 2008
dir: Michelle Lehman, 7min—Every February in Australia one of the more unique short film festivals in the world goes down. TropFest started out modestly in 1993 but has grown into a huge nationwide event since then. Hundreds of entries are submitted each year and out of those 16 finalists are chosen. These films are then simulcasted in public venues all across the country. In Sydney alone, it is estimated that 100,000 people come out to watch the films at huge outdoor screenings, meaning that being a finalist at Tropfest guarantees a filmmaker just about the largest festival audience a short film can get.
Topics: Love & Romance, Everyday Life, Award Winners | No Comments »
Muto
By Andrew S Allen | June 1, 2008
by Blu, 7min—Often an old story makes a splash when it’s told in a new way, given new context, or played out on a larger scale. Muto does all of these. Here, the familiar morph animation takes on a new face where characters animate across the real-life streets and buildings of Buenos Aires.
Topics: Animation, YouTube, Surreal, Twisted, Vimeo | 4 Comments »
Daddy Why?
By Matthew M. Foster | May 26, 2008
dir: Dawn Boyd’s, 5:00—I liked to be disturbed. Art needs to elicit a reaction—it needs to make you feel. Film, more than any other art form, does this with ease. Yet with all the possibilities, most movies go straight for excitement or depression. Your standard summer blockbusters launch audience members out of their seats to scream at the screen while myriads of indie weepies leaves sensitive viewers reaching for their Kleenexes while bemoaning the struggles inherent in everyday life. Neither of these use cinema to its full potential. Both the rushing of blood and tears are too close to our comfort zones. Neither set the stage for a major reevaluation of life.
To make a person think, to make him consider new ideas, new options, or just the value of old ones, the rug needs to be pulled out. The viewer needs to be left stranded—confused—with no clear standards and a mish mash of reality. The viewer needs to be disturbed.
The filmmaking team of director Dawn Boyd and writer/producer Michael Aronson know disturbing and Daddy Why? is a masterpiece of psychological dysfunction. In five minutes, it calmly, slowly, and lovingly rips apart the notion that the world is a reasonable place and we know our place in it. So, how does what is essentially a dialog on death manage to be so twisted? Easy: with a small girl and a bunny.
The setting is the backwoods of nowhere on a chilly autumn day. A young father (Kevin Fraser) is walking with his daughter Camilla (Emily Power) who happily carries her pet rabbit. Camilla has questions, and they have nothing to do with school or clothing or dinner or toys or TV. No, Camilla has questions about death. Daddy isn’t the quickest skater on the pond, but he does his best and while he lacks enthusiasm, he obviously cares for his daughter. Somehow, that just makes it so much worse.
Daddy Why? took several years to make because the part of Camilla is not one that parents crave for their daughters. If handled incorrectly, it is the stuff not of dreams, but of prolonged therapy sessions. Well, the wait paid off as Power is cute and believable (and apparently neuroses free).
There’s not a lot of camera tricks and no narrative knots or cheats. This is a simple picture. It is also a creepy one. A very, very creepy one. Complexity would only be distracting. Will it cause you to think? I can’t say, but it won’t leave you comfortable, and that is enough.
Watch Daddy Why? online at: Wildsound
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Dad’s Clock
By Ian Lumsden | May 18, 2008
dir: Dik Jarman, 7min—With a background in puppet animation and a thriving commercial practice as an architect, Dik Jarman celebrated the life of his late father in a very special autobiographical account of a complex relationship. Fearing at first that animating the story might be too clichéd, Dik was persuaded by friends and family that it would be both a worthwhile memorial and animation project. How right they were. Dad’s Clock records, in a multi-faceted series of metaphors, the passion of one man in the receding days of his life.
It commences with a giant stork-like, metal bird, beautifully crafted—there can be no other word for all the prop and puppet design here—sweeping down over a wooden carcass of a ship, the struts and frame boat and the skeletal system of a giant animal. The ship is floating on strips of wood, like complex pedals of a vast cathedral organ, the gently undulating lathes forming the sea. We become aware of a bespectacled figure immersed in the innards, studiously working on the cogs and wheels of his wooden clock. When the bell rings it is with the resonance of the giant metal bowls in the heights of Notre Dame. There is no Quasimodo figure however, just an old man hard at work, the passage of time and the disease revealed in his transparent, emaciating figure. The soundtrack is the bells and ticking of the clock.
Visually, this stop-motion movie is stunning even in the reduced quality available from Zed CBC Television. Building the set and puppets took one year alone. The studio set is remarkable—artfully lit, providing ample scope for the camera to pan around. We see the clock-maker from different angles—his face sculptured from wood cast in the warm glow from his lantern; or we look down from above and marvel at the symmetry of the boat beneath.
Veteran actor Barry Otto narrates the story of Dik’s relationship with his father with such sincerity I believed, until I read the credits, that it was the director himself speaking. It is a complex work involving guilt over the death of his younger brother, John, who died at the age of five, 14 years before Dik was born. The consequent sadness in the family was one from which Dik felt excluded. Unlike the sudden death of a road accident the slowness of cancer allowed the son to say goodbye and “hello”. When his father dies his ashes are buried with those of his long dead son. In a moving passage of commentary the difference in quantity of the ashes between the two, boy and man, achieves both reconciliation and a release.
Dik was courteous in replying to questions from one of my students, Adam Fadra, in an extended interview for my school website last year and provides ample detail about the production. For example, the “hero bird” was assembled from brass, aluminium and bits of one of his father’s clocks whilst the process involved Dik constructing a thousand moving parts and making 22,000 images.
I see a lot of animated movies. Dad’s Clock stands out for a number of reasons, its candour being one. I have never seen a set of this complexity, a work of art in itself. The supreme craftsmanship allows Dik to form striking tableaux: the skeleton figure peering into his telescope out to the stars on top of the symmetrical alignment of timber, figure and ship viewed in front of the backdrop of the cosmos. When the old man descends for a final time into the machine and the mechanism closes around him it is an obvious metaphor but an effective one.
Dik’s personal and dignified tribute deserves greater recognition than it has received other than the director’s Australian home. His design and architecture company Studio 505 is situated in Melbourne.
Watch it online: Zed CBC | YouTube
Topics: Animation, YouTube, Life & Society | No Comments »
I Love Sarah Jane
By MarBelle | May 12, 2008
dir: Spencer Susser, 14:20—While I’m always open-minded when it comes to the hunt for new films to get excited about, I have to admit there are certain elements that just push my buttons, and Spencer Susser’s I Love Sarah Jane hits through them with military precision:
Post apocalyptical world - check
An underdog to route for - check
A bully to get his comeuppance - check
Kick-arsed girl to pine over - check
and, of course, Zombies!
The thing about ILSJ—co-written by Susser and David Michod—is that if you were to strip away the high production values and outlandish world setting, there’d still be at its core a touching age-old story of teen awkwardness in relating to the object of your desire that places our hero Jimbo in the shoes of Kevin Arnold or Dawn Wiener before him, it’s just that their obstacles were slightly less brain hungry. Susser’s direction and the central performances from Brad Ashby and Mia Wasikowska completely sell the story and illustrate that when it comes to world-changing events outside of our normal experience, we’ll adapt with worrying ease. But that doesn’t mean our personalities will change; a bully’s still a bully, brother and sister still fight and the kids aren’t gonna do the washing up if no one’s around to make them.
Of course, even with all that, it’s a hard sell if things just don’t look right. However, not only are the visual effects flawless—helmed by Mike Seymour of fxphd who also filled the role of Executive Producer—but I have to admit, Richard Mueck’s nerve-jangling zombi turn had me tauter than the rope holding him back as the kids taunt and mock him; this is, after all, a zombie flick and those critters have a pesky way of managing to sink their teeth into all but the overly cautious.
Much has been made of the technical achievements of ILSJ, with it hailed as “a showcase of the most modern digital production techniques” by Digital Producer Magazine. Director of photography Adam Arkapaw shot the film in Sydney, Australia on a Thomson Grass Valley Viper FilmStream digital camera with Codex Digital recording technology enabling shots to be checked on set in full HD for focus and special effects.
ILSJ has rightly kicked up a storm of festival praise at both Sundance and the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival where it was awarded the Prix Canal.
Watch I Love Sarah Jane online at: QOOB
Topics: Horror, Twisted | 1 Comment »
There is Only One Sun
By Jason Sondhi | May 5, 2008
dir: Wong Kar Wai, 7:45—As we have proven with many of the recommendations on this site, being famous is no prerequisite to making a fine short film. Indeed since there are few proven paths to monetization, short film is usually either a playground for the experimental, or a proving ground for the up and coming. So it is surely noteworthy when a global cinema titan decides to hook up with a major multinational corporation for an online short film project.
There is Only One Sun, is the fruit of such a union. Wong Kar Wai, the premier arthouse writer/director of Hong Kong, decided in 2007 to team up with Phillips to do an online film promoting the electronic giant’s Aurea Ambilight Televisions. The result manages to admirably traverse that tricky ground between art and commerce, being a worthy addition to the director’s oeuvre while simultaneously an effective commercial. We as audiences are simply treated to an online film of an impressive artistic and technical caliber.
Set in a garishly lighted, yet otherwise ambiguous future (better to show off Phillips “ambilight” technology), the film focuses on “006”, a beautiful female agent of “Central Authority: Human Sanitation Division”. She is put on the case of a notorious figure known as “Light”, for whom she must pose as a blind person in order to gain his trust. The charismatic Light has a deep affect on the agent, and tension is derived from that classic spy trope—has 006 gone too deep?
Wong Kar Wai works well with the limitations of the medium while staying within the boundaries of his well-traversed tropes. If ever the auteur theory applied to a filmmaker it is Wong, as each of his films simultaneously draws from, and enriches those which came before. There is Only One Sun is no different, as it treads the familiar territories of love, trust, memory and disconnect that we have seen in films such as 2046 and Ashes of Time.
The opening of the film recalls the languorous pace of his most recent outings like 2046, as does the futuristic and stylized art direction, but things pick up soon via narration. Wong Kar Wai is famous as a director of emotion and affect, dispensing with narrative thrust in favor of exquisite moods and moments and this short is no different. The scene on the bed when 006 crushes her tracking device is lovely and powerful, as are her moments with the TV. But a short film reduces Wong’s canvas by which such moments unfold, causing for some clunky expository moments throughout. Still, though reasonably straightforward, the presentation of time is still charmingly dyslexic.
As I watched the short it occurred to me that a spy is the perfect Wong Kar Wai protagonist. Every new relationship is undone from the start by the lie that engendered it, isolating the character in the same rootless way all of Wong’s characters seem to suffer. 006 is the same, but memory for her is more a salvation than for others. Whereas in a film like Ashes of Time, the characters drank magic wine to forget their memories of lost love, and in 2046 memory is the cause of restless, constant dissatisfaction and something to be wished away, in this film the Agency tries to take 006’s memories away but are not successful. Central is a totalitarian place, and the fact we know her as 006 simply highlights how much of this character’s humanity has been stripped from her in making her into a tool. There is a sad nostalgia for her interactions with Light, and though there is a regret for “something she shouldn’t have seen”, her memory is a sign of her life and of past growth, an emblem that is hers which she can take into the future. She DID connect with Light. And thus she can have hope.
This film hit online back in October, but with the director’s English language debut My Blueberry Nights just now hitting American theaters it seemed like a good time to revisit it. Check it out Phillips website, though it sometimes does not play well. No Worries. I went and visited our good friend DeK.
Watch it online: NoFatClips | Phillips
Topics: Experimental, Surreal | No Comments »