I fail at making breakfast…

The Young Filmmaker of Mann screening is definitely one of the highlights of my year.  As many of you know I’m a huge filmmaking enthusiast and for me it’s almost like the Christmas Day of my filmmaking calendar.  

This year I was lucky enough to have all three of the entries I made accepted to be shown at the screening, which made me rather happy indeed! :D 

The first shown was my animation piece “Blob & Flob’s Lunar Landing”, which is a short stop-frame film I shot for my AardvarkAnimation youtube channel in December 2010.  The idea of this piece was to take the simple, and mainly silent stop-frame techniques I have used in many Aardvark shorts before and give them a new look with the addition of some subtle visual effects I had not attempted before.  For example the entire piece was shot in front of a blue background in order to key in a far more elaborate and interesting computer generated landscape than that I could have made myself with cardboard, PVA and paint!

After that came probably the biggest surprise of the day in that my entry “Tram Stop Shootout“ had made it to the screening.  This video was made with the support of Jay Warren, Jack Hedges and Luke Carroll and I had seriously doubted this one would do well at the competition due it’s fairly violent subject matter.  The film was made this April as a test video for a load of brand new special effects material I was longing to try out in Final Cut Studio.  Unfortunately there was no “Action” category so it was entered into the Drama category and came up against the very emotional film Deceitful which was far more fitting of the “Drama” title and in the end stole the show!

The last of my, well our entries to be shown were two of the visual effects sketches made for the BlueMountPics youtube channel earlier this year with the excellent support of Jay Warren and Jack Hedges.  The ones submitted to the competition were “The Other Kyle” and “iPhone Table Tennis”, that put various cropping, matting, motion tracking and keying effects into practice in the telling of two comical scenarios.

My favourite videos in the competition this year were Women as Agents for Change and Advert Break.  The first being a really interesting documentary shot in The Gambia, what an opportunity for some great videoing!  …And the second being a very funny spoof comedy film indeed!  Both of these won category prizes and I hope are on (or are going to be put on) youtube.

My films were lucky enough to be awarded a commendation in the experimental category for the Visual Effect Sketches “The Other Kyle” & “iPhone Table Tennis”, a special commendation for technical ability and ideas for the work on “Tram Stop Shootout” and I was very pleased to get the category award for animation with “Blob & Flob’s Lunar Landing”.

Well done to all in the competition this year, and I hope to see you all again come next September.

My broadcast studio is nearly complete! :)

I need to get me one of these.  Looks like everyone’ll be making Simon’s Cat style animations in the not too distant future! :)

It’s time for some cute cat photos!  The cat in the flower bed is Marble, but answers to “Pretty” said in a high pitched voice, and the one on the left is her son Jenga who has had a fascination with our loft for some time and the other day slept in this particular bag in the hope we wouldn’t realise he was inside it when we put it up into the attic.  This picture is proof that his plan fell through at the last minute!  Getting into the attic must seem as great a goal to him as man landing on the moon was pre-1969.  Yes, I’m a cat person! :)

Just saw this on iheartdigital’s blog.  What an incredible idea from IKEA!  Takes your basic Facebook information and turns it into a dream room design!

Here it is!  What Illy Quane and I have been working on over the summer.  His music and my camera stuff put together to make a rather simplistic, but effective enough, first music video for the bluemountpics collection.

(Yes I realise there is a slight mistake with the editing at one point, but if you’ve found it then you’ve probably watched the video a little too closely.)  :)