CROSSOVER BY FABIAN GRODDE

With Crossover, Grodde’s meticulous attention to detail means he has created a world that we can believe in and engage with, by inhabiting an “elaborately designed miniature setting of a forest” with tribes of immaculately designed CGI insects. With a nod to King Kong and a reference to the spread of Christianity around the world, Crossover’s beautifully-realised microscopic world works in perfect contrast with the grand ideas covered in its powerful narrative.

UMBRA BY MALCOLM SUTHERLAND

Writing about Sutherland’s animation 18 months ago, I hailed Umbra as something we needed to celebrate due to its glorious uniqueness and time certainly hasn’t lessened my feelings towards this singular creation. With Umbra, Montreal based filmmaker/animator Sutherland has created a universe only possible in animation, using narrative to push the boundaries of the medium and create a short that instantly felt timeless. Malcolm has showcased his distinctive animated style in other standout shorts Bout, La Fete and A to B.

LITTLE BOAT BY NELSON BOLES

Opening with a roughly drawn boat, floating in a sea of nothingness, you’d be forgiven for mistaking Little Boat as ‘nothing-special’ within it’s opening seconds. However, as Boles’ tale continues and his vessel progresses on its journey, his film soon evolves into a mesmerising voyage through weird and wonderful worlds full of monkeys, sea-monsters and war. Not only does Boles manage to successfully appoint an inanimate object as his film’s main character, but the titular Little Boat’s evolution throughout the film’s action-packed 4-minute duration has viewers willing the battered vessel to its final destination (wherever that may be).

LES CHIENS ISOLÉS BY CRCR

French outfit CRCR (who we’ve featured on DN twice before – with Todor & Petru and Vésuves), manage to create an animation featuring the heady mix of oil-rig workers, imaginary wolves and the viewing of a Scunthorpe vs Barnsley football match, without it somehow descending into unstructured chaos and excessive-weirdness. In fact, despite the odd subjects covered in its story and the heavily-stylised look of Les chiens isolés, there remains a level of believability and realism in this short that only adds to its ominous feel and intriguing nature.

Year 2086. Kate Sorin never imagined how volunteering herself as “base citizen” for Project Shell would determine her fate. The Western Confederation claimed that the creation of the cyber-clones would be the bridge to a free and equal society, without thinking that their human nature would fight against the role they were created for: to be slaves.

The individual 0258 escaped impersonating Kate, but everything went wrong and she saw herself forced to kidnap Kate´s daughter to survive, who died in the crossfire. Since that moment, Kate joined the CHD with a single goal, to find 0258 and avenge the death of his daughter.

Every time director Ben Wheatley puts out a film it invariably makes its way onto my top ten list for that year (2009, 2011), so it’s pretty clear he’s a filmmaker whose work strikes a cord with me. Given that his third outing Sightseers, written by and staring Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, had its world premiere as part of the Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight a few hours ago, shows that I’m not alone in my appreciation and in all likelihood Sightseers will follow Down Terrace and Kill List onto my best of the year. I sat down with Ben to discuss his RomCom about mismatched couples and why it’s unlikely there’ll be a car boot full of dead children in his work anytime soon.

There’s lots of cinema to make & it would be a shame just to end up doing one thing forever.

Showlinks
Sightseers
Mr. and Mrs. Wheatley
The ABCs of Death
RED Camera
Canon 5D
Canon C500
GoPro

Mikey Please’s 2011 BAFTA award winning animation The Eagleman Stag is an astounding short we absolutely fell in love with during our 2011 Rushes Soho Shorts coverage and for the eagerly awaited behind the scenes video Please has created a documentary that is just as inventive and entertaining as his original short.

Please is currently crowdfunding his new animated short Martyn Myller over on Indiegogo, and I for one can’t think of a filmmaker more likely to put your money to excellent use.

Brosmind and Upper First redefined the format, mixing cinema, illustration and 2D/3D animation with paper, adding to their highly anticipated video a double-feature comic book that was given for free, alongside plastic masks with the face of the characters, to a crowd that enjoyed all the presentation feeling that they were the real protagonists of the party.

I believe a making of video will surface at some point, but for now you can goggle over behind the scenes pictures after the jump.

Oh, and least you believe that OFFF titles only step up when they hit the Spanish boarder, take a look at Physalia’s Pescara and Hellohikimori’s Istanbul titles too:

Australian director David Easteal’s short The Father was one of my favourite films of last year’s London Film Festival and if you heard our interview, you’ll know he’s developed an effective and naturalistic approach to shooting which allows him to capture ‘reality’ convincingly on film.

David’s currently two thirds of the way towards his Pozible funding goal with 30 days to go for his new short Monaco and needs that finally bit of support to push him over the top. Take a look at his pitch video and if you want to help him realise the project, head over to the Monaco campaign page to pledge your support.

A piece of paper is divided by hand into an even number of pieces and then reassembled.
A photograph of this finished composition is then printed and divided again.
This makes the impossible possible, tearing the now included empty spaces that make up the tears in the paper. This feedback division process is repeated while the number of imprecise manual divisions gradually increase. Everything is created by division.

Take a look at shots of the painstaking production process after the jump.

Here are some of Kogonada’s previous films featuring the work of famous directors:

Get things off your chest, sing, rant, bark or just breath heavily to this number: 07513 315164 (from outside the UK: 0044 7513 315164) and you may find that your recording turns into a Gobblynne animation!

As great as infographics and pomeranian interviews may be, it’s the films which caught my eye. Of the three released to date, Confessions of a Michael Stipe, Things We Saw from His Cab, and Inside the New York Times ‘Lively Morgue’, I’d say they have one miss, a decent effort and a hit on their hands.

Confessions of a Michael Stipe directed by K.Ryan Jones is a pretty straight forward interview piece which feels less documentary and more celebrity endorsement; with cutaways to panned stills of Stipe in his REM days, his current sculpture work and the bits of inspiration he posts to his blog.

Jon Groat helms Things We Saw from His Cab, which does a nice job of evoking the collage panel style of New York taxi driver Max Cohen’s blog, mixing footage from the ride-along interview with shots of Cohen at his camera lens and previous shots he’s featured online.

Inside the New York Times ‘Lively Morgue’ is by far the best of the three. Created in partnership with radio station WNYC, we’re given a guided tour through the New York Times’ clippings archive/photo library, lovingly referred to as ‘The Morgue’ and old enough that ‘space program’ is categorised under ‘rockets’ as that term came first. Director K.Ryan Jones has said that they had enough footage for a 15 minute film, but at a svelte four and a half minutes, we never get the chance to feel bored or trapped within its basement location.

Given the widely diverse spectrum of blogs within the tumblr ecosystem and the democratised method for submitting story suggestions to Storyboard – users simply write a tumblr blog post and tag it ‘storyboard’ – it’ll be interest to see if the video output will remain restricted to its interview/documentary beginnings, hopefully not.

Liberal Arts tells the story of Jesse (played by Radnor), a thirty something who lives alone in New York following the break up of a relationship. He’s a university admissions tutor crossed with an advisor to potential pupils. Alone in a big city he clearly doesn’t relish his job; he relishes books, art, culture and seemingly longs for something different. A telephone call from his former university tutor, Professor Jenkins, inviting him to his retirement party gives Jesse an excuse to leave New York for Ohio to celebrate his favourite tutor’s exit from teaching.

Upon arrival in Ohio Jesse meets one of his tutor’s current pupils, Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen). She is 19, vivacious, smart and of serious interest to Jesse. The film charts their relationship against the backdrop of someone who returns to their old university marvelling at the changes and similarities to their time there.

Zibby studies Liberal Arts which is the American way of saying Humanities. She listens to classical music and is not yet jaded by life. Jesse meets Nat, a hippy dreamer, on his way back to his motel one evening. Zac Efron is almost unrecognisable as Nat and is the catalyst for Jesse going to a party, bumping in to Zibby and agreeing to a date the next day. Having got a tactical puke out of the way, Jesse and Zibby spend the day talking about books and music. Upon Jesse’s return to New York they stay in contact, writing real life, snail mail letters to each other with accompanying CDs. It’s literally love’s young dream. Jesse misses Zibby so much he returns to Ohio without telling Prof Jenkins. Meanwhile, Prof Jenkins realises that he has made a terrible mistake by taking retirement and is going through a bit of a mid-life crisis. Finding Jesse with Zibby tips him over the edge and you realise that perhaps Jesse is a tad selfish. In fact, he’s quite a lot selfish.

Josh Radnor wrote, directed and starred in the film and I really enjoyed the result. Elizabeth Olsen shone as she did in Martha May Marcy Marlene. Zac Efron was surprisingly good as a hippy and managed to not come across as a Dazed and Confused extra who wandered on to the wrong set twenty years too late which was no mean feat.

Liberal Arts is a film which examines, growth, change, love and how people treat others. Some people spend their whole lives looking back wistfully wishing for the past to re-run. Often, when they’re presented with that re-run they realise that the past is often viewed through rose tinted spectacles. This is the case with Jesse. The sad truth is that Jesse’s rose tinted spectacles are only removed with the help of another old tutor (played beautifully by Allison Janney). To me, the film also examined what happens when people grow at different rates. Often, childhood sweethearts are meant to grow together and when they don’t they grow apart. But what happens when someone much older gets together with someone much younger and the only thing they have in common is one person’s past and the other’s present? It’s bound to be a recipe for disaster, yet people become carried away with the idea of love and don’t look at its far reaching consequences.

After the film Josh Radnor did a quick Q&A. He had to write and film Liberal Arts incredibly quickly due to his hectic How I Met Your Mother schedule (No, I don’t watch it. No, I did not know that he was in it until he mentioned it). I don’t believe that this pressure negatively impacted the film in any way. Interestingly, the Ohio university Liberal Arts was set in was Radnor’s own former university. He touched upon how bizarre it was to be back where he studied around 15 years ago with former tutors as extras. He also explained that he finds Efron a talented actor and deliberately covered him up in a silly hat as a hippy so the audience would see Efron as the actor he is, not the Disney alumni tarred with the pretty boy brush. It worked.

Overall, I really enjoyed Liberal Arts. At times Zibby’s relentless quirkiness and belief in the good in people was wearing but she’s 19, she’s in love and she has her whole life ahead of her. It would be a bleak film if she had already realised that life isn’t all about classical music and long distance love.

I worked at both projects at the same time and of course when you are working on two different projects at the same time, both in your mind, they are connected. So yes it is true that I used some of the same narrative tools.

Watching both pieces you can see how Carlos’ skill as a director results in two distinct pieces despite them simultaneously inhabiting the director’s headspace during the production phase. As always, Carlos also gives us an informative look at the production process in his behind the scenes video for 50 Years.

Ever since I (and 9 million+ others) saw Argentinean director Carlos Lascano’s A Short Love Story in Stop Motion I’ve been dying to get him onto DN for an interview. It may have taken four years, but Carlos finally made it on to discuss his newest piece A Shadow of Blue, a beautiful mix of animation techniques which champions the power of dreams.

I want to talk about dreams & about how the dreams can be strong enough to change reality.

Showlinks
Carlos Lascano
Carlos Lascano Vimeo

38-39˚c gives us the blueprint of a relationship between a father and son inside the dream the protagonist experiences while under the spell of the elevated temperatures of a bathhouse. Thick sheets of paper in exquisite arrangement represent the two men who are linked by their identical birthmarks, yet cannot seem to look at each other. —- Maureen Selwood

It’s an animation that only gets more stunning when you realise the work and craft put into it:

A Shadow of Blue (2011)
A touching story in which fantasy and reality merge to make dreams come true. How determining can reality be, and how can fantasy unleash an unexpected freedom? Can a fragile world of lights and shadows show us more than a silhouette drawn against the sunlight?

I hear that if you follow this link and use the password shadow you might just get a sneak peak of the full film.

A thought-provoking meditation on the seal-hunt and what it means to the traditional way of life for Inuit.

Starring internationally renowned throat singer Tanya Tagaq, and Cannes-winning filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk (Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner), Tungijuq is a cinematic and musical expression of the organic and indisputable reality of hunting in Inuit culture. – (www.isuma.tv)

A Man has to choose between paying money or possibly losing his life.

And here’s the making of video:

Swelter, the second year film from Calarts student Jacob Streilein sees a desperate search for water, in a universe ravaged with extreme heat, end in a dangerous confrontation.

You can get a look at storyboards, background plates and help the team fund their next animation Bluebeard by buying t-shirts over on the Arithmétique blog.

The zombie apocalypse happened — and we won.

But though society has recovered, the threat of infection is always there — and Los Angeles coroner Tommy Rossman is the man they call when things go wrong.

Self financed, shot at weekends with a skeleton crew and released online for free, Brad Bores’ Wishful, Sinful could be said to be the definition of the indie feature. Brad joins us this week to discuss finding your film cinematically during the production process and the need for honest festival feedback.

You just wanna know some sort of information of how your film’s being critiqued[…] & when you don’t get that, the filmmaker’s not learning anything.

Showlinks
Brad Bores
Zero Film Fest
Panasonic AG-DVX100
Nobudge
When the Bell Rings

If you’re a fan of short film and you’re yet to see Mikey Please’s 2011 BAFTA award winning animation The Eagleman Stag, then you’re probably in for one of the most enjoyable 9 minutes you’re likely to have sat in front of your computer screen. Astonishingly created “100% in-camera” via stop-motion Please’s, striking visuals are equally matched by the filmmaker’s ambitious epic narrative.

Wishful, Sinful (2011)
A brutally honest and sometimes humorous view of two small town guys failing at mediocre lives.

You can watch the full 72 minute Wishful, Sinful feature for free over on NoBudge now.