The screening of "The Drawer" last week went great. The audience requested to play it twice and they did! Who knew that 17 seconds could make, as I'm told, such a splash. The other material in the show was great too. I was honored to be a part of the lineup.

This Wednesday, April 22nd, 7pm, at the Mpls-St. Paul International Film Fest, "Freatures" will have its first premiere as a part of the MN Shorts Narrative screening. I am very excited for this. This is my very first non-youth festival, so I'm actually a bit intimidated. ..and to top it off, I have an interview on Minnewood! http://minnewood.com/v2/permalink.php?id=393

I wanted the animations online for friends to see, so here they are. I have seen the first cut of this feature length doc, and I tell you, its worth seeing. Its touching, funny, and a personal insight of these eccentric artists who built these outrageous landmarks.



This was the biggest hand drawn animation I have done to date, and like these builders, I am not formally trained. Conveniently, the purpose was to make these animations look very 'scrappy'. I only had about four days to animate, with help on one day from an assistant animator. Most frames ran at about 10 to 16.

The castle was shot with my DSLR+flash and assembled in post, with color tinting to create the old filmic look. The Forevertron sculpture park was animated on a document table, with a video camera. The paper was on a lightbox, so I was able use a single separate frame for the road layout by shining through the layer of sculpture frames. The zooms were filmed with the camera lens itself and by physically moving the lightbox around.

No maps or blue prints exist, nor have I visited these places in person. I had to filter through hundreds of photographs and hours of video to render out simple outlines of these crazy structures. I thought I must have been crazy to draw a map for someplace I had never been, but somehow it came to fruition.

Scrap documentary

I've been invited to screen "The Drawer" @ Cinema Lounge, BLB, April 15th. 6pm doors, 7pm screening - FREE! They also wanted me to come down to describe a bit of what I've been up to and hype up the official premiere of "Freatures" @ the M-SPIFF which will be later this month. Until I find more details I will post them here, and hopefully draw a little poster.