Monday, December 18, 2006

Merry Christmas 2006


Christmassy Greetings to the world! For this year's card Freya employs her distinctive caligraphy and graduated-fill technique to startling effect.
A Happy and Healthy 2007 to all.

Evo Going Atomic



It's been some time in coming now, but short film site Atom Films will host my shortfilm 'Evo'. This link takes you to their First Look Lounge announcement. I'll update this post when Evo goes-live properly on Atom.

Monday, October 30, 2006

Telephone Camera Thing

I've finally replaced my aging and failing mobile and got a new SonyEricsson one. I was fairly amazed to find that as well as shooting stills and lo-res movies, it's even got some basic video editing software onboard! The so-called 'Video DJ' application lets you string together up to 5 shots with very basic trimming and titling functions. It's all at very lo-res of course (176x144 pixels and very compressed) the movies get saved in .3gp format.

I've started dabbling with this and might post some kind of phone-made movie things here at some later date...

Saturday, October 21, 2006

Flow



The branching storylines are best developed through the use of flow charts. The example here shows a few of the elements and how they might link together in story terms. My intention is to map out the entire schematic of the project this way, using a fairly broad approach for now. The next step will be to outline the possible narratives within these modules.

Friday, October 13, 2006

New Work in Blogress Starts Here

I'm embarking on a new shortfilm/newmedia project now, so thought I'd post some work in progress right from the start as the work erm... progresses.

The outline of the idea is to produce a short film with a branching narrative to be controlled by randomisation coding within the movie. I'm proposing a film that presents a different story each time it's viewed. The working title is 'I.D.' and the tagline; 'a new movie everytime'. I've looked around on the web, and think this concept falls somewhere in that grey area between cartoon and generative art. It currently looks like this...


It's early days obviously, but the first phase will be writing the content and devising scenarios for the piece. Along the way, I'm hoping to overcome any fiendish coding and production issues. I'm hoping that some readers will find this of interest, and would welcome any feedback on this.

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Russco's Bloggo


As top cross-media designer Russ kindly bigged-up my short film 'Evo' on his blog recently, it'd be just rude not to send some of my traffic back over to his place www.bloggo.com - An evolving directory of all things designerly and eclectic.

Google ÿþ

My Google listings for www.chrisgavin.com and www.chrisgavin.co.uk have been messed up for the last few weeks. The mystery of the ÿþ character and the unwanted display of HTML code is probably down to saving my index.html page with the wrong text encoding from Notepad.

UPDATE It's fixed now...

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Meshing About

I've put a proposal in for the Mesh scheme. The working title is "I.D." and it's to be a short film with a randomising narrative. Very early days in the development of this yet, but I'll post some details soon.
Whether or not Channel Four / Mesh choose to fund this, I'll continue some pre-production work in the meantime...

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Evo Goes West


Evo is to make its fourth U.K. festival appearance; this time it's the Encounters Short Film Festival in Bristol. The former Brief Encounters and Animated Encounters Festivals have been amalgamated this year to create a bigger celebration of all things new in short film. Evo will be shown in-competition as part of the 'Best of British 1' programme due to screen at the Watershed Cinema on Tuesday 21st November (6:15pm) and Thursday 23rd November (11:30am). I've been offered tickets to go and am considering making the trip.

Thursday, August 31, 2006

Evo Offers

Evo has had some interest from distribution outfits. I'll update here once I've mulled over the details of these.

Propellor TV, requested it for their arts channel via Sky. (non-exclusive TV broadcast rights)
Sony myPSP website want it for PSP users to be able to download the film. (non-exclusive online rights)
Atom Films have said they will take it on for their site. (non-exclusive online rights)

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Press Clipping: Rushes Brochure


Nice bit of write-up in the Rushes Soho Shorts Brochure, with thanks to editor / interviewer Stewart Jamieson.

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Evo Gets L.I.A.F. Date

The London International Animation Festival 'British Panorama' screening (which will include Evo) has been announced on The LIAF website The programme of various animation shorts will be at London's Curzon Cinema on Saturday August 26th at 9:00pm.

Tandem Leaps Aboard BlogWagon

This blog thing is unstoppable. Tandem Films has got one too.

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Evo Goes Online at the BBC



Evo is finally an online movie. It's been selected by the BBC Film Network site for all-comers to see. Here it is.

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Properly Hosted

Major infrastructure changes here... a venture I'm trialing required that I buy some 'proper' web-hosting, rather than the re-direction to my Blueyonder (ISP) space I've been using up until now. Today I moved all of this site over to the new space; though mostly straightforward; this did require re-pointing every image link in this blog. Visitors might notice that the address bar now shows www.chrisgavin.com properly instead of the previous blueyonder_pwp nonsense.

Saturday, July 01, 2006

Evo 'Shortlisted' in Rushes Festival


The short film Evo has been shortlisted for "The Vue Animation Award". The film; to be shown at the Rushes Soho Shorts Festival between July 29th and August 4th joins a shortlist of twenty-two films in competition in this category. See www.rushes.co.uk/sohoshorts/index.htm for details of the shortlisted entries.

Saturday, June 24, 2006

Evo in L.I.A.F.


The short film Evo is to be shown in the London International Animation Festival. The film has been selected for inclusion in the 'British Panorama' programme with a yet to be announced screening date sometime during the week-long festival in August. The venue will be the Curzon Cinema in central London. The L.I.A.F. website is www.liaf.org.uk

Saturday, June 10, 2006

Man at I.C.A. Evo at OneDotZero


A 'Day of the Jackal' June day on The Mall. Heat, flags, steel crowd-control barriers and an impressive Police presence ... The adoring masses are either here for the Queen's birthday 'Trooping The Colour' ceremony or the world première of the short film Evo at the I.C.A. Cinema.

Yet Cinema 1 is only half-full, (mostly other filmmakers I suspect.) Evo is three quarters through a programme of varied shorts. After the show, the director takes a celebratory beer in the I.C.A. bar where all eyes are on the widescreen monitor installed in the corner. It's not art, but it is contemporary; the England v Paraguay game kicks-off in Frankfurt.




So that was the première screeninig of Evo. Thanks go to Joel Karmath, Darryl Clifton, Giada et al for putting the OneDotZero Festival together, and in particular for choosing to screen the film. Find out more about the OneDotZero Festival at www.onedotzero.com

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Evo Première Announced

Evo is to get its first every public screening in London on Saturday 10th June 2006.
The film has been selected to show in the 'Uncut' screening as part of the OneDotZero festival.
The venue is London's ICA Cinema 1 (Institute of Contemporary Arts), the screening is at 12:00 midday. (the screening is free, but temporary membership of the ICA costs £1.50)

Sunday, May 21, 2006

Noodling

Readers might spot that the www.chrisgavin.com site has been subject to further noodling about. Now that the 'Poematic' section also plays movies sometimes, it made sense to me to retitle the whole thing as 'The Randomizer'. The word 'Poematic' now only applies to the randomly generated texts that appear from time to time. In the tidying-up process, I've added a few more video clips into the mix, including 4 extracts from the film Evo. (The first time any of this film has made onto the web.) I've also included a few other extracts from various tests and projects, all in a bid to cut down the chances of content repetition...

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Evo World Tour Dates

I've sent out preview copies of Evo now to many festivals. Entering for festivals is a lot easier nowadays than it was when I was last doing this. I'll come back to update this list from time to time.
The campaign so far...
FESTIVALCOUNTRYDATESSTATUS
2006
OneDotZero_10
London
UKJun10
screened
première
Rushes
Soho Shorts
UKJul29
Aug04
screened
comp. shortlisted
London International
Animation Fest.
UKAug26
screened
Brit. panorama
Bristol Encounters
Short Film Fest.
UKNov21
Nov26
screened
BestofBrit.1
2007

Saturday, May 06, 2006

Evo is Out

I consider the short film Evo to be 'finished' now. On Friday I made the first output to Digibeta tape and a DVD version too. These went straight to the Rushes Soho Short Film Festival office probably arriving within minutes of the festival submissions deadline. This is the first time in over ten years that I've sent a short out into the world, it'll be interesting to see if this gets picked up for some screenings.
Dave Daniels at Tandem helped me a lot at the last moment, getting the DVD packaging together conforming to the Tandem style, and also dashing off to the festival office in Soho. Thanks also to Mike Bell (producer at Tandem) for OK-ing Evo to be released under the Tandem banner.

Monday, May 01, 2006

Evo Release Soon

I'm daring to consider that the short film 'evo' is ready to show. I've spent the small hours of the last few weeks tweaking the picture and making fixes etc. The running time now with titles and credits (very few) is 2 minutes 30 seconds.
I've gone back into the Cubasis files now and optimized the music track to fit the picture and added library sound effects during the last few sessions.
I've been using www.sounddogs.com an online audio library to source my effects and a great service that is too.
I'll show the film this week to my colleagues at Tandem and if I'm happy enough with it, make a Digibeta master and DVD copies etc. I'd like to enter this for the Rushes Soho Shorts Festival, the deadline for entries is this Friday (05/05/06).

Saturday, April 29, 2006

Dave Daniels Talk

Tuesday night this week (25/04/06) went to see Tandem colleague Dave Daniels give a talk at the Curzon Cinema in soho. The Adobe hosted 'Inspired Media Event' was well attended by a genuinely appreciative crowd. Dave illustrated his talk with a graphical slideshow - a nice touch, and there was abundant movie material, some I hadn't seen before. Dave makes a lot of short films; often abstract; always experimental and much of the time exploring the interaction of music and image. Some examples of Dave Daniels work can be seen on the Tandem website www.tandemfilms.com (click on Directors)

Friday, April 21, 2006

Get Meshed

Trying to get some funding for your next animated short? The Channel Four Mesh Scheme is open for entries again. Submission dealine for proposals is 22nd September 2006.

Too Short

Back to nightshift work on the short. I've just spotted the upcoming Rushes Soho Shorts Festival; also just noticed the 5th May submission deadline for entries! Is this movie going to make it? It'd be very nice to get this film out and hopefully get it picked up for some screenings.
I'm mostly happy with the picture now, but the soundtrack needs work. Here's the problem... the soundtrack is a piece of music I composed using Cubasis VST 4.0 around three years ago. Since then I've changed my PC and now also moved house. I now can't find the Cubasis cd-rom!
So I've got old cubasis files (.all format) that I need to get into to modify the track to fit the picture... Cubasis seems to be obsolete now according to the Steinberg website and I've no idea whether my Cubasis VST 4.0 files would be usable in any current version of Cubase. Any ideas/suggestions would certainly be most welcome.

Sunday, April 09, 2006

Moved In

Spent this weekend moving house. From one bit of London suburbia to another not very far away. All those who know us better watch out for change of address info coming soon...

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Taking Random to the Movies

I'm ploughing on to finish the short film 'Evo' soon, and needless to say, new ideas keep coming along when I'm least able to act upon them. Moving house this week will doubtless contribute to furthering this frustration erm... further.

One idea I'm toying with takes the randomly generated text of Poematic into the realm of movie-making. I.e. some kind of code that generates movie scripts and draws on a bank of picture and audio elements to make a pseudo-narrative film that really is different every time. It's probably animation again, because this allows for more dynamically created elements etc. No matter how great the code is, the result will be surreal and disjointed... I quite like the idea of using familiar trappings of the thriller genre as the components for this.

Working title for this project "Unique" ... a tagline already too "the new film every time film"
Is it a goer?

Friday, March 31, 2006

The No.3 Chris Gavin In The World

If you Google search on 'Chris Gavin', this site www.chrisgavin.com gets the number 3 ranking. One day I'll be the Chris Gavin king of all the Chris Gavins...

Test Screenings

I've been showing the short film 'evo' (still work in progress) to a few colleagues at Tandem Films recently. www.tandemfilms.com It's interesting to get some fresh eyes looking at something I've been working on in isolation for well over a year now. I've had a few valuable comments/suggestions that I'll try and absorb into the production. Thanks anyone who has offered help and advice... you know who you are...

Monday, March 20, 2006

What's Goin' On?

Keen-eyed visitors to www.chrisgavin.com will spot that after a splurge of activity updating the 'poematic' section with movies etc, activity seems to have now abated somewhat. The day job at Tandem Films has taken over again, with my fifth directing job for Sky TV! It's been promos up to now, but this job is more in the graphics area.
Of course work on my short film (now titled 'Evo') should have taken a bashing, but I've rather been spurred on to get this thing finished. The picture is now just a tad over two minutes, with no rough artwork anymore. It's almost at the stage at which I'll have another pass adding elements here and there, possibly for around the next month or two. On completion of the picture I'll have to dig back into my archives to fix the music, then think about a possible effects track too.
Still too early to call this thing done, but it feels like it's into the last push...

Monday, February 20, 2006

The Poem Generator Just Got Better

I've made a couple more tweaks to the 'Poematic' ActionScript.
Now you can't get double adverbs (i.e. one before and one after the verb) as was previously the case.

I've also added a new group of words - the connectives. Now, sentences can start with a connective word (e.g. but, however, although, while, meanwhile, instead, and, or, for, suddenly, as, like etc.) These seem to give the randomized poetry a bit more flow; slightly less 'choppy' than before.

Sunday, February 19, 2006

Press Green for Kinoautomat

Thursday night (16/02/06) went to the NFT to see 'Kinoautomat, One Man and His House'.
It's a revitalisation of the Czech film made in 1967 (dir. Radúz Činčera).
Truly a fascinating thing, because it's an interactive movie, and billed as the first one ever. The film stops at certain points and the cinema audience votes on the next course of action for the narrative to follow. More details can be found at the Kinoautomat website. I was really up for this, and nice to see art college mate Tom Hillenbrand acting as host/compere for the night.

Got to thinking that I've had quite a few experiences with these branching narratives in various forms already; teenhood 'adventure' novels; early text-based computer games and the games at the Siggraph 'Electric Cinema' come to mind. I even tried creating a branching HTML narrative of sorts on the first incarnation of my website 'Tall Story Hotel' circa '97. The idea of modular, self-generating or random story devices has been kicking around in the things I'm keen on for quite a while now.

KinoAutomat shows that participating in an interactive movie can be engaging as a live and communal cinema experience. Astonishingly ahead of its time; the technologies of DVD and the web make it technically easier to create and deliver work in this field nowadays. I guess that once digital projection is more common in cinemas, there'll be much more of this to come...

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Coding Again

I've just updated the 'Poematic' code again.

The ActionScript now chooses whether to deliver a truly random poem or a pre-written text selected from variables stored within the code. The library is currently pretty small, so repetitions occur all too frequently.

Either way, random or pre-written, the text is dynamically converted into word tiles then automatically laid out on the page.

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Random or Written?

Woah, apologies for throwing 'poetry' at you there without any warning messages...

I'm planning to update the 'Poematic' feature of this site slightly. To make for more variety, I'm planning to randomly plant pre-scripted texts in amongst the randomly generated ones. Phase one of this has just been implemented... The Poematic feature now dynamically generates a page of 'fridge magnet word tiles' (henceforth FMWTs) from a single variable within the ActionScript code. This seems to work OK.

The next phase will be to build a small library of texts (yikes, more poetry!) then re-instate the random poetry generator too. On a random basis the visitor to the site will either be confronted by a digital poem or a humanly generated one. Clicking on any word will probably take the visitor to further digitally created texts. Maybe later, keywords that I've bothered to write accompanying text for will trigger the apropriate pre-scripted work.

For the forseeable future the pre-scripted texts will be variables embedded in the action script code, but I'd be keen to learn how these might be stored as text files server-side; the ultimate aim being to allow site visitors to contribute words or texts to the library for generating the FMWTs.

Ultimately, the goal would be a whole bunch of dynamically-created / partially random, partially hand-made web pages endlessly interlinked with each other for a truly non-linear user experience.

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Director!

I've finally made it onto Tandem Films list of represented directors, go to http://www.tandemfilms.com click on the 'Directors' area and I'm there, 'Chris Gavin' near the bottom but there nonetheless... Hopefully there'll be more of this to come!

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Video: 'Back From La Bourgogne'

Click on this image to view the QuickTime (0.23MB)
A family trip to visit friends over new year. On the journey back I took some stills from the car.