Thursday, December 27, 2007

Ahoy

A misty December evening in St. Katherine's Dock; some of my Tandem ship-mates after the studio party. The venue was the good ship Ardwina 21/12/2007.

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Merry Christmas 2007

This year, Freya's card design adds a figurative and appropriately festive touch to some Miro-esque abstract meanderings...

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Status Gimbal

Sturdier now, but Gimbal #2 has only 2 axes to grind.

The Gimbals of My Mind #1

Some plumbing pieces and skate bearings become a three axes gimbal. That bent piece of aluminium isn't very successful though ...

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Steadibrek

In the quest to add further bits to my miniDV camera I've been looking online at various hand-held camera stabilisers. That Steadicam Merlin looks great but I'm not going to be spending circa. £600 on one of those anytime soon. At the bottom end of the scale is the $14 Steadicam; essentially a weighted stick. The search for cheap camera stabilisation captures the imagination of geeky camera buffs everywhere so the web is awash with their various schemes and adventures.
There could be an intriguing wee project here involving some bits of plastic and skate bearings perhaps...

Friday, September 21, 2007

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Evo's Spanish Date

The programme for the Animación Internacional Curtocircuíto screening at the Curtocircuíto na Rúa Festival in Santiago de Compostela (Spain) has now been published. My shortfilm Evo will screen on the evening of 02/08/2007 at the Praza da Universidade. See the evening's programme at the Festival's website.
Evo's listing looks like this...

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Smallfilms Bigideas


Who wouldn't have enjoyed hearing animator and storyteller Oliver Postgate on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs on Sunday 15/07/2007? He spoke of working in bygone times when his unique originality and craftsmanship somehow found its way into the TV schedules. Would anything as inventive as The Clangers make it past the television gate-keepers of today?
Image credit © Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Evo in Academia

Takers of the British Journal of Music Education doi:10.1017/S0265051707007401
Published online by Cambridge University Press 04Jun2007 Volume 24 will have already spotted a passing reference to my short film Evo in the paper entitled Music analysis down the (You) tube? Exploring the potential of cross-media listening for the music classroom by Michael Webb.

You can read the abstract here, though you'll need to be a subscriber or buy the paper to see the Evo bit.

Monday, July 02, 2007

Evo's Spanish Evenings

Evo is to get a showing in Santiago de Compostela's Curtocircuíto Na Rúa Festival. Outdoor screenings will take place in the historic squares of the old town during the evenings of July and August. More details will surely be culled from the Curtocircuíto festival website when the programme is announced.

Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Domains For Sale

I've just put 4 domains up for sale over at www.sedo.com (the online marketplace for the buying and selling of domains.)

16x9.tv
sourcepix.com
buyoutmedia.com
buyoutmedia.co.uk

Friday, June 01, 2007

Colorblind Revival




Just re-discovered some fave sounds from the late80s / early90s. 'The Colorblind James Experience' from Rochester NY were a mad collective of jug-band americana featuring the deadpan-est frontman of all; Colorblind James (the stagename of the late and great James Charles Cuminale). A couple of band members have started a blog which includes 3 great podcasts 1 2 3 showcasing their unique sound and attitude. I saw them live at Hull's Adelphi club during college times; still worth checking-out after all these years...

Sunday, May 13, 2007

Enriched Word Power

It was beyond being about time I updated The Randomizer section of my website , so that's just what I've done over the last week or so. First-off I've updated the code to publish better under newer versions of Flash (some of my ActionScript was deprecated code apparently). I then set-about refreshing the word-banks used by the Poematic poetry generator: the vocabulary has been expanded now to 700 nouns, 80 proper nouns, 106 adjectives, 204 verbs, 143 adverbs and 23 connectives.
I've added a few more pre-scripted texts and a few more movie clips too. I've included a few archival animation tests and even included a couple of mobile phone shots.

Monday, April 30, 2007

That New Evo Sound

The 2007 re-release of Evo; featuring the all-new Earodynamics sound design can be seen here. I'm getting together another batch of festival applications to mark the occasion...

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Big In Berlin

The curators at Berlin-based arts and culture magazine Sleek have chosen my shortfilm Evo for their growing online "Art in Motion" archive. (If you choose to follow this link, you'll need to scroll down their page a bit to see 'Evo'.)

Video: 'Pin Disco'

Click on this image to view the QuickTime (1.6MB)

The very night before last week's deadline I decided to submit an entry for Channel E4's E-stings competition. I reached for those pins again and chose one of their quirkier electronica soundtracks to work to ... it's a seven second ident for E4 Music Channel; I called it 'Pin Disco'.

Busy-ness

At Tandem we've finished the 13 idents I was directing/compositing on for Focus (The nationwide D.I.Y. retailer.) Since then there's also been compositing work to do on some Idents for Ribena to show during ad-breaks in ITV's "Grease Is The Word" show on Saturday evenings. The studio has kept pretty busy for a good while now. The Tandem blog is definitely worth a look.

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Video: 'PinFolkTest_001'

Click on this image to view the QuickTime (0.12MB)
Here's a wee test.

Sunday, March 11, 2007

Pins


Been messing about with some pins and polystyrene, maybe with some home-made stopmotion project in mind...

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Ten Second Spots

I'm busy with Tandem work again, but this time a spot of directing! (A multitude of quickie TV sponsorship idents...)
So not much time for film-making activities: 'too busy to blog.'

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Thanks

To the guy who chased me down Essex Road one evening last week to give me back the mobile phone I'd dropped.

Saturday, January 13, 2007

Statistical Blip


January 10th 2007 shall henceforth be known as 'Big Wednesday' - the day traffic to www.chrisgavin.com unexpectedly spiked up to 1705 unique visits. Most of these seem to have been referred from the site www.stumbleupon.com in response to a positive review by user 'PanHelle'... thanks for that!

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Evo Remixed

A couple of months back I got an email from musician and sound designer Dan Buskell; he'd downloaded my film Evo onto his Sony PSP over at the yourPSP site. Dan seems to have liked the film well enough, but must have had some reservations about my musicianship! Over the christmas break he sent me a copy of Evo set to his own totally new music and effects track.
It had always been my original intention to find some help with the sound design for 'Evo', but I ended up pressing-on with my own track...

I like what Dan has done a lot, and feel it really does add a further dimension to the film. I'm planning to remaster a version of the film with the shiny new track and send this version out to the world... something of an Evo Remix. Once it's online somewhere, I'll blog a link to it.

You can find out more about Dan Buskell's work over at earodynamics.net