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.

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)

Press Clipping: Rushes Brochure

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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)

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...

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...

FESTIVAL	COUNTRY	DATES	STATUS
2006
OneDotZero_10 London	UK	Jun10	screened première
Rushes Soho Shorts	UK	Jul29 Aug04	screened comp. shortlisted
London International Animation Fest.	UK	Aug26	screened Brit. panorama
Bristol Encounters Short Film Fest.	UK	Nov21 Nov26	screened BestofBrit.1
2007

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.

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).

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)

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.

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...

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?