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).