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

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