Directed a Guardian Ad

I don't usually blog here about my dayjob at TANDEM (most of my work there gets an airing on the TANDEM blog anyway) but over the last 2 weeks at TANDEM I directed another commercial. This 10-seconder was made for agency Wieden+Kennedy to promote this weekend's Guardian and Observer guides to drawing and painting. The ad is now running on UK television, the newspapers go on sale this weekend.

See the finished commercial here.

Down By The River

I journeyed into the centre of town on Sunday to go see TXT ISLAND playing at the BFI Cinema 1 on the South Bank. My short-film showed as part of the Onedotzero festival in a varied programme called 'Craftwork 09'; the theme of which was film work inspired by a 'hand-made' aesthetic.



Nice to meet the 1.0 folks (thanks Jo and Shane etc.) and enjoy the hospitality of their Green Room ;) they also rather rashly let me take the mic at the Q&A session before the screening and even videotaped some of my ramblings afterwards!
Having been thoroughly 'documented' I headed back over the river and found myself amongst the revellers of the Thames River Festival.



My gosh, on a nice evening with things going on London is one spectacular city.



I'm finally starting to enjoy this rather shoddily constructed Canon 350d camera I've had for some years now.



800 ASA, and at one with the manual controls I can even take pictures at night!

Open To Offers

Well then,

Apparently today 09/09/09 is the 'World Day of Interconnectedness' and 'The Recession is officially over!'

As of 4 weeks from now 12/10/09 I'm officially a freelancer again and looking for gainful employment. Any offers most welcome!

TXT @ the NFT for 1.0

TXT ISLAND will be shown next week at the NFT Cinema on London's Southbank as part of the upcoming Onedotzero Festival. A festival preview clip can be seen here. As well as a couple of screenings throughout the week (wed 9th sept & sun 13th sept) as part of the 'Craftwork 09' programme, the film may get some further international screenings by way of Onedotzero's touring programmes.

P.S. Thought I'd better add a TXT ISLAND page to the www.chrisgavin.com website. So back into Flash; and though it's been a couple of years I've added a new TXT ISLAND button and accompanying page.

Born On The 28th of August

TXT ISLAND will get it's first international screening (and in competition too!) at the 'BornShorts' Festival at the end of this month. Bornholm Island off the coast of Denmark hosts the festival, TXT ISLAND will screen during the Animation show at the Scala Cinema on Friday the 28th August.

An 8mm Journey

Well, it's 2 months after our wedding and the Super8 film from the day is finally back in the country. The film has been on a long journey but here are the nerdy details...

My friend Ellis borrows my Nizo S800 camera on the day and shoots one roll of Kodak 64T Super 8 film. I send this to Bart at Blue Cine Tech here in London and he sends it on to Andec Filmtechnik in Berlin for processing. I get the film back by post then send it (with a USB memory stick) over to Uppsala Bildteknik in Sweden. Uppsala Bildteknik telecine the film using the FlashScan HD machine and return the film reel and the memory stick with one big Quicktime file. I then do a bit of AE noodling with some mild de-graining and levels settings.

Et Voila! Here are a couple of still frames from that very movie...





For the very curious, I might well follow this up with a post about the telecine service used.

Big Brother, No One Is Watching You!

I notice with some ranting smugness that nobody is watching Big Brother at all this year.


A long time back, Channel Four had built itself a hard-won reputation for edgy, innovative and unpredictable programming; they even used to fund lots and lots of film and animation production. Yet witness the endless freak-show of wife-swapping makeover reality programming they carry these days.

Well, it seems the game's well and truly up now. Lets hope there's anyone left at Channel Four HQ with some new ideas they're going to need something to fill that rather large void...

Awards Night Report

Well a fab night out with some TANDEM friends at the Rushes Soho Shorts Awards night last Thursday (July 30th). This year, the event was at the Curzon Cinema, a much classier event than on previous occasions; the change of venue being a definite plus. It was great to get an invite as a finalist director. 'TXT ISLAND' was up against two other animated shorts, 'This Way Up' and 'This is Where We Live'.

After the jury deliberated (and probably cogitated too) they chose 'This Way Up' as the winner. Well done to Smith and Foulkes, congrats to all the folks at Nexus.

1.0

Not a whole lotta blogging for a while eh? Some good news today though, TXT ISLAND will be showing at the onedotzero festival at the BFI cinema here in London in September, with international tour dates to possibly follow.

Foam Sweet Foam

I'm making a few models out of foam board and other bits and pieces. Maybe these will become the sets for another stop motion film, maybe not; fun to do anyhow...

TXT ISLAND : The Trailer

TXT ISLAND seems to be getting some nice responses out there. I've just re-cut the trailer to refer to the film's YouTube home over on the Tandem Channel.

It's Official!

The news embargo is now lifted; My short film "TXT ISLAND" has been selected for the 2009 Rushes Soho Shorts Festival.
Also, tonight (June 1st 7:00pm) we're off to the "Short & Sweet" short film evening at cafe 1001, Brick Lane to see it play there.

see TXT ISLAND now on YouTube!

TXT ISLAND : Featured by Shots

My short film 'TXT Island' is the front page item on Shots magazine website. For a treat this bank holiday weekend only, you can go over there to see the whole film!

TXT ISLAND : The Trailer

I know it's a little bit indulgent to make a trailer for a film that's only three and a half minutes long anyway, but I couldn't resist it, could I? Click here to see the TXT Island trailer.

The A to Z of TXT Island

Here's a still of the plastic alphabet I used to make the film. I've got some titles and maybe another project in mind for these...

'TXT Island' wraps !!!

TXT Island is finished !!! TXT Island is my stop-motion animated short film featuring animated letterforms; it's made using those plastic pegboard signage panels you sometimes see in bars and cafes etc. The film is currently featured on the news page over at www.tandemfilms.com. There are a few stills and an extract of the film viewable there.
This blog will be updated with further news about the release as it happens...

Nizo 4080 in Camera Hospital

This week on camera hospital, take a look at this fella... That's right, it's another German Braun Nizo, a younger one this time and would ya look at that gorgeous black coat... But he came in to the hospital with a dodgy trigger and couldn't run anymore... We had to operate...


Well, it was touch and go for a while, and to be frank there were bits all over the place, but it's good news. He's back together again and whirring like a contented puppy... bet he can't wait to go out and play...

Sensors And Sensitivity

Working late in the lab again! I'm trying to detect the film sprocket holes for my DIY cine film scanning project and in the process finding out quite a lot about photo-transistors. The plan is to mount one of these into my film transport mechanism to give feedback to the stepper motor. With some great support from Archie over at PC-control.co.uk I've made a little circuit to test the sensors and measure the high and low voltages they give.



By placing a bit of card or some white super8 film leader next to the sensors I had the circuit tuned quite well (using the salvaged Epson printer proximity sensor) to the point where I thought this to be a viable route... However, tests with actual film strips gave a very curious result... Though seemingly black to the naked eye, movie film seems to have little or no opacity when seen by the phototransistor.
Realising that the Epson photo diode/phototransistor device uses infrared light, I thought I'd take a look an infrared look at some movie film with my miniDV camera in nightshot mode...



Bingo! The cine film is pretty much transparent under IR lighting. There's no way an IR photosensor will detect the sprocket holes when the film base itself is rendered almost completely transparent. I'll be looking at sensors in the visible light range next...
(Also of interest here, notice how the film looks so scratched under IR lighting; some film scanners use just such an IR pass to enable infrared cleaning of scanned images.)

DIY Film Scanner : One Small Step

This grey and blue thing might not look like much, but it's my very first Windows application! The StepForward and StepBackward buttons tell my StepperBee card to move the stepper motor forwards and backwards. A strip of Super8 film sitting in my DIY film transport moves accordingly... Up until now, I've always been sending instructions to the StepperBee using the controller application that came with the board, so this represents a fairly dramatic development. For a long time I've wanted to make things and control them from the PC, so this is a real first.

To produce this exciting code, I downloaded Microsoft VisualBasic 2008 Express Edition, then pasted in the code found at the StepperBee website.



Unfortunately the middle 'Snapshot' button doesn't do anything yet. Triggering the Sumix camera and saving the images was something I hoped to do within the Sumix camera application, but this doesn't seem to be possible. I think the camera will have to be triggered by my application somehow, and I suspect that a whole other can of worms lies therein.

Next up also I need to find out more about the optical proximity sensor I've recovered from an old Epson printer... can this be hooked up to one of the StepperBee's input channels and if so, how accurately might it pick up on the tiny film sprocket holes? Stay tuned...