SMASH PROP

This is a smash prop panel made for Ian Cottage's short film KEEL.It was made from part of an old boat and painted to match the original boat hull.A photo of the original boat can be seen at the bottom of the picture for us to use as reference.
In the end this prop wasn't used as the actors smashed up the real boat in the heat of the moment...

CLEVER GUTS

Enjoying listening to Beacons of Ancestorship by TORTOISE.It sounds like a blank eyed robot from the future is trying to recreate tv cop show themes from the seventies without ever having heard them.

ALONE

http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/04/32/alone_life_wastes_andy_hardy.html

Many years ago the late great Dick Arnall showed me this film by Martin Arnold which monkeys around with the timeline of some found footage ( unlikely sequences from Mickey Rooney's early TV show The Andy Hardy Mysteries).

Huge amounts of weighted significance are implied by the slowing down and repetition of the sequence which was homaged in a recent music promo for Peter Bjorn and John.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbWemy7dwUE&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXgjugI-iFU&feature=PlayList&p=5D15BA50632247AA&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=31

RYHMES

"I woke up with something in my eye/I pull out one of your lashes
I like the way you stick in my eye/ I like the way my eye stashes"

Howe Gelb.Temptation of Egg.

I also like the way MF DOOM ryhmes BRIGHTON with A'RIGHT THEN.

IMBIBER

MORPHINE TEA PARTY

HAIRY PRAWN

We call this sleeping position THE HAIRY PRAWN. It looks like he has fallen from a great height.

STRANGE LIGHTS

Here are some strange lights seen at 11pm one night in May 2009.This picture is looking north towards Otterburn from the southern edge of the Tyne Valley.I think they are a strange military test made out of plasma and magic (rather than just some helicopters).Seven lights appeared randomly in this formation and did not move or advance.The lights in the foreground must be the small village of Newton.

SKULL

Every now and then I like to stick a picture of the skeleton from SPORE WINE up. In the film this skeleton stalks across the night sky looking for ghosts and does a freaky dance.

Jim Cain

I started telling the story/without knowing the end
Bill Callahan

Internal Forwarder

A masked man is trapped in the static on a TV set that looks like the surface of the moon in this sound based film.

EXQUISITE CORPSES

The surrealists were great fans of Victorian parlour games such as THE EXQUISTE CORPSE.This can be a game of random drawings making a whole or a story with words.
Sometimes surprising combinations create strange synchonicity.

CLUB THUMB

Here is a pile of art work for ClubThumb (2006) and part of the storyboard when it was up on the wall.The B+W board is colour coded so we knew what we had done,what we were doing and what we had to do.

Six Word Stories

The story goes that Hemmingway wrote a super short six word story for a ten dollar bet.That story is probably the most economic but resonant pieces of flash fiction ever written.

"For sale; Babys shoes,never worn"

This is a great exercise for authors of micro movies and animation in that it excises all fat and resonates way beyond it's confines into off screen space.
There are now countless websites and schemes dedicated such essentialised prose.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/reports/misc/sixwordlife_20080205.shtml

The Dark Lantern

David Soul in a still from The Dark Lantern

In the film, David performs weird actions with a grotesque Lanterna Magica for a mute devil puppet sat alone in antique stalls.At about the same time we bought a copy of one of David's best selling albums from the Seventies 'Playing for an Audience of One' (which includes the excellent 'Silver Lady' with the sublime line "the one shining thing in my life was the sweet love I had with you"). On the back cover is a photo of a young bored or sleeping boy (actually David's son) sitting alone in the stalls of a theatre...

SPORE WINE

The Animation Room

imagination has saved the human race