Digital Art Zone

UPDATE - 23 Jun 2012 - At the PHILAFILM awards ceremony, “The House of Seville” won the “Leigh Whipper Gold Award, Animation Category”.

“The House of Seville” is our 18 min animated movie made with Carrara and aimed at film festivals.  We have our first selection at PHILAFILM - The Philadelphia International Film Festival.  “..Seville” screens 1:25pm, Sat, 23 Jun 2012 as part of a festival event in the African American Museum, 701 Arch St, Philadelphia PA 19107.  Film festival rules mean we can only show you some excerpts for now.  PHILAFILM have requested a trailer so I have edited this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxCEPolnwSQ

Also on Youtube are samples of our use of Carnegie Mellon University MOCAP:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORTUY4rBRN8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yxu54YtjyKA

Story - a loose retelling of “Carmen” where the ghost of Carmen invades present-day suburbia.
Tech Note - mostly assembled and animated by a group of 4 of us.  We kept work diaries so we know that we clocked about 1000 person-hours during 3 and a half years to make about 1000 sec of movie. 

We are lecturers, students, ex-students and friends of the Manukau Institute of Technology in New Zealand where we do 3D multimedia learning, teaching and experimentation with Carrara.  Hello from academia!

PHILAFILM Schedule:
http://www.philafilm.org/schedule.html

Looking good, I hope to see the whole movie when the contest allows it.

“Four of us doing the animation over 2008-2011 have recorded 1000 person hours for about 1000 seconds of movie.”  What a concept!  I’ve been doing the 48 Hour Film contests, maybe 100 person hours for ... lessee, carry the one ...  240 seconds of movie.  The only advantage is that if somebody doesn’t like it, we can say, “Well, we only had two days.”

Congrats… looked at the trailer… really like the lightning and fire animation… at the police strobe lights.

24 Aug 2012 - Still doing the film festival run but we did our last entries in July for Festivals running up to December.  Some of these festivals have a no-public-internet rule.  If we score another selection then we plan to go to Youtube by mid-December.  If no more selections then maybe earlier. 

Film Festivals are getting very competitive.  In trying since 2004 we have had only 2 selections as well as some minor 48-Hours
awards. Some Festivals are reporting they are getting over 6000 entries for maybe 100 screenings.  On the plus side the “powers
that be” for emerging film-makers understand this and our 2 “hits” have been good for us. So we are hanging out for a few more
months to try to score another.

Currently submitted to:

Philip K Dick Film Festival, New York, USA
Interesting in that they are running a parallel online competition for trailers which means for the first time we can see what
the other movies are like.  In my obviously biassed opinion we stack up well.  They state they have public voting going for these
- I am guessing it works by clicking on individual trailer links from this page then “liking” them.
http://www.thephilipkdickfilmfestival.com/contest.html

also (24 Aug 2012)

Re-Animania Animation Festival, Yerevan, Armenia

Literati Film Festival, New York, USA

Seattle Shorts Film Festival, USA

Show Me Shorts Festival, New Zealand.

Signes de Nuit Festival, Paris, France

Imaginaria Film Festival, Italy

Kunstfilmtag Festival, Germany

ExGround Film Festival, Germany

Message to Man Film Festival, St Petersburg, Russia

Emmentaler Filmtage, Switzerland

International Short Film Festival Winterthur, Switzerland

Nice job.  Good luck on all those festivals.  I bet the entering the festivals is almost as much work as doing the animation.

.. I bet the entering the festivals is almost as much work as doing the animation

My major film-making activity for the last month but still only a small percentage of the animation time.  Packaging, formatting, preparing the support documents like our “bios” and photos.  . eg Includes visiting the neighbours to check that DVDs work in a variety of players.  Made a little easier in that there are central admin websites (“Withoutabox”, “Reelport”, “Movibeta”) where you can upload and fill in forms once then recycle the package into a number of festivals. Uploading of secure movie previews is starting to happen.

Update - just received the usual sorry-can’t-play-your movie email from Emmentaler, Switzerland.  They give stats of 1900 entries chasing 80 places.