Hitching a ride with the Travelling Picture Show throughout the summer, animator Claire Evans has been making a ‘chain-film’ with young people all over the Midlands. Here’s a silent extract from the Hereford bit; the full film complete with spooky soundtrack will be showing at our gala finale on Sunday.

magic box hereford from themagicbox on Vimeo.

Unfortunately Bibio won’t be able to play at the gig in London tonight, due to illness. Apologies for any disappointment; we’ll definitely try and do a return trip with him in the future.

At the Roxy on Monday we are sharing film-picking duties with Electric Sheep magazine. Here is one of their choices, a gorgeous 360° animation directed by Martina Stiftinger.

Onde Sonore from design.hagenberg on Vimeo.

Here’s another film showing at the Roxy on the 19th. An Aussie production created entirely in Photoshop, and featuring the inimitable voice stylings of Mr Nick Cave.

The Cat Piano from PRA on Vimeo.

Another good tipoff from Chris Plant.

Ginger beards and chunky pixels are temporarily back in vogue, with BBC4 drama Micro Men taking a satirical look at the early-80s computer wars between Sinclair and Acorn. Longtime 7inch viewers will know that ZX Spectrum Orchestra have been inhabiting this hand-coded world for many years, showing steely levels of commitment which go way beyond retro kitsch to create electro tunes and perfectly-formed animations on the most rudimentary processors. We took them to Norwich in a minibus a couple of years ago and it was a joy to see them getting mobbed by Sinclair fans at the end of the show. At our forthcoming event in London you can enjoy a brief 20Kb-sized retrospective of some of their finest film moments, including the premiere of new piece Alpha Omega.

In his background notes animator Mike Johnston describes the film’s origins in the theories of mathematician Gregory Chaitin and a recurring dream about a ghost-ferry (which reminds me of the railway in Spirited Away). He also confesses that he has finally made the leap from working on an actual Spectrum to an emulator on his laptop.

A mountain of knitted mice, created by Joyce Hall. We’ve been steadily handing these out as we trundle around on the Travelling Picture Show, and will be distributing the last few this month. Beyond the jump is a list of the remaining tour dates, and a copy of this month’s copious listings mailout. If you want to receive these things on a regular basis fill out the box on the left.
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Another short from the Travelling Picture Show programme, made as a graduation film at CalArts by Nicole Mitchell. This one is part of Fantastic Planet, and always goes down well.

Our favourite short film review so far (not of the above) was: ‘Boring and weird and funny and sad’. All in ten minutes!

The Travelling Picture Show kicks off in Lichfield today. (I’m not there but apparently it’s going very well.) One of the most consistently popular films in the programme is a fifty year-old French short with hardly any dialogue about a boy and his balloon, and even if you haven’t seen it there’s a good chance you’ve come across something influenced by it.

For a start there’s a Juliette Binoche film and a stage production, and note the multicoloured balloon clusters currently floating about in Pixar’s Up and Sofia Coppola’s Dior ad. These films celebrate the feelgood side of The Red Balloon – if you want the brutal underbelly check out the Don Hertzfeldt cartoon Billy’s Balloon. Decidedly not for kids.

Here’s another short film from the Travelling Picture Show programme, for anyone with noisy neighbours. This went down particularly well in the Shift_Time tent this weekend, and my two year-old son has become hopelessly addicted to the little mole.
[Wikipedia entry.]

Every festival has a few choice acts/films that don’t come off; the trick is to be thick-skinned and keep your options open. One of those that got away when planning this year’s Flatpack was British Sea Power, who we hoped to have up with their rescore of Robert Flaherty’s windswept documentary Man of Aran. The timing wasn’t quite right, but happily it’s all come together a few months later and BSP will be performing with the film at midnight on 21 August as part of a packed film-tent programme at the Green Man festival. Taking a lead from Flaherty’s film we’ll be showing an assortment of ‘edge-of-the-world’ movies including lunar shorts and cult documentary The Moon and The Sledgehammer (trailer below). More info on the whole thing here.