This morning I dragged myself away from several deadlines to go and hear Osbert Parker talk about his animation at the Flip Festival, and I’m so glad I did. The cliche about animators is that they’re monosyllabic and prefer to express themselves by moving bits of paper around. Parker does a lot of that but he can also talk with real pzazz and insight about the process behind his work. He started out in graphic design, and showed a stack of images from his sketchbooks which made it clear that he still thinks like a designer in some ways and researches the hell out of everything he does. Reversing the usual progression he went straight from college to an MTV ident and lots of juicy ad commissions (many of which can be seen here), and it was over ten years until he started working on personal projects like Film Noir and Yours Truly. Through these films he established a signature style which involves turning bits of live-action footage into cut-out animation – spending insane amounts of time on stuff like cutting out little Humphrey Bogarts with a scalpel, placing them in a toy car and spritzing with water. Virgil Widrich’s Fast Film uses a similar origami approach but although the effect is amazing it’s more of a set-piece technique-fest for me, while Yours Truly skewers the audience with story-telling. Here’s hoping he gets his creepy mixed-media kids feature off the ground!
PS: Quiet Earth review.

Flip Animation Festival is on in Wolverhampton this week, and includes one of the first UK screenings of Nina Paley’s debut feature Sita Sings the Blues. Paley is a comic strip artist who moved into filmmaking ten years ago, and spent the last five animating Sita on her home computer. Inspired by the Ramayana, the film concerns the parallel man-troubles of Sita (in India’s mythical past) and Nina (in contemporary America), with musical backup from 20s songstress Annette Hanshaw. The director’s blog details some of the copyright hassles Hanshaw’s music has encountered as well as the film’s plaudit-strewn festival journey, and this Variety review will help to whet your appetite. (It’s also screening tomorrow in Leeds.)

PS :: There’s a rundown of other things going on this month at our listings archive. If you want this info sent to you directly, sign up to our email list on the left <<.

This film about a little robot discovering the joys of Digbeth was winner of the recent Film Dash challenge…

Dunkirk from Pete Ashton on Vimeo.

A last-minute reminder that there is a 48-hour film challenge going on in Birmingham this weekend, if you happen to have three days spare. At 6pm tomorrow you get your brief, and by 6pm on Sunday you need to have planned, shot and edited your film. More details on the Film Dash blog.

Yet another thing we forgot to mention in our listings; this is an exhibition which runs until 9 November at the University of Birmingham. It’s part of a wider project where artists and writers from across Europe share their experience of the transition from dictatorship to democracy. There is also a series of Wednesday night screenings at the Rainbow pub in Digbeth to complement the show, starting tomorrow (Weds 15 Oct) at 7pm with The Lives of Others.

A belated heads-up; tomorrow (Sat 30th August) sees the second edition of Outer Sight exploding from every orifice of The Edge in Digbeth. Obscure fillums in a slightly obscure place, and well worth seeking out. This sophomore outing (sorry, have been reading Variety reviews) features plenty of warped family entertainment, lethal cocktails, 3D viewing booths and guest musical turns from Mr Simon and Mrs 7inch – who will turn into a proper DJ soon if we’re not careful. The fun starts at 9pm, let google be your guide…

Still recovering from our marathon drive home, with stop-off in Morecambe for Lancastrian tapas (?). Beyond the jump is a brief writeup of our Ballerina Ballroom experience…

(more…)

You find us huddled on the foggy ramparts of Berwick-on-Tweed, halfway to the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams; a new film festival in Nairn run by Tilda Swinton and Mark Cousins. We could have driven it in a day from Birmingham, but fancied a stop-off at Holy Island to see the spot where Donald Pleasance and Francoise Dorleac bickered in Cul-de-Sac. Good prep for Polanski’s next film – The Fearless Vampire Killers – which screens on Thursday at the Ballroom, amongst a programme of fillums clearly chosen on the basis of ’sod it, we like it’. What with cake, live scores, reclaimed shabby venues and Norman McLaren, the BBCD looks to be right up 7inch’s street. If we can get online at our caravan park, we might try and send you another postcard.

(…In true postcard style, this is being posted four days later from Inverness library.)

A couple of images from last week’s amazing Nosferatu rescore (with many thanks to Penny McConnell who took them and then had to wade through 4,000 Supersonic photos to find them). There is a handful of silent movies that are well-travelled and often get the live score treatment, and Murnau’s horrorshow is one of them. And yet – as Catherine Bray put it in her nice writeup – it seemed like a whole new film on Sunday. Testament to the skills of (clockwise from top left) Lucy Baines, Laurence Hunt, Hannah Baines, Grandmaster Gareth and Matthew Eaton (not pictured). They’ll be presenting the film again at Warwick Arts Centre in the autumn.