I haven’t posted since the 6th January because of a mixture of being busy and taking it easy. Right now I’m working on the third D&D short which is due late this month so it should be live early next. In between scenes I’ve been looking at the sky with my binoculars, playing World of Warcraft on weekends and in the evenings and sleeping well.

I entered Waterlollies into Annecy International Animation Film Festival, sending my DVD by express international courier on Feb 11th so that it would arrive by the deadline Feb 15th. It cost $50 to send but I figured it would be worth it, being such an important film festival for animation.

February 20-fucking-9th it arrived at their offices (grr!) but they graciously allowed my film to be judged because it was postmarked Feb 11th. Phew! Not that it did me any good. I hadn’t heard anything for a while so I went to the Annecy website and saw that Waterlollies hadn’t made the cut.

I was, I guess you could say, devastated. I usually make my films in NTSC aspect ratio and frame rate, but I made Waterlollies in PAL, especially for Annecy (France). The Annecy festival was a golden rung in the ladder towards getting recognition and finance to make the Brackenwood feature film.

Co-writing

I was feeling really low for a couple days until I spoke with my friend Ryan, who is co-writing the Brackenwood feature film with me. We had a 2-hour story meeting over Skype and it lit some rockets under me. I’m really excited about the project. There’s a lot of work to be done but I’ve basically been giving Ryan the bare bones of the story and he’s tearing it apart, telling me where and how it sucks and what should be added, moved or deleted to make it work.

Ryan lives and works in Los Angeles and is currently head of story on a couple of big-name upcoming features. I’m 100% confident that with his help in writing this movie, Brackenwood will be a success. Several times, people have expressed concern that I’m teaming up with someone on the other side of the world, but Ryan is one of my three closest friends and we’ve worked together for almost 15 years. So ssshh now :)

Ween

When we went to see Ween play their sold out show in Sydney, I wish I had taken the camera, especially when I got backstage and met the band. It was an amazing show and in true Ween style, the theatre was a complete mess of smashed plastic cups and crushed beer cans by the end. A security guy told me that he had never seen the theatre in such a state and it the big topic of conversation among the theatre staff was that the bar sold over 6000 beers to the crowd of 2500. Brilliant.

The show itself was the best thing I’ve ever seen, and probably the loudest thing I’ve ever heard (apart from the time my hearing was temporarily damaged from using a 12g shotgun every morning for a couple of months). Meeting Aaron, Mickey, Claude, Dave and Glenn afterwards was just awesome and they were really cool. Jeanette and I got to chat privately with each of them, except for Dave the bass player - who was catching up with old friends at the time. Aaron even mentioned that my Transdermal video had become an integral part of his kids’ lives growing up (can’t believe it’s been 5 years since that video).

Mickey was just brilliant.. he loves hanging out and chatting with fans and his tour blog has been calling for fans to come fishing with him. I just love the way Ween treat their fans.. like old pals instead of the frothy freaks we are!

Anyway, the backstage meeting was the perfect end to a perfect night. As much as I wish I had photos, I can’t think of anything worse than meeting your heroes and just snapping a camera in their faces the whole time. Memory’s good enough for me (touch wood) :D

Don’t touch that remote

Next post, I think I’m going to talk about Toon Boom Digital Pro (and perhaps Storyboard Pro if I get find a little more time to actually use it!). Until then!

gnighty, Phillips

ShareThis

If you’ve seen the main page of Bitey Castle, you’re probably aware that my 30 shorts in 30 days project is a finalist in the upcoming Flash Forward conference to be held in Boston next month.

I’m up against Bernard Derriman’s ‘Congo Windfall‘. In the past, Bernard and I have gone head-to-head in several festivals so for Flash Forward, we’ve finished our trailers. Here they are. A big THANKS to Ween, who have kindly granted permission to use this song for the festival trailer:

Voting for People’s Choice is open now and will close on August 30 so please, drop me a vote (no, not Bernard.. MEEE!).

If you voted for me, thanks! If not.. grrrr!

Waterlollies graph
Hey cmon, it’s only been 3 days since the last graph. OK then, here’s a quick one:

Waterlollies overall:

(i = done)
(.. = not)

ShareThis

You can see the video at the end of this article. Fans of my stuff probably know the following story, but I thought I’d post it here and explain how it all came about.

In 2003 I created a music video for Ween. The song was ‘Transdermal Celebration’ from the album Quebec.

I had bought the album and listened through a few times.. I’d been a Ween fan proper for a few years by that stage, but listening to the new songs prompted me to check out their website for the first time.

There I saw a notice to fans saying “Transdermal video, looking for ideas”. The third track on the CD “Transdermal Celebration” was one of the songs that I really liked, so I emailed Ween’s manager right away with some sketches and a short synopsis.

He replied saying that unfortunately Ween had decided to go with a live video for the song, because they were about to go on a tour. I was gutted.. so after some thought I emailed back, saying that I would do the video free of charge, for the experience of it.

They gave me their blessing to go ahead, I got an email from Aaron Freeman (Gene Ween) with some explanation of the lyrics. Sadly the email was later lost in a hard-drive crash, but I’ll always remember his opening line:

“Hi Adam it’s Aaron, it’s 3am I’m fucked up in Jersey City..“

So I got to work right away. At the time (October 2003) I was still working full-time for Disney.. I asked the studio manager for a month off so that I could do this music video. We were smack in the middle of crunchtime on “Return to Neverland”, so I knew I’d be very lucky to get as much as two days off. To be allowed any time off during crunchtime was unheard of, so unfortunately I had to threaten resignation (actually that’s something I’d never told anyone until now).

After a bit of negotiating I managed to get two weeks. Since landing my job at Disney, I saw this as the biggest opportunity life had thrown at me, so it was something I had to do.

I worked for around 12 - 14 hours each day on the clip and at the end of the two weeks I delivered it to Ween. I got another email from Aaron telling me how much he loved it, and how it captured the song perfectly. He told me it’d be the official video and that they wanted to pay me for it.

I rate that two weeks (and the month that followed) as the best working experience of my life to date. The video became a special feature on Ween’s ‘Live in Chicago’ DVD.

Until today I’ve been aware of only one fairly low-quality version of the video on the net. But then while surfing YouTube, it suddenly occurred to me to do a search. I found several but I think the following is the best quality I’ve seen yet.

Enjoy Ween’s ‘Transdermal Celebration’..

These days I look at it and wish I’d had more time to fine-tune, but there’s not much about the actual working experience that I’d change. Thanks Ween :)

ShareThis