Animate the world

The Barbican promises to Animate the World this weekend with their final days of the 6th annual children's animation festival. Their last items are:

The Ugly Duckling and Me!, Badgered, Brave Story, Lotte From Gadgetville and Trumptonshire Tales

They are also celebrating the 40th Birthday of Gordon Murray's Trumpton series with a Trumptonshire Tales special with special guests Brian Cant (Narrator and Voice artist), Bob Bura (Chief Animator), and Phill Jupitus (Radio Documentary and Trumpton Fan )

Film Distribution

The promotors of Shrek III have demonstrated just how to make Americans watch your film with major sales this weekend, knocking Spiderman 3 off the top of the charts.

Luc Besson is not so happy though, he has criticised the film distributors for the poor response from US audiences to the Invisibles film. Normally about half a film's takings comes from the US and the other from the rest of the World. The Invisibles made only $15m in the US but made over $90m which does give cause for concern over how it was released. The distributor Weinstein Company are not particularly well known for promotions to a younger audience, Besson speculates other reasons why the film did not float well:
"Why the critics didn’t like Arthur was because they changed so much of the film and tried to pretend the film was American. The critics aren’t stupid. They watched the film, they vaguely smell American but they can feel the film is forced for an American audience. The film is European. It’s made by a Frenchman."

Arthur and the Invisibles is now available on DVD.

Other useful links on film distribution:
www.launchingfilms.tv
Big Film Shorts

Spitting Image and Bee Movie

In the film news today, it seems that the satirical series Spitting Image will be returning to ITV next spring with new characters and a switch from rubber puppets/animatronics to CGI but all the political satire of that we loved back in the 1980s.

See the British Sitcom Guide for more details.

Jerry Seinfeld has been in Cannes this week promoting the Bee Movie. Although the film will be CGI, the trailer is done with comic actors such as Seinfeld and Chris Rock dressed in insect costumes with Eddie Izzard as director. The film will be voiced by these three along side Renée Zellweger as a florist with John Goodman and Matthew Broderick as other characters.

Stikfas

Whilst searching for information on digital camera suitable for stop motion filming, I stumbled across Stop Motion Pro's website. Stop Motion Pro (SMP) has a very clever bit of software but that's not what I'm going to mention today.

SMP are selling Stikfas figures with their software. Stikfas are an excellent idea from SMP as they are ideal for stop motion beginners. The basic figures click together and can be posed in various ways. The range of figures available as you can see above is quite extensive, however the figures are designed to be customised with paints or stickers so you can have something quite unique.

Stikfas are available in the UK from http://www.theintoy.co.uk

Depth of Field / Zoom and Dolly

Following on from a previous entry about still vs video and how the aperture can control the depth of field in Stop Motion. I got thinking more about adding a depth of field effects to the close up shots of the flea circus to help focus the attention on the acts and emphasis that it's a close up shot that's being magnified. You can see below how the settings affect the scenes. I'm not convinced that it's a significant difference and it does take a bit of extra effort to setup so I'm not sure that I'll apply it to the cameras in the flea film.


This lead on to some experiments with zoom lenses. The software Carrara that I use provides three default lens sizes for cameras, wide angle 25mm, normal 50mm, telephoto at 200mm. It also has a zoom option with a variable length. Changing the focal length of the camera allows you to "zoom" in on a object just like a conventional still or video camera.
If you zoom in whilst dollying out you get the classic effect sometimes used in horror films, the video below shows an example of this, as it zooms from 25mm to 500mm the scene flattens and the depth of the image is shortened till at 500mm its almost isometric providing a quite spooky effect.


References
An article on Depth of Field from Mason Resnick
All about CGI cameras fromthe Advanced Computing Centre in Ohio