http://www.andygaylejazz.co.uk/

This year we decided to enter the second in the now annual Birmingham creative community’s 48 hour film challenge, Filmdash.

The idea of making a stop motion animation is one we had last year, but beyond doing a test shot of two seconds with Tailycat – our lead in The Quest – we hadn’t got around to taking it any further. So when Filmdash 2010 was launched, with the general theme of ‘happiness’, we thought what better than to revive our animation idea with the two happy Jellycat toys!

As per the Filmdash rules no scripting, shooting, or planning was done in advance of the start of the challenge at 7pm on Friday – the only thing we did beforehand was to make the decision to do the animation using the toys. At the 7pm start time we got our criteria, containing a mandatory line of dialogue (“you’ll feel it in your blood and guts”) and a mandatory prop (a scarf).

Our process over the weekend was:

Friday evening

Initial ideas for the plot, deciding which characters would be used and how, and drawing up of the basic storyboard.

Saturday all day

Principle photography, rendering all the still photographs for each shot into a motion .avi file, first (very) rough cut of all the shots into one continuous video.

Sunday morning

Starting to do the special effects in photoshop (an idea which was immediately abandoned!), starting to do moving subtitles for the dialogue (another idea which was immediately abandoned), replaced by doing silent-movie style caption slates.

Sunday afternoon

Incorporation of background music soundtrack into the film, a series of rough cuts (three in total) in order to get the timing for the caption slates right, followed by exporting the final cut and uploading to YouTube.

Not only was this our first film with a story (I’ve made a number of YouTube films which are more documentary), it was also our first animated film – and after the fact (well during the fact on doing the postproduction work on Sunday morning) we can see all the errors we made – some of the focussing is a bit off, had we known we were going to use caption slates we should have left each shot before each slate linger just a touch longer, the special effects (which were going to be the kiln getting hotter, and the dalek firing its gun) were dropped, the penultimate scene (shot at the end of the day using fading natural light) with The Oracle really could do with having been re-shot entirely, my tripod, whilst smooth enough for normal use isn’t really smooth enough for panning and tracking the micro-movements needed for animation, and the scenes we shot right at the end of the day really did start to have bigger movements between each frame (thus becoming jerkier) as we started to get tired and wanting to ensure got it completed and uploaded by the 7pm Sunday deadline. And due to a whole day of crouching for extended periods of time in awkward positions to take each frame, I’ve twisted my back a bit!

But these are all things we would have done just the same had we spent two months making the film rather than two days – and that would have been well annoying! We were also a bit compromised by having a bit of a rubbish computer – about five years old and not the fastest processor available even at the time, using the free software which came with my hand-held video camera  (Adobe Premier still seeming to be a bit temperamental on this computer), the best thing about which can be said is ‘well it sort of works’.

But in the process we’ve learned an awful lot in a very short time about how to make an animation, meaning for Tailycat’s next adventure things should hopefully be a bit smoother. Many thanks to Chris Unitt and Ian Ravenscroft for their work in organising it, and also thanks to all the other Filmdash entrants for helping make it such a fun challenge to participate in!

The complete set of Filmdash entries are now on YouTube.

http://www.myspace.com/davidlloydhenry

I was recently walking through the Pallasades shopping centre when i noticed this poster, advertising the Pallasades Gift Card:

The perfect present every time, indeed; whose face couldn’t possibly fail to light up at receiving such a kind & thoughtful gift, when the gift of choice includes wares from these fine emporiums:

One is – quite literally – spoilt for choice.

Dear Dean Davies (Customer Services, British Waterways West Midlands),

I’m writing to complain to you in the strongest possible terms about the lack of gritting along the towpath of the Farmer’s Bridge lock flight, Birmingham City Centre.

This morning, between the top lock and lock number seven (where I disembark) walking along it to work I slipped and fell over not once but four times; I was reduced to descending the lock ramps by squatting & sliding myself down with my hands behind me for balance. You can imagine I’m sure the dangers inherent in slipping on the ice next to a lock, especially if one fell into the frozen lock itself.

I appreciate that British Waterways can control neither the weather nor the temperature, and that there’s little you can do to ensure passage for boats when the canal itself freezes over. However, you can control the pedestrian environment, with the application of salt / grit to ensure key strategic pedestrian routes such as this are safe for the people who use them regularly; the nature of that section of towpath route is such that once one has started going that way you are pretty much committed, as leaving the towpath to take a different route isn’t so simple. Once I reached the normal pavement – which the council is responsible for – my passage was completely fine, so if the council manages to grit the pavement, how can British Waterways not manage to grit the city centre towpath ?

Fortunately neither myself nor my laptop and phone were damaged in my four falls due to British Waterways’ negligence in failing to make the towpath safe, however be assured that had anything been damaged, I would be holding you liable. In this age of no-win-no-fee personal accident law firms advertising on television, I urge you to arrange for the key strategic pedestrian routes in Birmingham to be gritted and made safe as soon as possible, before another member of the public has a more serious accident, and my British Waterways licence money has to be used to pay out on a hefty compensation claim rather than its proper use of paying for the maintenance of the network.

in Friendship,

In the best traditions of lazy journalism where the answer to any headline posed as a question is almost certainly ‘no’, the answer to this question – the title of the Big Debate Birmingham (hosted jointly by the Birmingham Post and Birmingham City University) – is almost certainly ‘no’. Fortunately in the course of the afternoon we didn’t even bother trying to answer ‘yes’ to the question and instead got on with the business of discussing our creative industries in relation to ourselves rather than trying to save the rest of the country.

Five key points which emerged for me were:

The days of the global media corporation are over

In the olden days, the media industry was dominated by just a handful of ‘boulder’companies – such as News International, CNN, Associated Newspapers, Guardian Media Group, the BBC, etc. When Channel 4 launched, and when Eddie Shah launched the Today newspaper they were big, national events, because there were so few other media brands. Today, all new media companies are ‘pebble’ companies – small start-ups, with small costs & consequently small profits. New digital television stations come and go almost unnoticed; for most people literally unnoticed, as most people rarely update the channel lists on their televisions / set top boxes. There will be no more new boulder companies.

The paradox of the media industries in free-fall

The media industries – especially those of journalism and of music – are in free fall; profits for record companies and newspaper companies are plumetting, as people turn their backs on their offerings. The paradox of this is that now there is more music, and more journalism (and yes, some blogging should be counted as journalism) around now than ever before. It’s not ‘media’ itself that’s in crisis, but the notion of making a lot of money out of creating media. The ability for media customers to get their media for free (whether via piracy or legitimately) is only part of the story – media creators now take their product to market themselves, bypassing the middleman who used to pay for the creation of the media product, and accordingly take a cut of the price of the product. When you can create your album in your home studio and distribute it across the internet yourself, what value is the record company adding?

For creativity to thrive, experimentation needs to embrace the possibility of failure

This is clearly an obvious statement when written down like that; as with most obvious statements it never occurs to anybody until they see it written down. Common sense, innit? In the olden days, the music business was just that – a business. Record companies invested in artists, and took risks. Sure, manufactured pop has been with us since the beginning of popular music, and the number of experimental pieces even getting in to the hit parade, let alone topping it, can be counted on your hands. But in the olden days record companies used a bulk of the profits they made from chart-topping artists to subsidise artists which were unlikely to be vast earners, because they recognised that a healthy diversity of available music was good for society, good for their own portfolios – and consequently good for their own ultimate balance sheets. Similarly in newspapers, press barons of old saw newspaper proprietorship almost as a civic, philanthropic, duty – they didn’t want their newspapers to make losses, but conversely saw the provision of news and information as having primacy over the provision of profit.

In the modern era, with the boulder media companies, media businesses have become media industries – no longer do they invest in new, experimental talent, no longer do they take risks; by focussing solely on maximising profits they have lost the souls of their industries, with the consequence that their customers are deserting them in droves. Pebble companies are in the best position to experiment – such as BooneOakley, having made their whole website as a series of YouTube videos!

Quality, not quantity

Question – was it worth £6bn to make the Eurostar train journey between London and Paris 40 minutes faster, cutting the travel from 2 hours 55 minutes to 2 hours 15 minutes? Would that money have been better spent on improving the user experience, so passengers didn’t notice the drudgery of spending three hours on a train? First class carriages (with the food and drink to match) throughout the whole train? More cheaper fares (or more cheap first class upgrades)? Does three hours even feel like a long time to spend on a train to Paris anyway?

Don’t underestimate the propensity of users to re-purpose things

There are plenty of objects on Twitter, such as Tower Bridge. It’s cute – it posts a message every time it lifts, and then when it drops again. But what started off as a cute gimmick has actually turned into something useful – if you live in London & need to travel around the area, it’s actually a bit of an inconvenience when the bridge lifts, because it holds up your travel – but if you know it’s lifting, you can re-route your journey. Which people in London are increasingly doing.

Other themes

• The current creative revolution will be as economically & socially disruptive as the industrial revolution – and we’re woefully unprepared for it. Our education system does not encourage creative thinking, significantly unchanged as it has been for the last 200 years.
• The physical space will always matter for making connexions – we should be using the digital space to feed the physical space.
• Always design a thing by considering it in its wider context – a chair within a room, a room within a building, a building on a street, etc.

And finally…

…can you remember a world before smartphones?

Unlike parking on yellow lines or overstaying in parking bays – which are now civil offences – parking on the pavement is still actually illegal.

Not only this, it is downright antisocial – the weight puts extra strain on pavement masonry which is designed to carry pedestrians, not cars, invariably a car parked on the pavement forces people with pushchairs or those in wheelchairs to step into the oncoming traffic on the road to get around the car, an in the very worst instances – such as the one pictured here – completely obstruct the paths of blind people, and worst of all here, even obstructing the blind pedestrian from being able to cross a junction in safety because the car is parked on the tactile paving which the blind use to tell they are at a junction.

In busy residential streets, built before the mass ownership of cars and therefore too narrow to safely take legal parking on both sides of the road, this is bad enough, but it’s often accepted by many that a certain level of give and take is needed, so long as the driver still parks with due consideration for pedestrians of all mobility abilities. I’m not going to claim to be innocent of ever having put my wheels on the kerb’s edge in such situations.

However this road is not a street with people living there parking on it – it’s an access road to the blocks of flats either side, to the canal below, and to the footbridge to the other side of the canal. Until recently, parking was not permitted at all, as it was a private access road patrolled by clampers; nobody living there parks there, because everybody who does live there has their own parking spaces. Since the road ceased to be private and the clampers moved out, it has become a magnet for drivers all over the city who are too tight-wadded to pay for their parking like everybody else has to. They have a legal right to park there – for the time being – but no moral right, and certainly they have no right to park in an illegal and antisocial manner obstructing the way for residents and transiting pedestrians alike.

So I wonder if the radio station BRMB approves of its staff parking their cars – with the company logo plastered all over it – in such a way?