My New Animated Films

This past spring, I finished two stop motion shorts.

The first is called True Family Story, and I've blogged about it quite a bit since I started it nearly two years ago. I'm proud of it, especially the pacing and tone, both of which I feel are light and energetic.

I've only had the energy to send to exactly ONE festival, and that's Ottawa. They turned it down.

I will send it to more fests just as soon as I can gather the energy. It's my own fault- all this energy spent to create the film... then no energy left to send it out there. But it's a solid little film (despite what the Ottawa fest thinks), and I think it will have a pretty good shelf life, so I'll get it out there asap.

Here's a couple of pics of the DVD jacket. The jacket was largely designed by the every-talented Carla Veldman, who was a remarkable assistant through the entire production.






The second little film is called Rise of The Living Corpse. Who doesn't like zombies? Who doesn't like zombie stop motion films?

It's just 30 seconds long, and for THIS film I've actually sent it out to quite a few festivals. It's interesting- because it's a genre film (horror, obviously) that sort of "doubles" the number of fests I can reasonably send it to: horror fests, and animation fests.

And- since most horror fests get live action stuff, and "serious" stuff at that, a 30 second animated comedy stands out to programmers. As a result, I'm happy to say that of the 5 festivals I've heard back from so far, it's been accepted at 4 (with Toronto's After Dark Festival being the silly monkeys that turned it down).

The wise festivals so far include: Fantastic Fest in Austin, Oklahoma Horror Film Festival, Fright Night Festival in Kentucky, and the Chicago Horror Film Festival.

Oh, Ottawa also turned THIS film down as well.

Here's a few pics of the DVD (again, with design tackled by Carla Veldman).





I'm being pretty stingy on posting clips from either film. I kind of like the idea of being exclusive for a little while, with the films only going to fests. I'll post clips (and perhaps eventually the whole films) in the future.

I'll also probably look for some formal distribution, not to make money through, but in my experience it just adds to one's professional reputation to have a 3rd party handle the film.

Or- I'll keep them to myself for distribution and promote it myself exclusively so I can use the films to push my own "brand".

Time will tell...