jim le fevre

You can see my new showreel here.

A good review of Stephen Skrynka’s show at the National Theatre of Scotland in today’s Guardian of which I helped him create some zoetropes for.

I went up to see it last Friday and it’s absolutely great.

A really charming, warm and thoughtful view of a way of life that is, at least in the modern age, under threat. Stephen has been working with the Fox Family Troupe for a few years putting this together and has been training to actually ride the wall himself.

The evening is a journey through Stephen’s desire to be part of this but also to allow the audience in to glimpse the way of life of the family itself and combines the zoetropes as a personal response to this as well as some beautiful projections/documentary by Digital Artist Kim Beveridge and a questions and answers session with Ken, Lynda, Alex, Luke and Kerry, the Fox Family. as well as some other things buried around and through the evening itself.

If you’re around Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh this month then I would heartily recommend it as an experience you’ll most likely not see again.

When the show has had its run I will see if I can put up some of the work in progress on my Zoetrope page.

ARCHIVE of BRITISH ANIMATION COLLECTIONS

I went to an extremely interesting talk at BAFTA Piccadily on Wednesday about the setting up of the Archive of British Animation Collections which I will hopefully update upon as it progresses but essentially it is at a very early and semi-theoretical stage in its life, so much so it may even end up not being called that but it’s a start for now.

It is organised by a number of people and groups of people including Paul Wells, academic and animation historian, Paul Goodman, from the National Media Museum, BAFTA and the BFI, the Animation Research Centre at the University of Creative Arts in Farnham and many more and it is hoping to address the fact that there is an awful lot of un-catalogued and disparate resources (from films to production artefacts through to documentation stratching back to the start of the last century!) that are close to being lost but also to act as an umbrella to bring the British Animation Community together by reminding people of the history and celelbration of what has been acheived in the last one hundred or so years.

It will hopefully also be a bridge to the existing archiving systems from the BFI through to regional initiatives and consequentally hopefully become the most incredible resource for future generations.

It may not be apparent but I am extremely excited and inspired by the idea so expect some kind of updates!

WHEN THE WIND BLOWS

Following on from that I hot-footed it up to Glasgow to see the opening night of Stephen Skrynka and Vicky Featherstone’s wonderful “Wall of Death – A Way of Life” which will have its own post in a few days.

On the train up I managed to re-watch Raymond Brigg’s/Jimmy Murakami’s When the Wind Blows and it struck me at how pertinent the ABAC is and what it could possibly do.

The film, based on Raymond Brigg’s wonderful book, is both a desperately harrowing yet also tenderly humerous story of Jim and Hilda Bloggs, a simple and charming middle aged couple, and the onset of a nuclear war. It was made in 1986 and harks back to the previous decade’s brinkmanship of a Nuclear Threat but through the eyes of two very naive people whose only experience of war was that of World War II.

Regardless of what an exceptional story it is and of the voice acting of the late great Sir John Mills and Dame Peggy Ashcroft, the film itself it such a technical and aesthetic joy that I would urge you to re-visit it.

Not only is the drawn animation of such a down-played, tender and well observed quality but the approach to physically building their charming little cottage as a proper 3-dimensional set and to hang the drawn 2-dimensional animation onto this is just beautiful and I do feel quite worthy of its own investigation.

One of my fellow directors at Nexus, Celyn Brazier, got me onto the very early 1930’s films of Popeye by the Fleischer Brothers (of which there is a rather beautiful set of boxed sets here) and specifically the physical sets in Popeye Meets Ali Baba and The Forty Theives (of which there is a crappy version here and but I heartily recommend getting the better quality dvd) which you can see a great example of around 10:50 in where Popeye rides out of the town on a camel.

In When the Wind Blows however the sets are present throughout rather in key shots but they are  crafted so tenderly, and framed so beautifully and subtly behind the animation, that it’s easy to forget or even not to realise the technique is in  play. It is only when there are camera moves that they burst into a deeper level of sophistication and it is interesting to compare them to the early line-tests which you can see in the dvd extras where the backgrounds were traditionally illustrated and how different and how much more depth (both physically and emotionally) the sets bring.

Below are come wonderful shots taken from an early sequence of Jim and Hilda after Jim returns from the local library. As still images these are rather quaint and naive however set into the film they are extremely powerful.

I’ve just read the news that the Veteran Commentator, Bill McLaren, has passed away at the age of 86.

In 2000 Ed Talfan Davies and I made the series of adverts for BBC Wales for the (then) 6 nations Rugby tournament, written and created by Phillip Moss and Dylan Griffth of the BBC Wales Promos department called ‘Henry’s Heroes’.

This was a campaign written and produced between each successive game of the tournament and mostly voiced by the Wales fitness coach at the time Steve Black.

The BBC Promos department at the time, headed up by Mr Moss, created some outstanding pieces of work and this was no exception. One of the strings to Phil’s bow was in getting personalities to add their voices and for the fourth episode Phil cornered Bill and Jonathan Davies to supply a couple of lines as well as Grandstand presenter Steve Rider. In other episodes Phil managed to get Kelly Jones from the Stereophonics and Huw Edwards, BBC News presenter.

To my mind this is my favourite episode.

Bill McLaren 1923 – 2010

You can see the rest of the campaign here. Copyright remains with Phil Moss at BBC Wales

A few people have chastised me for not continually posting pictures and films of Iris up on this site.

I apologise, this will shortly be rectified.

There will also no doubt be more installments of Mme Poirot as well as a growing cast of other detectives of which Master Cameron Kyei looks likely to be the first if I can get Kofi and Gill to sign the release forms.

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Saturday 16th Jan 2010

Early morning piglet.

Simon’s latest opus is the Coalition of the Willing, a multi-directorial film with 14 different directors from around the world and is so jam packed with exciting things I suggest you simply follow all the progress on his blog.

One of the more amazing things to come out of it has been his Multi-Plane camera he built with Matt (I think it’s Matt) down at Clapham Road Studios) Check it out!!

The Jay is Games 6th Casual Games Competition is almost over but the finest submission so far (on the theme ‘Explore’) has to be David Shute’s ‘Small Worlds‘

I realise the image may not inspire the kind of praise that I’m laying on here but fire it up and just have a go. As I say, the competition theme is ‘Explore’ and not-withstanding the curious feeling of vertigo and comfort I found by playing this, I think he goes above and beyond this and gives you a remarkeable journey.

Well done David and good luck with the competition!

I cannot recommend this enough but the authors of Samorost (and other beautiful games such as Questionaut), Amanita Design, have finally released their most beautiful of pieces, the long awaited Machinarium.

Essentially it is a point-and-click adventure game, and this is how you progress through the story however the rewards that go beyond the ‘game’ side of things are the music and the artwork and the beautifully tender realisation they have put into it.

Case in point is that for every stunning page of the adventure if you click up in the top right hand corner of the screen there is a locked book. The lock itself is a small and simple mini-game which  just takes simple co-ordination and a minute or so but at the end unlocks and then shows you a wonderfully illustrated and detailed explanation of the puzzle on the screen, those illustrations on their own are a gift enough (Jakub Dvorský, one of the creators of the game told me that there are three different illustrators who contributed to the Walkthrough book so the style is also varied).

Amanita Design have done something so subtle that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a game before which is actually to create a storybook within which you live. Because the puzzles through the game, though being fun and interesting, with the walkthrough book mentioned above are a gentle framework and never a threat, however it is the story, sound and artwork are the beef to the piece.

I’ve asked Mr Dvorský whether they would issue a printed book of all the artwork and he said he’d love to so if any of my publishing friends are out there you should seriously strike now!!!

The game itself is $20 and as I said I cannot recommend it enough and if you want to indulge in a taster play Samorost and Samorost 2 as well as the Machinarium demo if that’s not enough to convince you.

Well done Amanita!!