jim le fevre

Hoot has finally got its Vimeo page up and running so with great pleasure I give you Morris Johnson, London Bear

I’ve just had an email from Ernest Zacharevic who has just made an awesome zoetrope contraption here…

Staying Alive from Ernest Zacharevic on Vimeo.

Such a wonderful balance of textures (sharp/dangerous/hard) and fluidity (ot the movement) which doesn’t even start on how beautiful the whole machine is!

Apart from the Limbo Post the other day I realise I haven’t updated my games pages for a while and equally that the Games page is rather unwieldly so I might start a new one.

Firstly Mateusz Skutnik has released the third chapter in the absolutely beautiful and rather taxing point and click illustrated book DAYMARE called, unsurprisingly DAYMARE TOWN 3

For the illustration alone I’d urge you to play it but equally the narrative, music and atmosphere are three other reasons.

Jesse Venbrux, the quiet goliath of satisfying but charming games responsible for the Karoshi Series has chalked up another off-kilter game called Maru which has been followed by a more mainstream exploration of the technique called They Need To Be Fed. PC download only I’m afraid.

Both are brilliant at what they are trying to do and similar in their game-play but if you try They Need To Be Fed first to get your head around the controls (and it’s an addictive 35 levels) and then follow it by the earlier Maru you’ll be spoilt by its charming story and subtle but deep explanation of the importance of Death (again!).

As promised a while back for anyone who is interested I’ve finally managed to upload the entire talk on the Phonotorope I did at the Flatpack Festival in March 2009.

As with the other Phonotrope film it’s all footage from the camera with the sound simply taken from the camera so the audio quality isn’t great.

I’ll also upload it onto the Phonotrope page too.

Jakub Dvorský, one of the utterly talented creators of Samorost and Machinarium, has been working on this wonderful feature of which the trailer is below.

It’s all in Czech (not Polish as I had first assumed) and I personally think the better for it for the moment. It adds an utterly childlike wonder to not knowing what is actually going on but being taken away by the magic of the moment.

I’ve just been on the phone to Richard Hart from Disturbance, a design company out in Durban, South Africa about something for something else (am being vague so as not to spoil the surprise for the exhibition that he’s doing it for).

Anyway if you want to feel low about wherever you have found yourself I highly recommend visiting  their site and having a browse through ‘The Daily’ section. It’s depressing as you realise that…

a) the five or six people that make up Disturbance are so motivated to keep a daily creative record of their creative antics

b) the five or six people that make up Disturbance actually have creative antics

c) the creative antics are mostly carried out in the glorious sunshine of South Africa and look like such fun (March 8th 2010 – case in point)

… basically it’s so easy to get locked into the soul destroying day-to-day and to forget about the challenge of colouring your life which is partially why I am so happy to have handed over what I’ve just handed over to him in fact.

A lesson to us all.

Apart from all of that Disturbance do some really wonderful design, graphic and visual work in what Richard passingly described as the backwaters of Durban (in comparison to the bigger cities) and the freshness of their output just smells of the sunshine in their studio, god damn them. Have a nice hour’s browse.

Oh… and to make matters worse Richard’s third arm paints wonderful wonderful pictures.

Oh my lordy are they beautiful.

Since 2007 there has been utter radio silence about a game enigmatically called Limbo, save for a movie teaser of some of the game play dynamics. But that in itself was utterly beautiful…

This morning I received an email from Dino Patti the CEO of PLAYDEAD the tiny team responsible for it, announcing that it is to be released on Xbox Live Arcade.

Feast your eyes my beauties, feast your eyes.

(and then go over to IGN to read a little more about it)

Emma Lazenby and Sally Arthur (from Arthur Cox) scooped the BAFTA for BEST ANIMATED SHORT last night for Emma’s Mother Of Many.

Ah I’m so happy for them!!!!

Aniboom and Sesame Street have got together to offer everyone the chance to make them an animated film (or animated films) which would be put up on their website to be voted on by people, the winner would then be shown on Sesame Street.

Apart from a sense of sadness I didn’t really think about this much as it’s simply another in a long list of institutions mindlessly doing what everyone else is doing however thankfully Bran Dougherty-Johnson of Cartoon Brew and Motionographer has expressed precisely the emotions that run through my heart.

I was simply going to put the entire letter up on this post but the formatting has gone haywire and it’s impossible to read so go to the link to the letter here and read the entire thing right away.

Please get in touch with Bran if you would like to add your names to the signatories.