Back to the lab

Having returned to full-time employment it’s time to take care of business and drum up some funds (The 9 to 5 way). It’s also a good opportunity to relax from months of running to a production schedule and catch up on various visual works promised to friends and collaborators.

There’s a strong temptation to jump onto the next project as I have  my little selection of concepts to work with, but I know I need to make an effort to effectively promote Little Lights rather than just dumping it on YouTube and leaving it there.

Back to the nuts and bolts of ideas creation.

Beyond that task, previous experience has taught me it’s more beneficial to work in bitesize chunks on small projects, when balancing your creative work inbetween long working hours. Now is the right time to focus on sketchbooks and experimental animation tests. It’s time to step a little further inside myself, keep quiet, and tune into the ambient signals in the environment around me. It’s that subconcious element a lot of artists mention. You simply focus yourself in a way that allows for a sensitive processing of the information that’s passing through your eyes every day and it all steadily melds together until you have a scene, a premise, or a concept.

It’s time to go back to learning and feeling my way. A film gives you  a very satisfying final outcome, but doesn’t allow the luxury of experiementing to any great length with new software or chasing lines of inquiry that might not lead anywhere. You design a visual aesthetic and you’re stuck with it for the whole project. I’m looking forward to keeping things free, relaxed, and generally just messing about.

Goodbye Little Lights

‘Little Lights’, the third film from SoulCatchFire, is finally complete. The extremely short, short (sometimes called a ‘micro movie’, a movie that lasts around 60 seconds or so) was completed at the beginning of November, and runs for a mere 73 seconds including titles and credits.

The new task of publicising the film is just beginning. If you like, you can follow my progress through Twitter by going here http://twitter.com/sunshinesignal

Working on the character design for Sarah during Pre-Production

The extended production time in relation to the length of the film has been a little far off the mark. 154 working days over 13 months. This is the reality of producing a film in-between your working life. Throw in a few instances of burn-out and poor motivation and that pretty much covers the time span of the project. This wasn’t helped by one or two wrong turns during the production process. Still, each film informs your understanding of what you’re capable of and where you’re strengths lie, so hopefully, a lot of those mis-judgements won’t be repeated, and I feel sure that the end result is a stronger film for having made those decisions

Still, the very fact that the film I set out to create stayed on course and is now complete counts as some form of achievement. It’s deeply satisfying to replace months of work and gigs of data with a single movie file, and wherever the film does or does not go from here, I feel confident its successful completion will be enough to keep this soul on fire just a little longer…

(What are) the little lights?

The little lights are those unexpected exchanges in life that shatter your preconceptions about someone of a particular group or mindset, who up until that point, you would never have believed you could share any connection with. It’s those experiences which make you think, potentially, there could be a lot more good people out there than you had previously imagined.

Little Lights will be released on soulcatchfire.com November 2008