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I won! The competition results were announced today and Bowling for Sandercoe came out on top. I now get a load of cool guitar stuff to distract me from making more films.

The film has also made it onto the front page of YouTube, generating over 400,000 views and a ton of comments at the time of writing. Fame and fortune can’t be far away now.

In other news, I got around to putting a page up for the film here and a page of fascinating and informative special features to enjoy. See? I haven’t forgotten about the little people now that I’m a minor internet celebrity.

I think this one needs a bit of explaining…

As part of my fledgling midlife crisis, I’m trying to teach myself to play the guitar. Justin Sandercoe is a very nice man with a website devoted to teaching people to play the guitar. It’s like we’re made for each other. Speaking as a complete guitar noob, I can say that his beginner lessons do actually seem to work. And he does it all for free, which is nice.

He posts tutorial videos on Youtube, which was how I first found out about him, and he recently put up a competition there to win a bunch of guitar stuff, with the prize going to the video demonstrating the most innovative use of a guitar.

This is my entry: Bowling for Sandercoe

The music is by my fine internet chum, Loïc Desjardins, who wrote, performed and mixed the score. That’s probably him whistling on it too. He managed to do this all in the space of about a week, despite me giving him nothing in the way of a useable brief and changing around the edit of the film while he was still working on it. Visit his site and tell him how cool he is.

There will be the usual smorgasbord of downloadable versions and behind-the-scenes photos sometime in the near future.

Just a quick note to say I’ve just uploaded a new test snippet to youtube. This one’s a treadmill technique that may or may not be useful for giving the appearance of a dolly shot of walking characters without actually moving the camera.

You can see it here.

As part of the ongoing renovations, I’ve moved everything from the old site to an archive. If you can’t find something that used to be here, it should still be there. As far as I know, the only thing that I left out in the redesign was the frankly useless tips page, which I lost interest in about five years ago.

I’m running out of excuses to avoid animating stuff now. Maybe I should bite the bullet and get the camera out again.

I think the site is mostly done now. There’s a few things to fix and I need to add youtube links to the film pages but I think everything else is in place. If you spot any problems, you can now leave one of those snazzy internet comment things right here and I’ll try to fix it.

I’ve moved everything onto a WordPress blog, which necessitates a change in the folder structure. If you ended up here after following a link from another site, use the search box up top there to find whatever it is you came for. I’ll be updating the ones I remember doing myself over the next few days but I know a few other people have linked here. Those ones are going to stay broken.

Finally, I found out today that Kristin Hersh, who is responsible for the music in Pneuma, is having some problems out on the road. Car trouble and the general economics of small-scale touring mean that she and the band are losing money big time at the moment, but they’re carrying on and honouring their remaining tour dates anyway. It’s a sad state of affairs for an artist that I’ve been a fan of for about twenty years, and I’m writing this in the hope that a few kind souls out there will help out.

See, you can download a whole free EP and a handful of album tracks from her website. That’s pretty good value right there. On that page, up near the top, is a little red circle that says “tip jar”. If you liked Pneuma and you have a paypal account and a bit of cash to spare, I’d appreciate it if you dropped a dollar or two their way. They seem like nice people and I’d be sad to see them forced to give up touring over something like this.

Bear with me. I’m updating the site so things are going to look a bit funny for a while.

Well, here we are. Long time no… anything.

There have been a few developments in the year and a half since I last updated this site. The main one is that I’ve put most of my films up on youtube. I know some people had trouble working out what codecs needed installing where with the downloadable files, so this should make things easier.

I’ll continue to upload higher quality versions of my films here but youtube links will be taking the place of the lower res versions from now on.

I’ve divided things up into two sections:

Proper films

Tests and outtakes

It appears that some of my files are unavailable for the moment. I’m looking into the problem and hope to get them back up as soon as possible. In the meantime, all the Quicktime versions (and anything else hosted on oblong.brickfilms.com) should still be available.