Shortlisted for YouTube Play!

Those bloody lovely people at YouTube did it again! DON'T TOUCH made it from being one of the 23,000 entrants to the final 125 for the biennial YouTube Play competition. It's seems strange to be considered in the same league as PES and I Met the Walrus, especially with a pretty old video.

If we make the final choice we'll be presented at a special YouTube Play celebration event at the Guggenheim Museum on October 21. Then, will be available for public viewing at the Guggenheim Museums in New York, Bilbao, Berlin and Venice from October 22 to 24.

The judges arrreee:
Laurie Anderson, Animal Collective, Darren Aronofsky, Douglas Gordon, Marilyn Minter, Ryan Mcginley, Takashi Murakami, Shirin Neshat, Stefan Sagmeister, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (By the way, I'm having to type all of these names out), and Nancy Spector (Phew).

Don't Touch goes to Glastonbury

*Edit* Looking back through the emails I believe we were shown twice at Glasto, courtesy of the lovely ChewTV.

Don't Touch is off too Glastonbury Festival with thanks to Dave Allen of the mighty Animation Forum West Midlands! From what I've heard it'll be screened on the BBC's back-to-back 25m2 screens. Whoop-di-whoop. Other films being shown are Second Home Productions' The Animal Book, and The Brother McLeod's Codswallop. Fine company indeed.

For info and a bit of a history on Don't Touch lookee here.

Featured on YouTube!

Wowzers!, Zoiks! and indeed Blimey! 'DON'T TOUCH' got featured on YouTube!
Considering I can't stand watching the bugger any more I'm quite proud. I suppose it's appropriate to show you it again... as if it'll look any different featured. *edit - Thought I'd give you the new HD version to oggle at.

Shorts on the Walls

David Allen kindly managed to squeeze DON'T TOUCH into the Shorts on the Walls line up today. Ian went along to introduce it.

It got a pretty good reception, including a nice mention from Chris Unitt on CiB. Just found Eight Eyed Sea Bass also liked it. That's nice of them too.

Commissioned for 20 Years of Pixar Exhibition

A bit more time travelling here.

In the first week of of the 2nd year of my course at ECA we (including some people who had only just joined the course) were marched down to the Nation Museum of Scotland to talk about making individual commissions for the up-coming 20 Years of Pixar Exhibition. A big step up from the usual slack pace that most animation courses run on. A lot of the course members suffered from the animation equivalent of The Bends to get over the learning curve. Some, I'm pretty sure cried themselves dry.

My pitch was originally to create filler animations for all the other films, includng a vague narrative of a museum curator going through it. Practically, this proved impossible to do as more people changed their ideas or ran away from the whole mess completely. So in the end, I tied the ideas together as a slightly ill-paced short, 'DON'T TOUCH'.

The original, if not slightly prentious sounding bumpf was, 

"I wanted to depict the intense fun that some children get from smashing things, running as fast as they can and causing general chaos! The animation plays on the anguish and frustration that childhood frivolity can cause grown-ups."

So for an O.K. student film, it's done pretty well. 2 years from the supposed date of this post it will have recieved over 250,000 views on YouTube which is very nice.

You can see all the other films at the 20 Years of Pixar mini-site (if it still exists). My personal favourites were: 

Imagination Station - Grace Chan, 
Vinyl Days - Mark Wagner,
The Penguin and the Piper - Aaron Johnston,
Yu-Lung’s Pearl - Natasha Harrison