A movie I recently programmed that I consider to be a great personal discovery: We definitely didn’t premiere it, not even close, but I really loved the short The Surprise Demise of Francis Cooper’s Mother. It really felt like something special, and it’s also a pretty good distillation of my personal taste in film. It’s deeply weird, animated, has cats in it, perfect narration, and the suggestion that life goes on no matter how stupid, insane or unsuitable for life we may be. Which is actually kind of an amazing statement. Did I mention it has cats?
It honestly wasn’t supposed to take so long but I realised that if I waited until tomorrow it would be exactly seven years since I last put something (The Pan) on Newgrounds and it made me a bit depressed. Hope you like him. He was animated in Flash and then composited in After Effects as usual. Look out for episode 2 soon (I swear).
Before Christmas I made a short film at Arthur Cox Ltd, produced by Aardman, for the Why Music Matters campaign. The idea was to pick a musical artist from the big long list of EMI artists and say why music matters. I chose the band Sigur Rós because I had a friend in university who kissed a girl on an A-road over-pass in the rain one night, and he said it was so incredibly emotional he imagined a movie camera spinning around them both while the sparkling rain fell in slow motion and Sigur Rós played. I found that funny and wanted to show how people match their surroundings and experiences with music, and vice versa.