-
As I type this bit of preamble, the swallows are screeching overhead, a fat wood pigeon is hoo-hooing insistently -if melodically – and a blackbird is trilling away like a happy milkman. It’s been very sunny, very warm, and our garden’s bobbing asteroid-belt of alliums is winking out, globe-by-starry globe, their purple colour desaturating and…
-
We’ve got several great big clumps of Astrantia major – or Greater Masterwort – growing in the garden. It has just come into flower, though ‘flowers’ don’t quite describe the perfect papery things that sit above its foliage. They manage to be both very old-fashioned seeming and also architectural, a bit scruffy, but also very…
-
It’s late July 2017 and I’ve just locked myself inside a very big, very old dark house somewhere in the Medway Towns. The house number is 351. I will spend the night alone at number 351 in the hope of capturing phantasmagoria on film. Fortunately, the old dark house doesn’t disappoint…
-
Hey Phil. I’m glad to be back at Red’s Kingdom to share some animation shenanigans. I’m thrilled to announce the film has a title, and it’s called The Green Glider. Currently, the main development has been translating the style of the illustrations into Maya and really knuckling down to nail the story, so lots of…
-
When participating Kick-About artist and animator, Emily Clarkson, offered up ‘Metropolis’ as the second prompt, I wasn’t alone in looking forward to walking into the expressionistic world of Fritz Lang’s epic work of science-fiction. At the outset I knew I wanted to begin with the concept drawings for the film by Erich Kettelhut, and I…
-
We were all surprised and delighted by the response to the first Kick About, with a whole range of work in a variety of media triggered by Max Ernst’s 1955 painting, Moon In A Bottle. We got sculptures and paintings both analogue and digital, drawings in pastel and in Sharpie Pen, animated loops, and even…
-
Black Narcissus is one of my favourite things. Here’s why. Written, produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger from the novel by Rumer Godden, Black Narcissus (1947) charts the trials and tribulations of an order of crisp Anglican nuns seeking to establish a Christian outpost high in the Himalayas in the sensorial environs…
-
Under the eccentric-sounding title Gelata Spongia Oculus Eruptus, I talked about a new film project in-the-offing that utilises a sound-visualisation widget to power animated imagery. Invented by Ethan Shilling, the plug-in was developed for live-synchronisation concerts of Hector Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet. Arguably the best known piece from Berlioz’s music is the Queen Mab Scherzo,…
-
A few evenings back, we went to Oare for the golden hour, the sun honeyed, the breeze warm, and all the soft banks of green and purple grasses rolling away from my camera towards the horizon. The older stems, bleached grey, looked exactly as if someone had rubbed away at the surface of the view,…
Red's Kingdom 