End of the Road Festival Trailer

Another festival trailer for you all! This time it's for End of the Road Festival, and features yet more paper animation.

Those of you who saw my animation for last year's festival may recognise one or two shots, but there's a whole load of new work in there too, including some rather time consuming line-up banners.

There were also some additional icons from the festival, including the boat and disco ball (no, I will not use a ping-pong ball, I will build a sphere from paper. Okay?) and the Somerset Cider Bus.

Also a badger joins the cast of animals this year, who is currently living beside the bear over my fireplace.

No Direction Home

Today I have another animation for you - this time in pencil.

The fine people of End of the Road Festival are starting a new festival called 'No Direction Home'. It's based near Sheffield, on the Welbeck estate, and is looking to be another high point of the summer.

We wanted to do a video to get people thinking about the festival,  much like the paper animation I made for End of the Road Festival last year.

Of course the difficult part with a first year festival, is that nobody really knows what it looks like. So after a few site visits to the Welbeck estate and some extended conversations over coffee with Simon, this is what we came up with:

As you can see, a lot of lead went into creating this video, and I'm not sure when my hand's going to stop cramping, but I have to say I'm rather pleased with it in the end.

(Oh, and I haven't even mentioned the whole 'robbers-broke-into-my-office-and-stole-my-computer-right-in-the-middle-of-all-this' story yet.)

One last thing! That beguiling voice you heard  belongs to Beth Jeans Houghton, who's album you should go out and buy immediately. And then buy a ticket to No Direction Home. And watch her play there. 

The Leisure Society - Dust on the Dancefloor

A new music video! 

I met The Leisure Society at End of the Road Festival this year. And a lovely group of people they are too.

Their single 'Dust on the Dancefloor' was soon to be released, and having seen my little animation for the festival, they asked me if I might be interested.

Of course I was.

Time was fairly tight, and the band were about to go on tour with Laura Marling, so it was very much a case of working with what you've got. Luckily what they had was a couple of reels of Super 8 footage from their last summer tour.

So I came up with an idea of trying to lace imagery of them into the beams of projectors, with an old retainer type character trying to catalogue the footage.

I don't think the band entirely knew what the outcome was going to be, and to be entirely honest I'm not sure that I was either. Nonetheless, Nick and the band were all extremely trusting, and just went with it.

We shot the band in a disused office in Old Street, and then the rest in a converted dairy barn in Sussex. My father, David Brett, took the role of the projectionist; how handy it is to have a fine actor in the family.

The rest was literally smoke and mirrors.

Little Tibet Premieres in London

After MONTHS of work, the day finally arrived.

Last Saturday, at the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square, we finally premiered our documentary 'Little Tibet'.

This has probably been the biggest project I've ever undertaken, and so it was wonderful to finally get it out of the edit and onto the big screen.

The project started over a year ago when Sonam came to me with an idea for a feature documentary. Sonam is a Tibetan man I'd met at pro Tibet protests a few years back. I'd also interviewed him for  short documentary I made at Uni, which was probably why he thought of me for this film.

The idea was to film a road movie, following him as an exiled Tibetan into the himalayan region of Ladakh; the furthest point north of India that can be reached before entering Tibet.

I liked the idea straight off, but was aware that maybe this was a little too huge a project to take on between just the two of us.

Fortunately I didn't listen to that instinct.

I was very much following the theory that "it's better to regret doing something than regret not doing something" at the time, and while it's a massively flawed theory it certainly gets you involved in things.

And so, it was with some mild terror that I hired a couple of cameras and headed off on a plane to India.

What happened there... Well, luckily for you I made a documentary about it!

What? You haven't seen it? Don't worry, I'll put a link to the DVD at the end.

We shot continuously for nearly a month. I saw some incredible and life changing things, and then came home.

To edit.

Editing took a year.

A YEAR.

Admittedly that year also facilitated several other projects, and in the scheme of things, a year isn't that long, but still... I was ready to finish.

Which was lucky, because I did. Even more lucky: people seemed to like it.

We first went to Tibet Society to talk about help with getting the film screened. After watching a cut of the film they jumped right in with us and pretty much single handedly organised the entire premiere. TS really were a blessing for us, and cannot be thanked enough for their work.

Okay, enough with the text, let's have some video. So first up, here's the trailer for the film:

And here's what a few people at the premiere had to say about it:

So there we have it!

If you want to catch the film at one of our screenings, head on over to www.littletibetfilm.com, where we are constantly adding new screenings all over the globe.

If you'd like to buy it on DVD, Tibet Society are selling it for us on their website here: http://www.tibetsociety.com/content/view/199

Or here: http://www.enlightenedgifts.org/little-tibet-dvd-250-p.asp

End of the Road Festival 2012

Another year, another End of the Road! This year was another great one, but that's not really what I'm here to tell you about.

I'm here to tell you to watch an animation I made before the festival to get all you lovely people excited about what a great time awaited us!

So here it is.

I built all the puppets myself and shot it on my bedroom floor (I'm still finding bits of paper everywhere). It was great fun to get back to some real stop-motion animation again, and also to use the same paper technique I'd worked on way back at my art foundation.

I also shot a lot of time-lapse footage over the week of set-ups on the festival site, which you can see here:

Hopefully it gives you some idea of just how much work it takes to get a festival up and running each year.