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My Web Videos of 2014
I wrote this Top 5 for Sight & Sound back in January on behalf of Animate, but as it’s more than half way through the year already and S&S haven’t yet posted it online I may as well share it here before I find myself writing my Top Five of 2015 list. 2014 was a great…
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Filmic Festivities at Flatpack
My March wrapped up with four days of sensory overload thanks to the 9th edition of the superb Flatpack Festival in Birmingham. Having been invited to be on the short film competition jury I was tasked with considering 48 films across five programmes for just two awards. The films that my co-conspirator, animator Joni Mannisto, and…
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![Duke of Burgundy, Peter Strikland]()
Peculiar women at the London Film Festival
Although the BFI London Film Festival is now a distant memory, two of the feature films that I saw are still playing on my mind – The Duke of Burgundy directed by Peter Strickland and Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe. Whilst both films are directed by men, they differ greatly in the way the treat their…
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![Brutus, Svetlana Filippova]()
November’s film festival highlights
November has been an excellent month for examining the great work talented filmmakers and animators have been producing of late. Here is a selection of films that I’ve recently seen at two film festivals, Bradford Animation Festival and Underwire Festival, that are worth a watch. Bradford Animation Festival 1. The Obvious Child – Stephen Irwin…
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![A Million Miles Away, Jennifer Reeder]()
Millions of Little Dramas – the work of Jennifer Reeder
After having heard about Jennifer Reeder’s work at Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, where she won the ZONTA Prize for her remarkable film A Million Miles Away, I was curious to find out more about her work. I contacted Reeder who invited me to check out a few of her recent short films. Taking a…
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![Alice, Jan Svankmajer]()
Time Out’s Top 100 animated feature films
I recently contributed to Time Out’s poll alongside filmmakers, critics, and the likes of Disney’s Jennifer Lee, animation historian Jerry Beck, and many independent animators producing award winning short films including Koji Yamamura, Jeff Scher, Martha Colburn, Robert Morgan and Lilli Carré. Interestingly the only restriction given to selectors was that the films had to…
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![Yamasuki Yamazaki, Shishi Yamazaki]()
Top 10 animations of 2013
Below are 10 films that I believe shows 2013 to have been a great year for animated film. As the majority of work I watch at festivals and online tends to be animation, I‘m keeping strictly to the medium with my review of the year and am avoiding straying into the realms of artists’ film…
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![Animation Sketchbooks]()
Animation Sketchbooks
Published earlier this year, Animation Sketchbooks is a welcome anthology for anyone who is curious about the painstaking process that goes in to producing animations. It’s a lavish, weighty tome, with 320 pages, which are for the most part elaborately illustrated by the 52 animation artists that grace its pages. It’s as fantastically visual as…
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![Sun City by Rob Carter, single channel HD video, 2013]()
LOOP Barcelona 2013: My selected 5
I’m back from a few sun-filled days spent looking at artists’ moving image at LOOP Barcelona. It was my first visit to LOOP and I imagine that it won’t be my last. From the 44 international galleries that participated this year, here are five works that I felt stood out from the gamut of experimental,…
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![Bendito Machine IV, Jossie Malis]()
The best online videos in 2012
Sight & Sound have once again posted online the year’s best online videos, as selected by 16 ‘international correspondents’ (including yours truly) from various regions of the film world (critics, programmers, producers). It’s terrific that Sight & Sound publish this list every year, as there are always videos and interactive sites that have slipped under…
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![McPixel screenshot]()
Three games to test your metal
The past month I’ve been spending a lot of my time travelling about in South Korea and the South West of England, giving me ample opportunity to play games on various devices. So in true Mashable style here are my current Top 3 good looking games for the casual gamer: 1. Limbo Platforms: Mac, PC,…
