Broken Bird pre-release trailer

"Broken Bird" (Ariel Undine) - trailer for music video.

Ariel and I shot the visuals for this music video last year and I've been working on the animation and final edit  - the full version will be released very soon. To find out more about Ariel Undine or listen to more of her music go to her Facebook page here. You can also find my blog articles about the making of this video here: part 1 and part 2.

Better Red Than Debt? [Preview: Dragon Day]

Trailer for Dragon Day starring Ethan Flower

Spare this film a thought: obviously intended to be science fiction but it could become a documentary in the next 24 hours as the U.S. prepares to hit the debt ceiling... Movies are one way to take a nation's pulse and if nothing else this trailer does indicate just how much the U.S. is currently in fear of China.

Killer Eels From Mars

Molly Brown's short film, made for a Kino Challenge. One of the voice-overs sounds strangely familiar...

We Can Get You Some Really Cheap Gear [Trailer]

Trailer for my animated short film "We Can Get You Some Really Cheap Gear." I've taken the full version offline (temporarily) so this will have to be your Lego fix for the moment. More news about this film soon...

Late Nights And Love Bites [LIFF Preview: A Little Bit Zombie]

Dying was easy. It’s getting married that’s the killer.

Another LIFF highlight for sci-fi fans: A Little Bit Zombie, directed by Casey Walker, will be at the London Independent Film Festival on 18th April. Finally someone has made a romantic comedy with brains.


A Little Bit Zombie - Trailer from A Little Bit Zombie on Vimeo.

A Little Bit Zombie is the second part of a LIFF double bill: it follows the LIFF Music Video selection, including my own video for "2007" by Tenderstar.

A Cross-Stitch In Time [LIFF Preview: Dimensions]

Looking through the London Independent Film Festival programme (April 12th to 22nd) - this year's festival includes several indie feature films with science-fiction or fantasy themes. 

Dimensions: A Line, A Loop, A Tangle Of Threads , directed by Sloane U’Ren, is showing on Saturday 21st April at LIFF. It's described as a 1920s/1930s sci-fi love story and is currently touring festivals worldwide - recently winning the Gort award at Boston Sci-Fi. If you can't make it to LIFF then it's also on the bill at Sci-Fi London.


Dimensions teaser/trailer from Ant Neely on Vimeo.

Why see this time-travel film? Imagine The Time Traveller's Wife as an indie romance rather than a Hollywood romance, or imagine the complexity and intelligence of Primer delivered by a cast (including Camilla Rutherford) capable of speaking in coherent sentences. I'm rather looking forward to it.

Human Centipede Patient Information

Tom Six's recently released horror-torture film is "100% medically accurate" according to the producers. Some more helpful information for potential patients:

• Here in the UK, between 20 and 35 Human Centipede operations are carried out every year by the National Health Service, with an unknown number also taking place in private clinics.

• The average NHS waiting time for the procedure is approximately eight months. The operation can only take place in a small number of specialist hospitals due to the need for a purpose-built, elongated operating theatre.

• Common side effects in the first three weeks post-op include knee pain, nausea, altered bowel habit, slowness of movement, pain, impaired vision and irrational aggressive impulses directed mainly towards the surgeon.

• National Institute for Health & Clinical Excellence (NICE) operative guidelines released in 2008 recommend that this procedure should not be used for children under 14 years of age, except as a last resort when all other options have proved unsuccessful.

The Purrfect Storm

The Eyecat Training Collar has some serious competition - well, it made me laugh. Thanks bro.

In other news, Sci-Fi London is coming in April. I'm getting a team together again for the 48 Hour Film Challenge, but right now I'm still working on post-production for Bast in every minute I can squeeze in.

Demo of post-production work on Bast. I'm working in Blender 2.49. The steps:

Artefact reduction: Quad blurring the Cr and Cb channels in the compositor leaving the Y channel unblurred. You can't see this step at all if you're watching at 360p as YouTube tends to add in some lovely artefacts of its own. If you're watching at 480p look at the candle during this step.

Colour consistency: lift gamma gain balancing in the VSE so all the shots in a scene look similar. Blender 2.5 will include colour balancing nodes in the compositor as well, seriously speeding up the process.

Lighting: adding or reducing highlights - meshes with gradient textures in the 3D scene, multiplied in the compositor.

Gradients and overall colour look: adding local colour uses same approach as lighting step. Overall colour look is a colour curves node that is applied equally to all the shots in the same scene. Here I've just bowed the red and green channels slightly to add warmth.

Bast: Secrets Of Cat Training [Trailer II]

Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back

I recently returned from a course where I learnt the Interview Rules of Survival. They're pretty similar to the Zombieland Rules of Survival although apparently the double-tap is frowned upon by most HR departments. On my return to Paddington I came across this space-time anomaly:

I was impressed by the group of excitable orange-suited RailTrack engineers who were making a fuss over Bittern (a sister locomotive to Mallard) on a rare excursion down south.

In other news I'm uploading a sequence from Bast to YouTube that I thought would make a good second trailer, this time with some of the animated content. I'll post a link when it's up and running - check back here or on the Bast website later today.

[produced in Blender]

Bast: Secrets Of Cat Training [trailer]

A first attempt at a trailer. Bast is still a work in progress - some shots still need some adjustments but from this point I'll be working on the final version. The film will eventually feature an original soundtrack - for the trailer I've used Gustav Holst's classic trailer composition "Mars" performed by the USAF Bands Programme [via wikimedia commons].

The film website is here. Further updates planned soon including more about the cast.

Just for fun...

here's my version of the Under Construction Trailer, with apologies. You may not get this unless you grew up in the UK...