"Steampunk Girl" Screening: London Independent Film Festival

Some great news: "Steampunk Girl" is on the official selection for London Independent Film Festival 2015! This will be my second LIFF screening (the first was "2007" shown at LIFF 2012) and I'm really looking forward to being back. I'll post details of the screening and festival programme as soon as they become available.

"Steampunk Girl" Movie Poster

Poster for the "Steampunk Girl" music video

"Steampunk Girl" Screening: St. Albans Film Festival

I am absolutely thrilled to report that "Steampunk Girl," my lyric video for the song by John Anealio, is on the official selection at St. Albans Film Festival 2015. I loved being part of this festival in 2013 and am looking forward to this year's event. I'll post details of the screening as soon as they are available.

Kinetic Typography Double Bill

Two inspiring masterpieces of kinetic typography:
"From Paper To Screen" a short film by Thibault de Fournas about typography and the evolution of the cinema title sequence.

"Shop Vac" a lyric video for a song by Jonathan Coulton, animated by Jarrett Heather.

You can watch my lyric video for John Anealio's song "Steampunk Girl" here.

Steampunk Girl (John Anealio) - Lyric Video

Download This Song For Free: www.johnanealio.com

"Steampunk Girl"
from Laser Zombie Robot Love by John Anealio
(C) John Anealio 2012

Features the Steampunk Girl artwork by Len Peralta

Animation (C) Joshua Westbury 2014
With thanks to the Blender Foundation

"Steampunk Girl" Screening: Kino London

The premiere screening of "Steampunk Girl" will be at Kino London, at Electrowerkz in Angel, on 7th July 2014. Doors are at 7.30. You can find out more about this "open mic film night" on the Kino London website.

Steampunk Girl is a song by John Anealio: discover more of John's music here.

When Words Collide [Work in progress: Steampunk Girl]

Putting the final touches to the Steampunk Girl video now: one major scene still to render, which will take approximately 20 hours to create 40 seconds of film. There's still time for things to go wrong, but provided there aren't too many crashes the film will be ready for a premiere screening at Kino London on Monday.

My first foray into kinetic typography has been really satisfying. I'm working in Blender which has advantages and disadvantages. KT lends itself very well to 2D animation and a lot of videos have been made using 2D packages like After Effects or Photoshop. It's not hard to simulate some 3D effects in these programs as well. For me it makes sense to work in a 3D space, not unlike making a physical stop motion animation, I think this matches the way I think. Also Blender is designed for really fast creative work once you are familiar with all the short cuts, and where you actually need 3D effects, or smoke, particles, physics, fluids etc. they are all built in. I also found I could use the compositor to create a look and feel for the animation, for example incorporating fake shadows, motion blur, vignetting etc.

For KT music videos, one issue must come up quite often, irrespective of which animation software you use: what do you do when you hit an instrumental break and there are no words to base your animation around? I came up with a solution, but you - and I - will have to wait until Monday to see if it worked...

The Joy Of Text [Work in progress: Steampunk Girl]

Over the past few weeks I've been working on a new animation project: a kinetic typography video for Steampunk Girl, a song by musician John Anealio. I'll post more updates as I go. I'm discovering there's something immensely satisfying about animating with words.

You can discover John Anealio's music here.