Flatpack 2010 Trailer from Dave Gaskarth on Vimeo.

Animation by David Mourato.
Original design and sound editing by Dave Gaskarth.
With thanks to the Visual Communication department at Birmingham City University.

Fast Forward With Synth Eastwood from Synth Eastwood on Vimeo.

(You may spot the Fairbrother timelapse images in there somewhere.) We’re really looking forward to this one. Clark makes wondrously dense-but-melodic music on Warp, Hugh Cooney is a very funny youtube renegade who we’ve mentioned before, and Gangpol & Mit bounce tunes and cartoons back and forth between each other to make barmy live shows like this.

PS: You can also see G&M and Synth Eastwood talking about their work as part of Unpacked.

The Secret of Kells is a stunning animation about how the Book of Kells was completed and survived to become one of Ireland’s national treasures. The film has won several awards and an Oscar nomination for its animation which is nearly as beautiful as the book itself.

A Film About Poo is a lovely little film that will be screened in the Colour Box Shorts programme and is all about….erm…The catchy song has got into all of our heads, and I will certainly be humming it to myself all day! The shorts programme will also feature a screening of The Brothers McLeod’s beautiful new film Moonbird as well as other super and silly shorts including birthday cake, a sleepy cat and Rapunzel.

After the recent copy-writing marathon it’s time to take a break from words, but we’ll be back next week to start flagging up some of the treats in store.

Facts About Projection from Studiocanoe on Vimeo.

Fancy helping out at Flatpack? This year’s festival runs from 23-28 March in venues all over Birmingham, and the whole thing wouldn’t be possible without hordes of dedicated volunteers. (See a nice writeup from one of last year’s team here.) Responsibilities will include front-of-house, venue installation, technical support, marketing and bar work, and all volunteers will have the opportunity to make good use of their festival passes. If you’d like to get involved, please drop us a line at info@7inch.org.uk with your contact details before 15th February.

**Update**
Deadline extended to 22nd Feb — eager volunteers have another week to sign up. And keep in mind that our briefing meetup will be on Weds 3rd March, from 6:30pm.

And here’s a poem on the same subject:

Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

Written by Louis MacNeice while sat in a house in Birmingham in 1935.
Mike Johnston made a pilgrimage there last week.

PS: If you’re wondering what the heck is going on at Flatpack this year, fear not! Further details will follow very soon.

To express an interest, email Doc/Fest Marketplace Producer Charlie Phillips via charlie@sidf.co.uk with a one-page proposal for a factual/documentary project (single, series or cross-platform doc) and brief information about yourself. Projects can be at any stage of development, for any platform, as long as it is a factual project. The deadline for applications is Friday 5th March.
> http://sheffdocfest.com/view/pitchworkshops

Ian Francis, one half of Birmingham’s 7 Inch Cinema and programmer of the Flatpack Festival, describes the experience of discovering an intriguing short film on a friend’s computer one night.

It starts in blackness, punctuated by single-frame glimpses of a ceiling. There are lights, girders, high windows, and as we descend we see basketball hoops. The gaps between frames diminish until we are spinning rapidly around the gym. When we hit floor level we seem to be surrounded by easels. We slide towards one of them and on it is an image of the gym with another easel at the centre of the frame and so on. We continue to zoom towards and into these images, and our trajectory across the gym becomes increasingly complex. The easels begin to move, converging with each other and with us. All the while a queasy clamour of electronic noise has been building up.

It is tempting to try and work out where the join is between film and photograph, even though it has been made clear from the start that we are watching a series of still images. I began to question whether this gym actually existed. Then I started projecting people into the space, a flash of a figure stood in the corner. Before long the analysis dried up and I let the film take me where it wanted to go; continually changing the pace and improvising new variations within the limited rules and geography that it had set for itself, in the way that the best, most manipulative techno music does. The effect is giddy and sinister at the same time. It’s a simile that often gets applied to cinema, but there can’t be many films that take you this close to the sensation of a rollercoaster ride.

Ten minutes well spent. After the euphoria came the urge to contextualise, to hunt down a back-story, to google. The film is called Spacy, and was made in 1981 by Takashi Ito. Is there a print that we could show? (Yes, Light Cone in Paris have it on 16mm.) And how was it created? (From 700 photographs.) And who is Mr Ito? (A professor at Kyoto University. He made the film as a student.) Already Spacy is becoming domesticated. Do we need context? Will a heavily footnoted essay on its contribution to structuralist cinema – or indeed this article – help us to appreciate its power? Probably not. In an ideal world this is a film that would be delivered Lost Highway fashion, an unlabelled cassette in a brown envelope on your doorstep one morning.

A two-disc anthology of Takashi Ito’s work is released by Image Forum on 18 December. Spacy will be screening at Flatpack Festival in Birmingham, 23-28 March 2010.