While we beaver away overhauling the website and plotting for Flatpack 6, as ever there’s plenty of film action afoot over at the 7inch website.
After a couple of jaunts to Green Man and Shambala festivals this month, on September 1st we kick off a jampacked weekend of Metal on Film. This is part of the ongoing Home of Metal juggernaut, celebrating the Midlands’ heavy rock heritage with all manner of exhibitions and events, and our contribution will include a host of screenings at Light House as well as one-offs across the Black Country. If you missed the legendary Chris Needham at Flatpack in March you’ll be glad to know he’s making a return visit, as are Ollie and Emma with their marvellous Vintage Mobile Cinema. We’ve also got a shorts programme showing on Sunday 4th Sept called Metal Till I Die, which among other things includes the following…
We’ve been loving David Wilson’s work since we stumbled on his Moray McLaren video, and last year’s promo for Let Go by Japanese Popstars was just mental. David has recently started bringing a similar illustrated morphing style to live visuals, which you can feast yourself on if you come along to the Paper Party during Flatpack. Here’s a taste…
Last year the excellent Numero Group released Celestial Navigations, a DVD retrospective of artist and animator Al Jarnow. Ordinarily they reissue forgotten soul or folk rarities on vinyl, but in this case they were exhuming fragments of film embedded in the memories of countless 70s children. Jarnow started out making sequences for Sesame St, including the legendary Cosmic Clock, and from his attic studio in Long Island he created a little cottage industry in curious, brain-tickling little films. Like the best experiments he followed an idea through to its natural conclusion. I particularly like the short which gave the DVD its title, in which he plots the movement of sunlight across his wall and then ends up travelling to Stonehenge to compare and contrast.
All of which is a preamble to say that a juicy selection of Al Jarnow’s work will be showing during Flatpack at Ikon Eastside on Sunday 27th March, around lunchtime. Earlier in the weekend there are plenty of other psychedelic animated treats to be found, including some pioneering computer animation and more recent work by the likes of Mirai Mizue, David Wilson and Anthony Francisco Schepperd. More info coming soon.
(With thanks to Rick and Alex for the initial tipoff)
While hunting for short stuff we’ve been coming across lots of morphing and psychedelia lately. Here’s Exhibit A, by the very talented Anthony Francisco Schepperd. (His video for “Wail to God” is also well worth a look.)
A whole year back animator Jim le Fevre brought his marvellous Phonotrope device along to Unpacked. He’s recently posted the talk he did that day up on his site. (We can’t embed it here, cos we’re not vimeo plus.)
© Flatpack Festival 2010