Today’s Random Test/Doubt from snailsnail on Vimeo.

Addendum to yesterday’s. The final doubt.
I wish I knew why my videos keep getting their aspect ratios monkeyed with.

A scattershot post I think, to hide the fact I’ve not been blogging recently (the rate’s not likely to pick up any time soon, incidentally). So, random stuff:

Those are wugs. Imaginary creatures used for testing language ability, a subject that I touched on in a recent post and couldn’t be bothered to research further. It coincidentally came up while watching this Royal Society lecture [link will take you to a streaming video player thing] about genes and languages (lots of interesting lectures here by the way) which is about the research which led to the “Gene for language” news story you may have read about recently.

Anyway, wugs are cute, or whatever.

I’ve been making little videos recently.

This one was a birthday present for my dad:

Joust! from snailsnail on Vimeo.

And here are two hyper short experiments – I make this sort of thing quite a lot as mini-exercised, trying to teach myself new techniques and wotnot:

Tonight’s Random Test/Doubt from snailsnail on Vimeo.

Today’s Random Test/Doubt from snailsnail on Vimeo.

Sometimes I read webcomics, this one is cool, it’s short, and beautiful (in its way).

What else, oh yes, films…

I finally got around to seeing the most recent Almodóvar: ‘Los Abrazos Rotos‘ (Broken Embraces), it was good, but not superb. If there’s anything that can’t be faulted it’s Almodóvar’s visual style, every shot is perfect, the colours and the shapes exact and delicious, and (i’d say) it gets better in each new film. But, on the other hand, it feels somewhat like he’s treading water. He has always been a director that (somewhat like Tarantino) appropriates prior films, styles and genres, but (unlike Tarantino) it has never been too overwhelming. However, in Abrazos Rotos, on top of referencing some of his stock styles (melodrama, noir) he becomes exquisitely self-referential. [[minor spoilers]] The film contains a film-within-a-film (that in the course of the narrative will get remade and rereleased) which is itself a remake(?) of one of Almodóvar’s films, ‘ Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios‘ (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown). What exactly all this means is somewhat beyond me but, if you know the previous film, it makes for some of the most humorous moments in this one, if not it probably just seems odd.

Anyway, not a bad film, but it would be good to see such a talented director stir things up a bit.

Another master film-maker with a recent release is Hayao Miyazaki, the Japanese animation god (not a word I’d use lightly) who made other stuff you might know if you’ve hung round me at all, like Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. So his most recent is Ponyo on the cliff by the sea, and it is, truly, fantastic. I’m waiting to go and see it again before I decide if it’s actually my favourite of his, but it might well be.

It’s a simple story which sounds worryingly familiar – a mermaid (well, sort of) escapes from her cruel father, makes her way onto land and makes friends with a boy with whom she falls in love and for whom she then becomes a human… I know, I know – but it’s nothing like that at all. I know most of you won’t but you really all should see this film (undubbed!)  so I won’t go on about the content, but sufficed to say from the second shot in the film my jaw hit the floor, and it stayed there, making the carpet soggy, until the credits rolled. Technically speaking, the animators working with Miyazaki are the best in the world (however much he moans about kids today) and so visually the film is breathtaking and the story is just as beguiling, funny, poignant, all the good adjectives. Utterly wonderful.

Now might be the right time to introduce you to Samuel Pepys whose blog, while not being particularly contemporary, is always an interesting read. I bring him in now because events these past few days have been pretty exciting, culminating in yesterday’s battle.
It is, genuinely, a fascinating way to read the diary, not just because the blog format suites a diary so well but because it brings it to you in bite size chunks (automatically if you’re using RSS) and also builds suspense as if events really were panning out in real time. In addition, each day’s entry provides hyperlinks to help explain the places, people and items mentioned and often is richly commented on by people providing information on obscure words, links to other contemporary accounts and the like. The diary is full of history, society, sex, violence, intrigue and details of everyday life, so I recommend it to you.

For anybody who I got to read Blood Sweat and Tea by Tom Reynolds, you might be interested to know that the sequel is out, and you can buy it, or read it for free – below in some kind of new-fangled gadgety thing, or by downloading the pdf from this page. It’s factual and based on the above-linked blog about the London Ambulance Service. I haven’t read it yet, but do read the blog regularly so I guess I know most of what’s going to happen – always interesting.

Well, last night we finally finished working on the animation that I’ve been consumed with these past couple of months, which finally ended up entitled “El Pequeño Gran Viaje” or “The Little Big Journey”. I don’t know when you’ll get to see it, but soon enough – I have to subtitle it first. Here is a still :-

SO, now I have to work out what’s next. You may remember I have two unfinished poetry collections in the pipeline, called “One Punto Stop” and “Stories for Girls”, maybe I should crack on with those.

I also have another animation idea which I think will be cool. The only problem being, it’s a big project, taking techniques I’ve been developing in recent drawings and applying them to animation, and it invloves a humanoid main character… Now, I’m not very good at drawing people (well, at drawing full stop, but people are particularly taxing) so yesterday I found myself a model and started shooting reference photos – which may be cheating  but whatever. Here you can see an early work in progress which I’m posting because this thing might not ever get finished, and to remind me when I started.

Right now, however, I’m going to grab a beer and do some hard relaxing.