Orson Welles Award

I went to San Diego over the weekend to the California Film Awards to accept the Orson Welles Award on behalf of our film. It was a long ceremony with a lot of categories but it turns out the Orson Welles Award was way up there towards the most prestigious categories, so it was quite an honour. I asked someone to use my phone to shoot video of my speech but unfortunately I forgot to press record when i handed it over, and they didn't either... so I'll paraphrase roughly what I said:

"This film was made for roughly... zero dollars, so I want to thank the Animation community for putting up with all the begging and grovelling we had to do to get this film made. But mostly I'd like to thanks the one hundred or so talents artists that volunteered their time to make this film. Thank you!"

As a side note... the life of an animator isn't compatible with an award like this. We often have to keep moving around, and this thing is soooo heavy!

Devils, Angels and Dating - One Year Online

So it's been a year since 'Devils, Angels and Dating' was first released onto YouTube where it recently passed a million views, which was a very nice Christmas present!
http://youtu.be/rkddkbu-EMA

Our film's composer, Phil Rey, has a great new album out that I'm listening to now... and wow! .... it's good. Check it out, well worth a listen:
http://phreymusic.bandcamp.com/album/age-of-the-fallen

The singer, song writer for our credits, Andrea Perry, ran a very successful KickStarter campaign to fund her new Album which passed it's goal by a significant margin:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andreaperry/andrea-perrys-4th-album-2013

I've been encountering a lot of Devils team members over the years. Several popped up at my leaving event in Austin which was a surprise and I worked with a good number of remote animators from the team while I was in New York. Most notably I worked alongside Jamil Lahham for six months or so, which was a real treat and we've become good friends. He's also making his own short film.
http://jblogger-animart.blogspot.com/

It really is nice for me to meet all these team members but what's even cooler is hearing about them bonding over Devils when they cross paths on their own. It's going to be a go-to conversation piece for a long time, I can tell, and it's amazing to have made something that has become a big part of the history of animator's careers.

Since the online development site for Devils started in 2009 it has spawned numerous other projects using similar methods to get their films made, way too many to list. It's opened up a lot of doors for people that would otherwise have struggled to get a film off the ground on their own.

It's been an honor to have run this project and met so many great talents. To some degree I have to hand it over to other talents now as they venture forward with their films. I've already been involved in one which is yet to announce anything significant yet but subscribe to the blog for future news.
http://www.cloudcatchersfilm.com

If anyone else working on something similar would like to swap notes please feel to get in touch.

Portfolio Website Update

I've posted a number of website updates to include some recent work. I did a short stint in New York working on previs for commercials. It was a surprisingly quick job, but we generated a lot of content in that time. You can check it out here.

In other news I've moved to Los Angeles and I'm looking forward to catching up with my west coast buddies.

Devils, Angels and Dating picked up the Orson Welles Award, which I'll be going to the California Film Awards ceremony to accept. It also passed a million views on YouTube over the Christmas break.