Owen Fitzpatrick: August 2009

Saturday, August 29, 2009

The New Frontier

A dynamic audiovisual perspective on American history driven by John F Kennedy's powerful 'New Frontier' speech.

In July 1960, after winning the Democratic Nomination for the Presidential election, John Fitzgerald Kennedy spoke at the ceremony of acceptance in the Los Angeles Coliseum. He faced west towards a setting sun and addressed 80,000 democrats and thirty-five million Americans watching him on television. Behind him stretched America...

The New Frontier is available on Digi-Beta/Beta SP/DVD and all digital formats.

4 minutes/Colour/English Language/4:3 Letterboxed at 1:2.1

The New Frontier was broadcast by RTE's Network 2 television station on November 22nd 2003, the fortieth anniversary of John F Kennedy's assassination. The short film screened in front of Oliver Stone's feature, JFK.

FESTIVAL SCREENINGS

The Galway Film Fleadh 2003

The New Frontier premiered at the The Galway Film Fleadh Animation Show
12.30pm, Sunday July 13th 2003 at The Town Hall Theatre, Galway, Ireland

CORK FILM FESTIVAL 2003
Irish Shorts Programme 3, Friday 17th October 2003, 4.30pm, Kino Cinema, Cork, Ireland

BLIND@DEAF Festival Electronica 2003
Monday 20th October 2003, 9.30pm, Meeting Place Square, Temple Bar, Dublin, Ireland

KERRY FILM FESTIVAL 2003
Competition Entries 5, Saturday 25th October 2003 - Siamsa Tire Theatre, Tralee, Ireland. The festival ran between October 20th - 26th 2003.

13ª Mostra Curta Cinema and 9th Rio de Janeiro International Short Film Festival 2003
The New Frontier screenings schedule:
ECHOES Screenings
Cine Odeon BR 28 november 2003 - 21.00h
Estação Botafogo Sala 3 30 november 2003 - 17.00h
CCBB - Sala de Cinema 05 december 2003 - 14.00h

Annecy 2004
Short films in Panorama
Screenings:
10th June 2004 - 2300hrs - Bonlieu - Petite Salle
11th June 2004 - 1600hrs - Salle Pierre Lamy

Darklight 2004 Film Festival
Dublin's Darklight 2004 Film Festival (November 17th to 21st 2004).

Feile Beochan 2005
Irish Competition at the Feile Beochan Irish Animation Festival which took place in Killkenny on the first weekend of September 2005.

Broadcast on Ireland's RTE Network 2 on November 22nd 2003, the fortieth anniversary of John F Kennedy's assassination. The New Frontier screened in front of Oliver Stone's feature, JFK.

AN OWEN FITZPATRICK / ROCKET ANIMATION PRODUCTION

FEATURING THE VOICE OF JOHN F KENNEDY
ANIMATION & FX BY MARTIN O'GRADY
LAYOUTS & BACKGROUNDS BY OWEN FITZPATRICK
SOUND & FINAL MIX BY KEITH ALEXANDER & STEVE MCGRATH / LIME STREET SOUND

DIGITAL IMAGE TRANSFER BY IAN O'BRIEN / WINDMILL LANE
ONLINE AND TRACKLAY BY SHAYNE MURPHY / WINDMILL LANE
EDITED BY RONAN O'MUIRGHEASA
PRODUCED BY OWEN FITZPATRICK & STEPHEN KENNAUGH
DIRECTED BY OWEN FITZPATRICK

Owen's Homepage

The Nest

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

T H E N E S T

A baby journeys into the realm of the primordial

Written and Directed by Owen Fitzpatrick
Produced by Anne Tweedy
Animation/Backgrounds/Props/SFX by Les Quinn, Eamonn Elliott, Dermot Elliott, Martin O'Grady, Owen Fitzpatrick

The Nest is available on 35mm/Digi-Beta/Beta SP
12 minutes/Colour/English Language/1:1.85 DOLBY SR

PRINTS BY COLOUR FILM SERVICES

Distributed by Network Ireland Television Ltd. www.network-irl-tv.com

The Nest was financed by The Irish Film Board

THE NEST - REVIEWS

The Nest received two written reviews while on its world tour of film festivals in 2001.

They are re-printed below.

The 55th Edinburgh International Film Festival 2001

A review of The World Animation Programme at Edinburgh 2001
by Kirsty Walker

EIFF 2001 World Animation

Twelve animations from seven countries, all UK premieres and one world premiere, all unique with each employing different methods to bring you quirky and offbeat stories. How could you resist? Forget the films with their boring old human actors. This is where you'll find the true creativity and anything can happen.

The USA has covered the humour and tastelessness fronts. The Moving Pyramid by Wolf-Rudiger Bloss is an entertaining new theory on Egypt's pyramids. According to Bloss, pyramids were not built to be stationary, but powered by the old carrot and donkey method, except the donkey is replaced by a flotilla of dozy slaves. With a passing nod to pyramid selling, Pharaohs are toppled and their carriages left to stand in the sand.

In Bike Ride, Tom Schroeder takes a line for a walk, as James Petersen tells the tragic tale of a 50 mile cycle trip to see his girlfriend. After intermittent images of hearts and hugs, he arrives only to be unceremoniously dumped and have to ride home again. Getting "on yer bike" has rarely been more tragi-comic and the tale is helped by drummer Dave King's jazzy backing track. Petersen's dead-pan narration also contrasts well with the animation which tells an entirely different story. While we hear, "I think I took it pretty well", we see the jilted lover's heart being battered into pulp to the sound of raucous percussion.

Rejected, by Don Hertzfeldt, has more than a little South Park about it, although hopefully even the South Park team wouldn't come up with a sketch where a character is drowned by blood from his anus. Other bits are more genuinely funny, however, and the cartoon cast takes on a life of its own as they too feel rejected.

Germany's Jochen Kuhn offers one of the most thought provoking pieces in Recently 2, where a new machine in a doctor's surgery can see far beyond the body's internal organs.

The Irish contribution offers computer animation as well as some of the most traditional illustrative work. The latter is a haunting interpretation of Christina Rossetti's poem "Goblin Market", a kind of Victorian version of events in the Garden of Eden. The result, created by Suzanne Arnold is infinitely superior to Owen Fitzpatrick's computer-rendered The Nest, a rather boring, unimaginative tale of a baby abandoned on a beach.

Two of the best pieces are stop frame puppet animation. In Caravan, Ferenc Fisher of Hungary spins a delightful tale of a traffic jam in the desert - if only all gridlock situations could result in social interactions and life long friends. In Pizza Passionata, Kari Juusonen of Finland, tells an entertaining, but poignant love story. Toivo is a chronically shy, lonely man, a grey man in a grey world, but in his dreams he is an arctic explorer, a macho man can make a bear faint by roaring at him. As he tries to woo his next door neighbour, the fantasy character is unmasked, but in the end the two find mutual ground in a game of ping-pong.

Kirsty Walker

9th Anima Mundi 2001 Animation Film Festival of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro (July 13th to 22nd and in São Paulo from July 25th to 29th)

A review of The Nest by Eduardo Valente (translated from Portuguese by Eduardo Cerveira) from Contracampo: revista de cinema #30www.contracampo.he.com.br/30/frames.htm

The Nest: a life in ten minutes
In the midst of the Anima Mundi marathon it's easy to watch more than 100 short films in less than 10 days. The difficult part is for one of these shorts to keep hammering inside the head of the one who watches it, days after the session. Not for a lack of interest on the production in general, but mainly for the fact that due to the extreme amount of films in exhibition, it generally makes these marathons tiring runabouts that seem to hinder the chances that one separate film has such effect. Well, all this only magnifies the value that we give to a film such as The Nest. It is a 10-minute Irish animation, a simple computer animation, directed by Owen Fitzpatrick.

Its greatest quality perhaps is, by the way, its technique. But not because of an exhibition of manual or technological dexterity, which devastates so many other cartoons. Mainly for its capacity to surprise the spectator.

In Animation there is an unspoken rule, according to which the appearance of a film allows the spectator to read all the meaning that it possesses. Even in the most interesting works. What do I mean by this? That all films that try to discuss more serious subjects, more reflective, possess dark tones, strange climates and atmospheres, strange traces, sauterne clay figures. I mean, they seem to cry out: this film is serious! On the other side, the funnier films have the light trace, many times pretty, many times comic, and announce their funniness beforehand. There are still the ironic examples, the excellent films of Don Hertzfeldt, or thinking about TV, those of The Simpsons and South Park. Here the technique, anarchical and lazy, lets us predict the searched effect.

The Nest goes directly against this. Not only it brings a beautiful but almost "naive" technique, that plunges the spectator into the "comedy" mood, and specifically the lighter and inoffensive comedy. Even worse: it has a baby as the main character. Babies are the most obvious representation of innocence, pureness, cuteness. The film starts with this: a baby on the beach, in front of the sea. It emits the typical sounds of babies, magnifying the "ooohhhs" and "aaahhhs" of the audience. How cute! A radio is turned on at his side, even though it's not possible to understand very well, it describes a common news bulletin. Some music is played. The spectator starts to wait for the next step: what cute act will this baby make? In which comic intrigue will it become involved?

Some fadeouts always take us back to the same scene: the motionless baby. He looks around, astonished: the sea, the seagulls, the wind, the sand. How cute. Five minutes passes by, and nothing else happens. The filmmaker "films" the baby in a fixed medium-shot, shows the sea once in a while, the sun, comes back in an eventual close-up, but always returns to the more general shot, and the baby, there, motionless.

The spectator starts to get unsettled. Where did this baby come from? Making an effort we remember that the first sound of the film, still with the black screen, was that of a car pulling out... Will it be that the parents had left the child on the beach? Ah, but then they will soon come back...

The necessity of establishing a narrative starts to get annoying. We need a past that justifies this child here, motionless. But, mainly, we need a future, an action. Impossible not to think of "Waiting for Godot". We await the redemptious action, the one that will bring meaning to everything. And it does not come. Only the baby, the sea (and its seductive sound starts to be irritating), the seagulls. The sun. He continues emitting his pre-speaking sounds. He naps, falls to sleep. Fadeout. He wakes up. In the same place, the baby, the beach, nothing happens. More fadeouts and nothing.

Dusk. And the baby there. And the images continue to be beautiful, continue to be graceful, but the audience is not deceived anymore: the film has something strange to it. Divided between being bothered by the impatience of the non-action or laughing at this, but nothing yet indicates anything other than a comedy, even if by irony. Fadeout.

Dawn. The same general shot. There is the baby in the same place, but now the seagulls overtake the whole cradle, pecking the boy already dead, eating what remains of him. Just like that, suddenly. " The end ", also suddenly. That's all. Some sparse laughs, applauses - but mostly a feeling of being very much uncomfortable.

And I, days later, can't take this baby out of my head, despite of whatever I might I see in the festival. It can be a metaphor of the existence of the human being in its passage through Earth. It can be many things, by the way, for each spectator. But, above all, the more films I see in the Festival, I do not stop thinking of the intelligence of a director in dealing with the expectations of a crowd, in making cinema above all a game between the screen and spectator, where the filmmaker holds the wires that move the puppets within his hands and can do whatever he wants with them. And, when he knows what to do, can make the spectator his own toy, even more so than the film itself. The result is an admirable film, not less than this. It justifies and is worth a whole festival.

Eduardo Valente

The Nest screened at the following film festivals between 2000 and 2003:

(Screened on 35mm print unless otherwise stated)

45th Murphy's Cork Film Festival 2000 at The Kino Cinema, Cork, Ireland (October 2000)

Motorola Irish Animation Festival at The IFC2, Dublin, Ireland, (19th November 2000). Beta SP

17th Short Film Festival Hamburg 2001 at The Zeise 1, Hamburg, Germany (3rd june 2001) INTERNATIONNAL COMPETITION 5 - INTERNATIONNAL COMPETITION 5 - Sunday, 3rd june 2001, 8.00 pm., Zeise 1 /Wednesday, 6th june 2001, 10.30 pm., Metropolis /Friday, 8th june 2001, 10.30 pm., Zeise 2.

13th Galway Film Fleadh at the Town Hall Main Theatre, Galway, Ireland (Sunday 15th July 2001)

9th Anima Mundi 2001 Animation Film Festival of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro (July 13th to 22nd and in São Paulo from July 25th to 29th). Review

The World Animation Programme at The 55th Edinburgh International Film Festival
(www.edfilmfest.org.uk/) (12th-26th August 2001). Review

The 21st Atlantic Film Festival, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, (September 14th to 22nd 2001).
http://www.atlanticfilm.com

Competition of The 7th International Short Film Festival in Drama, Greece (16th to 22nd September 2001).

The 46th Semana Internacional de Cine de Valladolid, Spain (October 26th to November 3rd 2001) - The Nest screened in front of Mike Nichols' latest feature film, 'Wit', starring Emma Thompson

The Budweiser Northern Ireland International Foyle Film Festival 2001 (November 9th to 18th 2001).

The 13th International Welsh Film Festival 2001, Cardiff, Wales (November 22nd to 29th 2001).

The 11th Mostra Curta Cinema 7th Rio de Janeiro International Short Film Festival Rio de Janeiro, 2001. The festival had a record 655 international entries and selected a total of 117 short films (representing 41 countries) for the International Panorama. Reviewed

The International Festival of Cinema and Technolgy 2002 which was held in Toronto, Canada on October 18th, 19th, and 20th. The festival events took place at The Ontario Science Center - Mini-DV (NTSC)

RTE Television - Christmas holiday season 2002. Digital Betacam.

Bradford International Film Festival 2003 - 12th to 15th November. A retrospective of Irish Film Board supported animation film shorts.

Many thanks to Angela Jones, Gillian O'Connor and Éanna de Buis at The Cork Film Festival Office, Nicola Cooper at Network Ireland Television Ltd., Anniva O'Flynn at The IFC Film Archive, Dublin and Eduardo Cerveira.

From An Evil Cradling

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FROM AN EVIL CRADLING

A KAVALEER PRODUCTION IN ASSOCIATION WITH ROCKET ANIMATION
BASED ON THE BOOK 'AN EVIL CRADLING' BY BRIAN KEENAN

A FILM BY ANDREW KAVANAGH AND KEITH FORAN

WRITTEN AND NARRATED BY
BRIAN KEENAN

STORYBOARD BY
ANDREW KAVANAGH
KEITH FORAN
OWEN FITZPATRICK

ANIMATION SUPERVISION BY
ANDREW KAVANAGH
KEITH FORAN

ANIMATION BY
DEREK JOYCE
RICHARD KELLY
PAUL MCGRATH
CIARAN CROWLEY
MARK FLOOD
SCOTT MCDONNELL
SHANE O'FARRELL

ASSISTANT ANIMATION BY
TEEMU AUERSALO
DAVID BUTLER
DAMIAN BYRNE
MARTIN BYRNE
TOM CAULFIELD
STELLA CRISTOFOLINI
VAL CUMMINS
DAVID JONES
JOHN KEANE
LORRAINE LORDAN
PASCHAL MAGUIRE
ADAM MCCONNELL
RICHARD MOONEY
FIONA MURPHY
BRONAGH O'HANLON

DANCE PERFORMANCE BY
PHILLIP LEE

LAYOUTS BY
OWEN FITZPATRICK

BACKGROUNDS BY
OWEN FITZPATRICK
PAUL MADDEN
BRONAGH O'HANLON

DIALOGUE TRACK-READING BY
WORD WORKS STUDIO
SAM POUCH
AMANDA SHIEL

POST-PRODUCTION CONSULTANT
CÚÁN MAC CONGHAIL

PRODUCTION ACCOUNTANT
STEPHEN KENNAUGH

FRAMEWORKS CO-ORDINATORS
ÁINE O'HALLORAN/TIM BOOTH

POST-PRODUCTION SOUND FACILITY
LIME STREET SOUND

POST-PRODUCTION SOUND SUPERVISION BY
MACALLA

VOICE DIRECTION BY
MARCUS MAC CONGHAIL

POST-PRODUCTION ANIMO BY
A FOR ANIMATION
MARK TAYLOR
ZAN LIGHT
HAYLEY CROSBIE
GARY BROWN
NOELLE GARTLAN

POST-PRODUCTION SERVICES BY
WINDMILL LANE LTD.
PAULINE O'ROURKE

SOUND DESIGN BY
TONY MCGUINNESS

FINAL MIX BY
LIME STREET SOUND
PAT STOKES

ONLINE EDITOR
WINDMILL LANE LTD.
ALAN SULLIVAN

MUSIC COMPOSED AND ARRANGED BY
GREGORY MAGEE

ART DIRECTION BY
OWEN FITZPATRICK

EDITED BY
RÓNÁN Ó MUIRGHEASA

ASSOCIATE PRODUCERS
CAROLINE DUNN
STUART SWITZER

PRODUCED BY
KEITH FORAN
ANDREW KAVANAGH

DIRECTED BY
ANDREW KAVANAGH

IN ASSOCIATION WITH ROCKET ANIMATION

FUNDED BY
BORD SCANNÁN na hÉIREANN/THE IRISH FILM BOARD

RADIO TELIFÍS ÉIREANN

THE ARTS COUNCIL

From An Evil Cradling has screened at the following Film Festivals:

Dublin 1999
Galway 1999
Cork 1999
Foyle 1999
London Irish Film Festival 2000
Manchester Short. Film Festival, 2000
International Film Festival of Wales 2000
MECAL, Barcelona 2000
World Expo Hanover 2000
Kerry Int. Film Festival, 2000
Krok , Russia, 2001
Melbourne, Australia 2002
Adelaide, Australia, 2002
Dublin Fringe Festival 2002
Bite the Mango Film Festival, June 2003
Bradford Irish Animation Retrospective, BAF! November 2003
Irish Animation Retrospective, Animex International Animation Festival, University of Teeside, February 2006
Irish Animation, PifPaf Festival, Olomouc Czech Republic, December 2008
Animadrid, Madrid, September 2010
Filmoteca de Zaragoza Screening , October 2010

Irish Animation Festival, Damascus, Syria, December 2010
Annecy 2012 - Monday 4 June 14h00 Décavision / Salle 2 (Forty Frames of Green Programme 4)

More Information: http://kavaleer.com/

BBC's Funky Fables

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Funky Fables - CBBC

Storyboarding for the BBC's 'Funky Fables' animation series (2008)

Storyboards for 7 x Episodes of CBBC's 26 x Episode 'Funky Fables' series (2008) including 'Sleepwalking Beauty' (Episode 1), 'A Knight's Tale' (Episode 3), 'The Mirror Trek'd' (Episode 7), 'Legs & Muffet' (Episode 14), 'The Prince Maker' (Episode 19) and 'Goldilocks And The Big Heist' (Episode 22).

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