When the world’s getting too wordy…

Yesterday I finished drawing the last location for our animation pilot “Sunny and the meowing tree”. It will be our third short film where the story will be told without words. I’d wish to find a way how to fill every tiny part of an expressed idea with power to touch the audience's souls. Ideally, it might be just a single glance or a gesture giving some interesting experience.

Surely, I’m aware of me standing somewhere in the beginning of this way and being so distant from those masters who have inspired me – Charlie Chaplin, Slava Polunin, Rowan Atkinson…. But I believe it’s worth trying =)

Speaking of new project, it actually started almost 12 years ago as a short story, a comedy – “Miss Beam – the great artist”. Certainly, it was written after watching series about Mr. Bean. I was so impressed how skillfully Rowan Atkinson creates funny situations with minimum tools. But at the same time, being a positive person, I’d wish to have someone… sunnier 😊 Yup, that’s how miss Beam was born, but later I’ve found that miss Beam is taken by someone else.

First stories about miss Beam were welcomed by readers what gave me inspiration to write a sitcom series, but producers didn’t like the idea. Now I’m happy to have all necessary tools to produce my own films with my characters. Well, let’s see how the audience meet them…

My first international writer contract

This happened back in 2010, when I was on the search for a job and decided to test my fate at some point. I sent some CVs to New Zealand, to IT companies as a Technical Writer and my story “Higher than stars” to Japan, Tokyo, applying for International Festival “Story Circus”. I wished to see what God kept for me, which way is mine. As a result of that experiment, I didn’t receive any reply from New Zealand, but… Yes, my story got into Top20 best works of the Tokyo festival. Soon I received a contract from Marza Animation Planet, a branch of famous Sega Company. So, animation didn’t come into my life just out of blue…

In January I received also this wonderful card from Marza Animation Studio. It was so kind of them to send me these seasonal wishes…

A Wooden Cat's Secret

Working on animation projects as a Screenplay Writer for many years, it was so exciting to get all tools for creating a whole picture in hands one day. Yes, it was such a joy to have this ability to change any aspect of your future film in every way.  

Well, let me introduce you to our first animated film is a family-friendly love story, a story of a family reunion that happened thanks to a secret of a small wooden figurine... That film was drawn with only a mouse =) We used Krita for animation and Shotcut for video editing. 

One of concepts was to produce a film that could be understood without any language =) 

Our new animation film "Elixir of Life"

Recently, I and my wife Ira finished working on our new animation film "Elixir of Life". It was a really interesting experience to see how a fairy tale I've written many years ago is coming into reality - slowly, scene by scene, but steady this story of an old alchemist, who received an expected present that changes his life, became visually real... 

By the way, our film has no dialogues - no language limits, the story will be told in the language of your heart. At least we hope so... Just in case you're curious about technical part, this film is a result of our work with Adobe Animate. If you wish to support our small family studio (just me and my wife), please, share the film with your friends. Thanks in advance.  

Arrival - How we feel the time

I've watched “Arrival", and just finished reading the screenplay. Yes, it's not new, but I can't miss it having some relation to the world of translators and being a fan of good sci-fi. What I like most about this film is its wonderful integrity – here are so many scenes, details, ideas whirling around one clear concept – time is just one of many dimensions. I have never sensed it like this in other sci-fi movies. But this idea is not just clearly-conveyed – it's served beautifully as a consolation for those whom we have lost once. The film creators seem to pull time out of the cloth of this world giving us a remarkable chance to feel how it may look... All other things, including language-related ones, work on this main idea, for example, that's why the alien's language represented in this movie doesn't have that cause-effect base as English does.       

The Circle - Who's in charge?

We've watched “The Circle”, a cyber-related movie, starring Emma Watson and Tom Hanks. The movie is really actual, with a theme, frequently discussed in social networks, and with an interesting ending. I don't want to share spoiling details here =) but, for me, personally, an ordinary & boring ending is when a cyber system is being destroyed, not giving any other way of social interactions. What “The Matrix” offers as an alternative way? The same military-based system that shows who exactly has created the matrix, that its roots are actually in our crooked souls. But it's different in “The Cirlce”. This film gives us a really great scene, open to different points of view. Perhaps, exactly this open ending and still unsolved conflict became the reason for low rate and low back-office of this film. There are still lots of talks about weaknesses of different elements of the story, but I loved this climax scene - it was really great and unique for Hollywood movies.  

The theme itself is also hot – how social networks use our personal data. It is given in a very vivid form here, aching with its uncertainty in actions and lines of the lead (Emma Watson). Perhaps, as ever, the truth is somewhere in a balance between transparency and privacy. The question is who determines this balance, this limit... Who's in charge? How easily it is to cross the line, beyond which the freedom turns into its opposite — total control...

I have heard about so-called narrow-targeted movies (for Spanish-speaking audience and for India), which could be a base for this film in a commercial sense - but they are not available in my country. I'm sure the audience in totalitarian countries like Russia or Iran, where social networks are usually associated with freedom and true democracy, movies of that kind play a special social awareness role. I'm very thankful to all the team involved into this project. They've done a great social job despite the box-office and possible intentions.

    

     

What is it?

Books, screenplays, pictures, music and other creative works become cheaper and cheaper as more and more such things come to the market. We need more and more strength to promote our works to be recognized or just read/listened, watched. It’s a general situation with small variations depending on quality of our talents. People say information should be free. Ok, nobody forces our brothers and sisters create anything, but they do and they will. We, almost all, say the same – that it’s our passion, our need. Note, it’s the need to produce information, despite its value for the others. What is it?

More and more texts, videos, pictures, sounds stream into our living space – almost everything what a human being can sense. Most of these are just informational noise, valueless for us. Clearness, filters and just silence turn to be our need too. Their prices slowly grow up. We are ready to pay for not sending us advertisement, for filtering our mails from spam, for search services. We are looking for something really valuable. What is it?