Flatpack Festival 09

We've been invited by the good folk at 7 Inch Cinema to put together a panel event for this year's Flatpack. So Animate Projects will be presenting 'Flipping Heck', featuring top talent Mark Simon Hewis, Stephen Irwin, Thomas Hicks and Suky Best on Friday 13 March.

Seems that the students and alumni of Birmingham City University are already looking to Stephen Irwin's film The Black Dog's Progress for inspiration for their shop window displays.

There's also, a special screening of Lorenzo Fonda’s documentary about Italian street artist Blu, Jim le Fevre will be rocking his Phonographantasmascope (turning record players into zoetropes), plus there'll be children's workshops, early cinema screenings and much, much more. And the special guests this year are David O'Reilly and Guy Sherwin.

Flatpack Festival brings an array of filmic delights to Birmingham from 11 to 15 March 2009.


Image: Unicycle Film, production still, Thomas Hicks

Arts Council England commission animated Christmas Card by Animate's own Suky Best

We are thrilled that the Arts Council commissioned Suky Best to make a wonderful animated Christmas card. You can watch it here.

They made this wise decision having seen Suky's AnimateTV 2008 film Early Birds.

AnimateTV 2008 new films - first outing

And last night we had a preview screening of the films we commissioned last year - seven of them! It was all a bit nerve-wracking - the first time anyone except us and the artists had seen them, and all on a big screen at the Birkbeck/ICO preview cinema.

They looked and sounded great and went down a storm.

Catch them on Channel 4 on 21 September (five to midnight). They'll be on animateprojects.org in October, and there are live launch events from November - Aurora Festival in Norwich, Encounters Festival at Arnolfini in Bristol, FACT Liverpool, finishing up at Tate Modern at the beginning of December. Actual dates and times when we've got them.