The Ballerina featured in the National Post!
A film that I worked on was featured in the National Post! This was a fantastic film. I am so excited to see it when it when the effects are finished!
I mostly helped with set dressing & construction, but you can see me between the lines in this article as one of the three people simultaneously on the phone with the City of Toronto when we realized the costume designer's landlord had mistaken the corset - which was drying on the porch - for garbage. And still at her place helping out with last-minute costuming at 3am when Jacob and George suprised her with its inconceivable safe return. It was just completely balls-out ridiculously awesome.
Also: Everyone who worked on this film was awesome. I am not sure how many more times I can fit the word "awesome" into this post.
a variety of applications of the same ideology.
I have a lot of things to catch you up on today, but first: one of the few images I've made lately that isn't intended to be cannibalized into something larger than itself, except my general confusion about how the hell cynical old me managed to find herself in a thriving, respectful, silly-ness driven romantic and creative relationship when so many of my cohorts for some reason feel like they need to settle with people who make them feel like they are being slowly lobotomized.
I have been EXTREMELY busy this summer, which always hits me like a pile of bricks. I keep myself busy through the winter but forget how many opportunities rain from the sky when the whether warms up.
Like the song says. It went from hovel to useful space over the course of a few weeks thanks pretty much entirely due to the construction skills and insight of JJ Tebrake and Misha Snyder. The ghost pictured above is illustrator Erin Ornstein, who is, in fact, a ghost lately, in that I do not see her nearly as much as I should in person and who really needs to be putting more of her stuff on the interwebs.
So far the studio is pretty much set to go, if we get our screens exposed elsewhere, but we are ambitious types and have dreams of building our own on-site exposure unit. We don't have the funds collected to complete it yet, but this past weekend we gave it a run through anyway with the materials we did have: christmas lights in the place of a uv safe light, fluorescents rather than blacklights, bits of random stuff we had lying around to cover it, and a chunk of slightly tinted coffee-table glass we found on the side of the road. (Eventually we're going to find a good price on a chunk of 2'x4' plexiglass.) Our images exposed but a lot of the detail was lost, . It was a crap-ton-o-fun. (For serious!) With a little more money and experimentation we will master it! The picture above is JJ, Kat Verhoeven and I, lurking over our in-progress exposure unit, which seemed to get more ghetto as which realized how many supplies we were short. (That's why you do a run-through, right?)
We've already got an awesome handful of artists contributing to the studio, but we're hoping to meet some cool people through it, other illustrators and artists looking to do some screen printing in a space that's nice and big and well-ventilated! If you're looking to do some screen printing this summer, you should contact any of the people mentioned in this here blog post (myself included) to let us know you're interested!
All the details were lost of these when we exposed them but I'm keeping them for the next experiment. That type was a lot of fun and I'm pretty sure is going to look amazing printed. I love type. Type type type. These were made by painting in thick, thick ink directly on acetate. I didn't get a picture of Kat's but she did hers on rubylith, which I am EXCITED to try at the next opportunity. But the straight ink on acetate has a wonderful quality, the ink clings to it so beautifully, and I hope someday when I get through my already ridiculous list of projects I want to do i get a chance to experiment doing some shadow puppet animation playing with bending acetate and filming the shadows.
Dear other multimedia artists out there: if you decided you're going to produce a stop motion animation, do it in the winter. Especially if you don't have air conditioning. You can't have windows open or a fan blowing when working with a medium that registers to slightest movement shifts. Stick to digital animation for the season so you can work on your laptop in some crispy coffee shop.
I HAVE LEARNED THINGS. Growing as a person right here. (I am going to finish this animation if it takes me all year.)
Misha and I went for another Drawn Dinner, you can see Kat's review of the Toronto restaurant WVRST. Which was amazing, in my own words, and I hope to go to again Trevor is threatening hosting his next birthday there. Fingers crossed!
Also at that dinner was Jenn Woodall, an artist I lived with for a while and have had the wonderful chance lately to work with more closely lately. She's been extremely lovely in introducing me to the wonderful world of the live-action film industry. And I wanted to link her website again because I recently updated it to wordpress. 
So that all is a bare, hobby-shaped morsel of what I've been working on this summer so far! There's a lot more: collaborating on web design with a trio of talented humans, sticking my thumbs into as many independent film pies as possible, madly canvassing for an internship which seems like it's looking to go my way real soon. (I am really hoping this will make my resume and my general brainset settle from "Brave Wanderer" to "Focused Multimedia Enthusiast.") I have some hilarious stories from a few jobs I've applied for showcasing the, uh, interesting personalities who advertise for free help on craigslist. It wouldn't be professional to gossip about it online, but let me tell you this creative professional business has some characters. (Luckily, many of these characters are fifty-seven shades of awesome. I have met more people that I want to keep knowing in the past two months than I have in the last four years.)
I was going to include in this post a list of all the films I've worked on this summer that aren't mine, but as they're all being produced with the intention of being submitted in festivals I don't want to mess anything up for anyone by "leaking" things about them online. Oh well. They were all awesome and you should go out of your way to watch every one of them.
ETA: We now have an Indie Go Go fundraising platform (as well as a name!) for our screen printing studio. Check it out! Every little bit helps!
Naked No More
Close-up of Previously Naked Guy
A lot has changed on set since last we met! This guy has pants. And a new tripod, and a new rig for the speechbubble, and the gravestone has a makeover. If you were on my twitter or facebook fanpage you also saw this after-set-construction-but-before-final-costuming progress shot. I am hoping to finish principal photography on this project by the end of July, so I can have my studio back to do... pretty much anything else. I've got some illustration projects I want to do, and I want to make another comic for Zine Dream in August.
I am realizing a lot lately that I really need to make friends with a musician. I am entirely un-musical, but I'm always making these films with no dialogue and I know they need a soundtrack but no music is perfect and I could fart around in garage band and come up with some chords that might sound like they go together, but I should really be finding someone with a lot more talent than I but a similar sense of aesthetics so we can collaborate. I tried doing this a few years ago with a friend of mine, but she was overseas and it just became very complicated and disintegrated. I think I need someone I can sit down at a piano or violin or whatever with. Do you like ghost stories and stuff that looks like it's made out of bits of trash? Do you make music to match? Any Toronto Atmospheric Composers wanna get a drink with me sometime? (That is the preferred term, right?)
same i always was.
I don't know if these are accepted stereotypes or anything like that, I'm just basing these archetypes off of the impression I get based on the names attached to work I see. Most of the work I see that I find really innovative and exciting seems to come out of Europe, which makes me really jealous, and I wonder where they get the money to make things. The north american stereotypes are mostly based on everyone here insisting that you HAVE to go to the states if you ever want to get a real job. Working for a big studio doesn't sound all that appealing to me.
I'm taking a stop motion class at OCADu, here is my progress as of a few hours ago. I was experimenting with yellow backlighting because it's the bulb i happened to have in my lamp, so now my characters have been relocated to the PITS OF HELL. (Or, possibly, the barren surface of the sun.)
firkin student debt animation
Now! That think that I have been working on for ages! Is finally revealed! After only about a million technical difficulties!
Apocalyptic Firkin Application from Gillian Blekkenhorst on Vimeo.
Mirrored everywhere: Firkin | YouTube | Vimeo
I made this animation %50 for the sake of working on an animation, because I feel like I don't have enough completed examples of one of my favourite media to work in, and the remaining %50 for this Firkin University FU to Student Debt Scholarship/competition/popularity contest thing. Which is not actually an animation contest, so I might be the only animation in the contest. Neat.
Anyway PLEASE VOTE FOR ME, as often as you can, because if I get enough votes I can win five grand off my student loans which is probably more than I'll be able to make in a year. And also it will make up for all the pain I went through trying to get this monstrosity on the Internet. Also that I lost a week of voting because I couldn't get it on the internet.
Sorry about the sound quality. I recorded the narration with my laptop speakers. With all of my money I will hire a sound engineer for my next project. Or at least buy a microphone.