As the first of a series of regular events, ShellsuitZombie brings you a film screening from the largest short film network in the world, Future Shorts.
The creators of Secret Cinema, Future Shorts are world renowned for supporting short film and the lineup for this festival is no exception. A haul including Oscars, Baftas, Sundance and Annecy Festival awards just goes to show that the films you will see are amongst the best in the world.

Official Programme

1. Deeper Than Yesterday

Filmed on an old decommissioned military submarine with 35mm cameras, Deeper Than Yesterday tells the story of a Russian crew who suffer a rather savage form of cabin fever. Directed by Ariel Kleiman, a graduate of the VCA at the University of Melbourne, recently said  “The more uncomfortable I feel making a film the better it will be.” Jurors have compared the film to “The Lower Depths,” Maxim Gorky’s best-known play – very Russian with long period of isolation and madness.

Winner of International Short Filmmaking Award at Sundance.

2. The External World

A boy learns to play the piano in this rather dark but occasionally humorous mediation on the anxieties and fears of a modern civilized society. Created as a lo-fi animation, The External World is a surreal seventeen-minute collection of vignettes which borrows themes from pop culture, cinema and videogames – classic and contemporary. Some have heralded this short as “a unique reconstruction of the universe” while O’Reilly recently noted in an interview, “I like creating experimental films that have an emotional function.”

3. Incident by a Bank

A detailed and humorous account of a failed bank robbery: A single take where roughly 100 people meticulously recreate an actual event that took place in Stockholm in June 2006. Directed by Ruben Östlund, these events were witnessed first hand along with his producer Erik Hemmendorff while on the way to the Swedish Film Insititute. The film questions the reality of how, really, robberies happen, and what they might or, should, look like. “Making ‘Incident by a Bank’ is a way to correct the false images of robberies we see almost daily in action movies made in Hollywood,” says Östlund.

Winner of the Golden Bear at Berlinale.

4. The Eagleman Stag

The Eagleman Stag is a unique 9-minute stop-motion animated film that depicts a man’s haunting obsession with the passage of time and his unorthodox relationship with a beetle. Directed by Michael Please, the production was a highly ambition final year film produced while studying at the RCA – it is based on a story he previously wrote entitled “The Life and Time of Peter Eagleman.” Orchestral music was integral to this film and composed in tandem with the animation process.

Winner of Best Short Animation at BAFTA, and Special Jury Prize at SXSW.

5. God of Love

Matheny, who wrote, directed and starred in this 19-minute inventive comedy about love-inducing darts won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short in 2011. A recent film student graduate at New York University, God of Love was produced as his thesis film project while enrolled at NYU’s MFA program. At the Oscars, he was hailed as delivering one of the best acceptance speeches of the evening and thanked his mother for her contribution to the movie.

Oscar Winner in 2011 for Best Live Action Short Film.

6. Luminaris

Inspired by the Argentinian instrumental tango piece entitled “Lluvia de Estrellas” (Star Rain), Luminaris tells the story of a man living in a world controlled by time by light. Each day inhabitants of this fictional world awake and are pulled, as if by some otherworldly force, to their jobs by sunlight. Combining pixilation and stop motion techniques; the surrealist short pairs styles reminiscent of art deco with black cinema. Zaramella explains, “Originally, I approached the project as a puppet animation story, but doing some pixilation tests in the gardens of Fontevraud, just for fun, the seed of the present short was born: the idea of sunlight as a magnetic force.”

Winner of the Audience and Fipresci Award at Annecy 2011 International Animation Festival

The best thing is, the whole thing will be introduced by one of the Future Shorts team. Plus you can go to the bar and still see the screen! Yeah boi.

GET YOUR TICKETS HERE

see you there chums.

Over the past year They’ve pimped people’s profile pics, created customised royal plates and even commandeered an ice cream van to deliver to people’s doorsteps. Now, to celebrate the end of year 1, Poke have helped Orange bring back a popular item from their feed, Secret Portraits.

People describe themselves in one comment – they can either use the #SecretPortrait hashtag, or they can submit their description via the Facebook page – A bunch of illustrators then bring these descriptions to life.

Check out past illustrations here, then get tweeting yeah?

The latest video from ShellsuitZombie’s favourite band Keston Cobblers Club is now up and it’s an absolute tearjerker. The story of a couple realising a lifelong dream is KCC’s most ambitious work to date and reportedly caused a few headaches (and bruises) but the end result is totally worth it.

In other news, Keston Cobblers Club are now (finally) on Spotify - add them to your chillout playlists motherfuckers.

A couple of weeks ago we held a zine workshop with Alex Zamora from FEVERZINE - have a watch of this video to see what we got up to. We’ll be putting up photos of some of the zines shortly (the video barely scratches the surface of the body of work produced), but until then be content with pausing the HD footage and salivating/giggling over it.

We absolutely loved this workshop, there’s nothing better than getting people  to stretch their creative muscles in new ways and producing a magazine in 3 hours is definitely a good way to do it.

More New Blood videos to come…

Zac Gorman is an american illustrator with an interest in games – upon the recent discovery of a love for animated illustration he has begun to experiment, largely using the subject of The Legend of Zelda, producing these visually arresting but also very funny cartoons.

Zac seems to have about 12 websites but check out his work here, his gamer type blog here and his new tumblr ‘I draw Nintento’ here. All three are well worth a look.

A week ago we bopped up to Leeds to run a workshop as part of the uber-hipster Diesel Island campaign (which you can check out here) – our brief was just to do something ‘ShellsuitZombie’ up there, but instead we decided to do something completely over-ambitious and as far as we were aware at the time of their publicity going to print nigh on impossible to pull off.

Isn’t it great, this whole revolution of streaming cloud-based media, taking on the world of TV head on. Why even as I type I’m watching Stewart Lee whining with a guitar in a program that aired a week ago, all through the magic of the internet. So we thought, what with the Diesel island being an island, why can’t it’s inhabitants do some sort of pirate broadcast. The world will finally see, live, what we few can do. And so the idea was born.

A month later, a monday night at 6pm (an hour before the workshop started) and we couldn’t get our £9,000 rented camera working. We had yet to fully sort out our lights, props, costumes, script, sound or cast and we were due to go live in three and a half hours. Yet this was all part of the plan. Our workshop members would eventually form cast, crew, set dressers, props guys, cameramen and boom operators, a feat that they ended up handling admirably despite there being cool beers for free at the end of the room. Somehow we managed to put on a half hour show involving three musical numbers, a bizarre quiz, several sketches (including a disturbing rendition of Tom Hanks and Wilson enjoying each others’ company) and an island QVC flogging bananas, cocktail umbrellas and ‘half a bottle ‘o beer’. It may have been raw, but it definitely happened and some people definitely watched it. Job done.

Here are some photos by James Mitchell – for more check his flickr.

Thanks to everyone who came and those who tuned in. Never again (until next time).

Looky here, a nice bit of promotional prettiness for degree show G R A F T from the students at  Liverpool art and design academy. Only for a selected few creatives, the lucky bastards.

They say:

The invite is hand bound 3mm gray board with buckram book makers cloth and spine tape. The motif on the front is heat pressed tee-shirt vinyl.
The message is silk screen printed white, on to photosensitive ilford paper in dark room conditions where it was cut to size and packaged in light proof envelopes. These were sent the next day.

The exhibition runs from the 26th of May at the Art and Design academy in Liverpool.

We’ve been all over the country this month – at one point nipping up to Leeds where we presented a whole pile of waffle to students from the three universities at an event called ‘don’t be an idiom‘, a curious mix of caravans, haybails, wax eyeballs and other often experimental pieces of design and illustration. It was great to meet so many of the guys up there and the moment we got everyone dancing to a song of our own composition (garageband, boom) in the middle of our lecture was both bizarre and exhilarating in equal measure.

We are constantly being excited by the creativity and comradeship of the northern bunch – it sometimes seems like everyone knows everyone, regardless of which college they’re at. As a thank you to them (and you) here’s the song we all danced to. Bangin’.

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The Shakey Monkey Space app. Wow, we (and probably a lot of other people) have been saying for ages that someone should somehow take the piss out of this kind of work, and blow me down, the guys at Cog Design have only gone and done it.

This app lets you create a piece of work worthy of many a fffound page (and unfortunately many portfolios) with a wiggle of your hand, purely by shuffling together an assortment of animals, lines, space and sky images, shapes and underlined obliques. In fact there are so many that, with over 1 million combinations your work will probably be more original than the object of its derision. What makes it even better is that you can then export your masterpiece inside its very own mystery ‘poster-poser’ shot. So fashionable.

We asked creator John Burton about the app (and when I say ‘asked about the app’ we of course meant ‘invited to have a rant’). He said this:

‘We created the app because we were bored with people producing the same kind of trendy, monkey-floating-in-space, style-over-substance imagery. It all seemed so formulaic. We took a satirical approach from the start, poking as much fun at ourselves and tackling as many design clichés as we could – the animals and random geometric shapes floating in space, strikethrough and underlined block capitals in italics, the faceless-phantom presenter of all posters holding up your end result. The result is a bit of fun we want everyone to get
involved in.’

Well we’ve had a lot of fun with it (and it’s free). Download it and nip this vein of unoriginality right in the bud.

In this promo for Crytek’s new FPS ‘Crysis 2‘, a bunch of shady looking chaps got in a van and illegally projected the game onto various landmarks around London and Paris. The result? Loads of people got to try the game and by the looks of it they nearly got arrested. Rock and Roll man, rock and roll.

ps. the game is SICK. Black-ops beater.

This scrabble board, named A1 and created by Industrial design student Andrew Clifford out of ash and mahogany, uses 6 different fonts on the tiles and aims at the designers and typographers of the world. As a product it sure is purty, especially with the inclusion of cork buffers and magnetic board holder thingies, though I don’t know if I could hack playing a game with the full mixed letter set (individual typefaces would also be available) – my brain has enough trouble with ‘words with friends’ without a curious mix of serifs, slabs, sans, gothic and blobby fonts used here.

Still, if you’re interested in a limited edition fancy-pants version of a belter of a game, head to his site where you can put your name down for one. At least if you have shit letters you’ll be able to touch wood for better ones.

The stand-out at last night’s IAB awards was comfortably this campaign for the mini countryman (frankly a pretty ugly car) – engaging audiences young, old and across the world with a simple challenge. We just wish we’d got a go in it ourselves. Congrats to Profero (and Ross from SSZ, who it turned out worked on the campaign) for a win well deserved.

ps. Kudos to the guy basically licking the fake windscreen/where all the sweaty mid-shopping-trip armpits have been wiped. Yum.

Howdy, so we’ve been keeping a slight radio silence over the last week or two, but don’t think we’ve been resting on our laurels, oh no. In fact we went … up north. I know. Like, further than Watford even. In a mad few days with D&AD we visited Newcastle and Leeds, holding portfolio crits, workshops and the odd lecture (like above yeah?).

We met some cracking students from unis spanning the breadth and length of the North (and bits of Scotland), even learning what an interactive media course gets up to (there’s some mind-boggling work coming out of Northumbria this year) and witnessing a guy spit his gum on another person’s iPad (mid Angry Birds), pick it up, pop it back in his gob and wander off down the train. Waste not want not.

We’ll follow this post with a couple of the students we met whose work shone, but rest assured the state of design education in the North is very much alive and kicking (and it’s WELL CHEAP!).

Our Liverpool VS night was a huge success, resulting in (amongst other things) rude sketches, wall sitting, bloody noses, free t-shirts, posters, magazines and books, a lot of beer, even more chat and many new acquaintances both young and old(er). We hope to go back to Liverpool in the near future, but for now our sights are well set on London’s equivalent next Tuesday. So far the grads are up 76 points to 53, so industry had better buck their ideas up.

To check out more Liverpool photos head to our flickr page.

During a recent project creating ‘Bourne Identity style’ fantasy interfaces, this video was a true inspiration.Every transition, wipe, pixellate/sharpen, swipe, zoom, loading digit and fake OS imaginable is present. The film stars just don’t know how good they’ve got it.

Check out Mark’s site here.