FOREWORD

Sell the kids for foodweather changes moodsspring is here againreproductive glands

We can have some morenature is a whorebruises on the fruittender age in bloom

K. Cobain 20 years ago

Blazing Squids #02

Created and edited by Christyan Lundblad and Igor Noronha

300 copies

Contributors: Carmen Hannibal, Drude Mand-gaard, Denis Chapon, Suzanne Bækby, Karina Posborg, Esben Sloth, John Mallet, Rikke Skovgaard, Rune 10 years-old.

Contact (temporary):iggynore@gmail.com

Financially supported by the Open Workshop.

This magazine is freed from any political or commercial interests.

Esben Jacob Sloth , CGA07

Esben Jacob Sloth , CGA07

Rikke Skovgaard, CGA07

Sarah (???)

Benny, KAU 09

Karina Posborg, CGA07

Carmen Hannibal, KAU09

Drude Mandgaard, CGA08

John Mallett, CGA07

Rune, 10 years old

Christophe Peladan is a stop-motion animator and he’s in Viborg for around 3 years. He’s finishing his film “Goutte d’Or”, about a dead pirate that wants to get the attention of an octopus girl. The pirate ship used in the set attracted many visitors to the studio where the film was being shot, in the Open Workshop. Let’s chat a bit with this all around cool French artist!

- Igor

When did you start your ca-reer in art?

I was always drawing in pri-mary school. if we had to draw something, like Santa Claus, I was asked by the teacher to do it on a big sheet of paper in front of the class. I used to draw a lot of Goldorac (Mazinger Z). In high school, I wanted to be a guitar player, to go to a guitar school after my bac-celor. It turns out that now I have a Master degree in Arts (I hated all my classmates, because they thought they had to be-have like assholes just because they were labeled “artists”). I couldn’t find any specialty: I liked painting, sculpting, etc. Until one day (I was 26, I guess) I bumped into an Aardman book called “How to make you own stop motion movie”, and I thought this was pretty cool. I started doing some amateur mov-ies with a shaky tripod, and I realized I really enjoyed doing that. So I applied to nearly ev-

ery studio in the world (seri-ously: I sent over a hundred ap-plications with a demo DVD) and I got accepted in Germany as an intern. I wanted to go to Canada or South Africa, also because I wanted to leave Toulouse. I stayed 3 months in Germany and got hired for 9 more after for a TV series, then I went back to France to work on Folimage and Toulouse, went back to Germany to work on the second season, etc. Until I went to work on Max & Co. in Switzerland. It was a huge crew: one third were from the Corpse Bride, another third came from Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were Rabbit, and the other third were peo-ple like me, with less ex-perience. It was a really cool mix, in the middle of the mountains, with no big city around us, so the crew was always together and we had cra-zy parties.

A DROP OF GOLD

How did the Goutte d’Or idea came to be?

When I was in Germany, I was really in love with this French girl but she dumped me. And I was very sad, for a whole week I didn’t go to work, I just stayed

home getting wasted (note: the octopus girl character in

the movie is exactly like I used to draw her

back in the day). Then I thought of

making this movie in six months and send

her the DVD with just a post-it saying “watch

me”, so she would cry and come back to me. Now, seven

years later, she is married and I followed my own path, I’m very happy with my family now and my much more awesome woman. (note: the last sentence was added un-der death threat)

What’s the role of themusic in the film?

The music has an im-portant part in the film. In fact the movie started with the music at first: one day I came across this cool song from a band in which Robert Crumb was playing. >>>

I liked it instantly and it fitted very well my idea. I just phoned them and they said sure, you can use it!

Tell us a bit about the anima-tors you’ve hired.

There were 6 in total, but only Ludo and Flo stayed more than just a few weeks. Tim, Dan, Marjo and Brian could only stay for a short time. I’ve been lucky to have them, I couldn’t have animated the whole movie by my-self. The characters are pretty tricky to animate, especially the octopus woman, and most of the time I could hardly animate one second a day! But luckily, ANIMATION IS DONE!!!

What are the challenges one can find when making a film such as this one?

Finding money is definitely a big challenge. The fact that it is my first movie made things much slower, because producers don’t really trust you, and with more money I could have hired many more people and we could move faster. Keep your stamina is also challenging after all this time. Working with close friends can be challenging too. But the hope of having a great feeling in the end keeps you going, and I’m sure after it’s all done it will help me in my career, in case I want to make a feature film, for example.

How was it to supervise the bachelor film “Out of a Forest”?

It was really cool. The students were re-ally motivated and wanted to make some good work. And they trusted me, even though I was a bit embarassed in the beginning because that was the first time I was doing this. It felt awkward to behave like I knew better than them, but come to think of it: I knew better than them. They didn’t have any stop motion experience before that, except a little bit for Tobias. Now they are real pros!

How do you think the en-vironment at the Anima-tion Workshop affected in the making of the film?

Sometimes it’s hard to have to work when people are having fun in the chill-out room, it makes me jealous. The Open Workshop is not a place that has one crew fo-cused for one project, we have different agendas, and I don’t expect anything oth-er than that. But sometimes it’s great, because I can al-ways find a friend to hang out when I need to relax.

Thank you Chris-tophe for the interview. The Blazing Squids team wishes you the best with the film!

In Denmark, an artist is someone very high cultural. An artist is someone who creates pieces which a common man or a simple animator would not un-derstand. A real artist in DK is someone who studied at the Academy for 5 years. And who knows what the heck is going on behind those high walls. It is not for the simple man to know. I say screw that shit. Art is creativity. Every-one at the Animation Workshop are growing artists. All the kids in Kindergarden are art-ists. All the cavemen in the past and your mother is an art-ist when she cooks. Art is not something difficult and very distinguished. Art is simple and relatable. This idea of art being something almost super-natural is something insecure ego-pumped artists want us to believe so they have something to hide behind. It’s a way to make a somewhat superior dis-tance to the viewer. Make people believe they can’t understand it just because they don’t see what the fuzz is about. They make you feel the don’t under-stand the mind of this super sensible master guru who just peed on the clay sculpture in front of them. I dare say most modern art has no or very little sense of

aesthetics or appeal. Most mod-ern art has no sense of humor. Maybe the creators take them-selves so seriouslyPeople spend a lot of time try-ing to make some sense of the world and life in general. We use art to mirror ourselves into. It’s a way to feel we are not alone with our problems. We identify with the woman in the picture or the folk man on the stage.Art is simple. The question is not whether or not something is art. The question is if it’s good art or bad art. If it’s good art, you and everyone else can relate to what you see or hear or smell for that matter. Without any explanations need-ed. Get the band down from the stage. Everyone can learn to play the bass! Nevermind the six-meter-high painting who no one is allowed to take photos off, because they are afraid you might steal their “inven-tion”. Your 6-year-old brother probably did something cooler hanging at home on the fridge. Art is something to put on the wall or in the DVD player that you might relate to emo-tionally or that you may simply just enjoy. It is made by hu-mans, it is for humans. See you around, artists!

Christyan

art!

PLAY IT, PHIL!

Moutain GoatsThe Hound Chronicles+ Hot Garden Stomp

In 2008, I worked in a second hand vinyl shop in Århus. In the early 90’s it had been a super attractive shop with all sorts of weird rarities and cool alterative stuff. American bands like Gi-ant Sand and the Walkabouts would stop by in limos to hang out by the shop. Customers would come from as far away as Norway just to buy records from this very shop when they were in town. But that was in the late 90’s. Now it was 2008 and the shop was aiming on the old nerdy regulars as the main source of income. I worked there behind the cash regis-

ter, guiding people to what records their husbands might want for their birthdays. It was a cool time even when there weren’t many cus-tomers. When I was alone, I could dig into the piles of discs and discover albums I never thought I would like. For some reason my boss didn’t really order new records home which meant that customers af-ter months ands months of no news stopped coming back. Some times there would only be one customer per hour. That gave me a lot of freedom, I put any records I wanted to hear on the record player, I read mu-sic magazines drew sketches and ate all-eco sandwiches from across the street. One day, motivated by boredom, I went thru a lot of little boxes with CD’s without covers from behind the desk. Dusty things. I found a few stickers and some postcards but as I went through the bot-tom shelves I found four cas-sette tapes. One was reggae,

one was a local lo-fi band called “I Drink to Pee”. The last two were two albums by the Mountain Goats. The reggae tape didn’t work, so I threw it out., The local lo-fi tape was re-ally nice and cool, sort of like “One Foot in The Grave” by Beck (K Records) but less memorable songs. The Mountain Goats tapes were the greatest. Both tapes were uniquely decorated with colored pen-cil, the covers were hand-written and photocopied. The songs themselves are prob-ably some of their finest. I have a CD by them from 95 or something, it’s not as good. I borrowed some CD’s from the library from 2004, it’s totally boring neo-folk neutral stuff. It’s not that tapes are wild rocking, it’s still accoustic songs but they are melodic, sim-ple, more powerful and well-crafted songs.I don’t think you can find these songs on Grooveshark or places like that, but I’ll write the song titles anyways just in case you’d ever find them somewhere you have a chance to check it out. If you are interest-ed in owning these two al-bums give me a cassette tape for recording, and then we should talk to Bo Mathorne (CGA) about borrowing his double tape recorder that he has down in his basement. That’s all for now, see ya next month, music lovers.

- Chrystian

The Hound Chronicles:SIDE ONE: The Garden Song. Go-ing to Wisconsin. Spitting To-ward Alpha. Alpha Negative. The Torch Song. Ape. The Cow Song. Going to Chino.SIDE TWO: Love Song #4. Going to Mexico. Lab Rat Blues. Go-ing to Kansas. The Water Song. Going to Spain. Keep it on Your Mind.

Hot Garden Stomp:SIDE A: Pure Milk. Ice Blue. Water Song II. Sun Song. Go-ing to Japan. Are You Cleaning Off the Stone? The Hot Garden Stomp. Love Hymn to Aphrodite.SIDE B: Beach House. Hello There Howard. Going to Norwalk. Fresh Cherries in Trinidad. Feed This End. IS - I. Thanks for the Dress. Tell Me On a Sunday.

Today, in the OW-kitchen, Igor asked me, with his famous Brazilian nonchalance: - Are you going to continue writing in the magazine?- Of course! I answered, It’s on my list of things to do.- But then you need to put it higher on your list.- Why?- Because the deadline is the 25th. - What day are we? - 27.

For this time, in my mu-sic library, I found HIM :

Shantel

1. DJing and remixing tradi-tional Balkan musicHe takes music similar to what Goran Bregovic or the No Smok-ing Orchestra’ are making for the sound track of Emir Ku stu-rica’s films (Underground, Ar-izona Dream, Black Cat White Cat). You may know this balkan gipsy’s big orchestras led by A LOT of brass instruments.

2. His origins are from Bucov-ina.He’s German, but his grand-par-ents where from Bucovina, a re-gion split between Romania and Ukraine, in the mountains.

3. The story.

The next days staying in Istanbul, we played it and sing it very loud in the car of my Turkish friend, when going to the Black Sea, to the Basaar etc … I played it a couple of times when I DJed in Høgni.

You can hear that song and others like ‘Disko Boy’ or ‘Cit-izen of Planet Paprika’ from his new album.

If you use Itunes, you can listen to my whole library through the network. It’s called : Bibliothèque de « DJ Fromage »

I discovered his music during my train trip Paris-Istambul-Viborg for New Year 2009. Down there, in Istanbul, I met some friends, French and Turkish. That day we were walking in that big commercial street that goes to Taksim. For some reason (I think there was a pro-peace in Palestine demonstration) I lost my friends in the crowd. Eventually, we found each oth-ers, and my French friend had bought a record. He said, he was passing by the record shop, he heard the music, he came in, he ask who’s that, “Shantel”, ok I want it. The song he heard was ‘Disko Partizani’ from his eponymous first album. It’s an amazing energetic party song.

Hello, my name is Susanne Bækby Olesen. I’m a freelance ani-mator/designer and director (KAU04/OW).I have decided to write down a few reflections on the short film proj-ect that I have been developing for now 3 years. I would like to share my experience with my fellow anima-tors/directors but not to frighten anyone from starting anything like this themselves. I can only encour-age you to get started if you think you have a great idea. It will prob-ably not be easy but if you believe that it is a good idea and you are ready to fight for it - then hope-fully it will pay off in the end... That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway!

First of all I would like to tell you about my experience. Start-ing from the very first idea and end-ing where I am today. I’m far from done - I’m halfway getting started. And it has been almost 3 years.

2006: Skallerup Klit Feriecenter.

I am spending the weekend in a family resort, with all of my fam-ily; my parents, my sister, uncles, aunts and cousins. It’s a place for happy families. Children everywhere. Water park, wellness and holiday cottages, sports activities inside and outside. Nature, fun and in the evenings great food and dancing.... I’m not going to give away the whole idea now - but something unpleasant is about to happen. And this is what I am basing my movie on. The subject is “alcohol in child families”!

2007: The first background, I made in Photoshop, during the last year at TAW. That’s all I have... an image in

WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF INDEPENDENT FILM MAKING!

“SKÅL VIOLA!” a 7 minutes 2D animated short

film.

Establishment shot, WIP.

my head - and it’s basically every-thing I need for my film. One layout, one pan - what a simple idea! It’s perfect!

Researching: I meet with Trine Moltzen, now leader of Klub Vest, Viborg, to talk about my story - she knows a lot about children dealing with alcohol-ic parents. I want to make sure that my idea is not totally off. I am try-ing to visualize a child experiencing his parents getting drunk and fight-ing. Trine gives me great feedback and I feel a lot more confident about my story. Trine helps me get to know the characters in my film. The whole idea is based on something that I saw - but I don’t know much about the personalities of my characters or the patterns and reasons that rule in these families.

2007: During my internship with Tod Polson at The Monk Studio, Bangkok, I’m working on the script every eve-ning. Together with Maahir Pandie (KAU04) I am developing character de-signs. We want to do this film togeth-er, me and Maahir. At the time it was the “plan” to work on it after gradu-ation, January 2008. I never consid-ered budget, schedule or “housing” to play any important role when I was about to make my film. As a student for 3 years at TAW, all these matters were taken care of; there would be a PLAN, because Michelle and others have figured that out for us. Besides; I would have a place to live and food to eat because I could pay with my S.U. and the small salary from my cleaning job at the gym. It never oc-cured to me that these factors should have the slightest interference with my production...

While working with Tod I share many of my thoughts, concerning my film. “It really isn’t easy, is it! It is extremely difficult to write a good story! I have to be my own pro-

ducer!!! I will have to write the script myself, be the art director, do the animation, find the people who can help me do what I cannot do my-self and I have to find money for the non existing budget!” - “Welcome to the world of independent filmmaking!” was Tod’s response.

January 2008: I graduate. I am now a Bach-elor of Arts in Character Animation (Whew!) and shortly after I start freelancing at Markfilm, Viborg. I pitch my short film idea there, and they like it. I get a workstation at Markfilm’s and they offer to help me find money for the production - so that I can bring my friend Maahir to Denmark and work with him. “Det kører for mig!”

April/May 2008: I make a presentation/ fund-raising folder. I’m developing the first “final” BGs. Applications are written by Claus Toksvig and approx 20 pcs are sent to many different funds. In December we get 25.000 ddk from ANIS for the production - the other applications were turned down. That was not a lot of money! That just covered the expenses of having Claus do all the applications - and left just peanuts for myself.

2008 - 2009: The rest of 2008 I have no fur-ther luck finding money for the pro-duction. I am freelancing a lot - I have to make money to survive, I realise - and I feel like saving up

Early sketch by Maahir Pandie

some money now! I work with Markfilm, JA-film, The Monk Studio and Dracco Scandinavia. Some work is awesome and some is less beautiful, but the point is that I can save up for my short film. I decide to finance the storyboard-ing and background painting myself. I’m willing to spend my own savings and for 6 months I can actually work on this film on my own - if no one else will help me, I’m gonna do it myself! No salary and no “dagpenge” from the A-kasse. I hire a good friend, Jacob Foged (KAU03), to help me out for 2 weeks, cleaning up the messy ani-matic. It’s a great help - and the whole thing looks much better being re-drawn by Jacob’s sensitive hand - but by the end of the 2 weeks I am nowhere nearer a final animatic I realize. But it looks better!

Next step: I make contact with several con-sultants within the field of helping and treating alcoholics and their families; I want to find out if they would be interested in using my film as part of a therapy and, also, to once again bounce off my ideas on people who know what they are talk-ing about. I find that they are re-ally excited about the idea and that this is just what they have been waiting for - something that can il-lustrate a child’s perspective and can help children to put words on their feelings. I am very excited to meet these people. It’s very in-spiring to talk to somebody who is so passionate about their job. They are experts on this area, that I am learning so much about right now. Unfortunately none of these people can offer me any economic support, however they are willing to write letters for me, that expresses their excitement for the project and how they could benefit from this film, if it was produced.

I send an application to The West Danish Film Fund. I get help from Markfilm - because I am way too

emotional on the phone when I talk business with money people. Little advice to you: don’t get upset and hang up on a Filmpulje if you want money from them! Luckily Markfilm helps me out and this time, with help from all the people from the treat-ment centers - I get 50.000 dkk for my project “Skål Viola!” - that is, if we can find the rest of the money for the production elsewhere. This is so exciting! Finally something is happening... The idea works. I’m mov-ing forward, or so it feels!!

From The Open Workshop I am also sponsored a small amount to pay my buddy and Production Manager Claus Toksvig, for writing applications to more funds and I get a little bit for myself. I am very enthusiastic!

October 2009: Bad news - we have to return all the money to the West Danish Film Fund, because we haven’t found more money for the rest of the budget... sigh! Through January and February 2009 I find myself getting more and more physically tired. I literally cannot drag myself to work (at the time I’m staying in a room at the kaserne).

Character development by MP and SB.

Cover of the fundraising material

No wonder: it turns out I’m pregnant! Now what? I have no job and no plan. I have to put my project on hold and do what? I need a job. I’m going to China with my boyfriend to do a stop motion short film with some animation students!

September 2009: We have a lovely little baby boy. His name is Viggo-Louis and he beats everything I have ever done be-fore! Having a baby ROCKS!

However! My project is a big ques-tion. How can I move on with it? While I am on maternity leave I am try-ing out different ideas. I have to do something else.

For one: I probably need to consider if my project is actually good enough. There might be a reason why it’s be-ing rejected over and over again... sometimes I wish somebody would tell me to quit, if that’s the case! But since I am stubborn and will not listen to such silly talks - I can tell you already - don’t even both-er!! :)

...The animatic is nearly done now. Of course all the nice little details that I want to correct will take some more work - but I think it’s time to add some folie and background music. With help from The Open Workshop I get to “hire” Thomas Richard Christensen for the audio. We are about to set up the first meeting. I am excited again, and it feels good!

I get an idea of how to proceed:I put my film on the shelf (as we say in Denmark). I want to write a chil-dren’s book based on the same sto-ry. I am going to consult the former Editor from Egmont - before I start writing. Once again I will meet with the people from the alcohol institu-tions, for advice.

What’s next I cannot tell you. I just put my faith in luck and do little by little when I have some time - eventually I will be able to finish what I began long time ago. And not only would I finish the proj-ect - hopefully my film and book will make a difference for children and adults who happen to deal with alco-hol in their everyday life.

That’s all! I hope this was interesting to read for some of you. Good luck on your own projects and remember the process can be long, but along the way you will meet many interesting people and you will get to reflect a lot on your own work. This is not the only way to do things - hopefully you will have more luck with ideas that get green light and lots of money immediately. Maybe you choose to do the whole thing over a few months (or years) at The Open Workshop - that’s also a great place to realise your dreams.

Cheers Susanne Bækby OlesenW:susanneolesen.blogspot.comE:suscapea@hotmail.com