Over the last year or so I've been using my spare time to make a little cartoon of my own called "Dog and Ball". If you're in Southern Italy next week, it'll be screening on Friday 24th at the Imaginaria Festival in Conversano.
It's a very simple visual comedy about a dog who loses his ball in a bull's field, and tries various ways and means to retrieve it. It's all drawn in TVPaint, my favourite program for hand-drawn animation, which has rapidly become an industry standard over the last few years.
The film is not available to view online yet because I'm still submitting it to festivals, and most festivals prefer to show films that aren't readily available elsewhere. It's an understandable policy - who's going to go out of their way to watch something they can see on YouTube-? - but the downside for creators, of course, is that we can't have our cake and eat it by allowing our work to be seen by all our potential clients until it's done the rounds of the festivals. Some events, including the Manchester Animation Festival, are beginning to change their thinking on this. After all these are social and networking occasions as well as opportunities to see films.
This is my first festival screening for a few years, so I'm delighted to be getting work out in the 'real world' again. Once it's used up all its festival applications, I'll make it available online.