Jennifer Linton

Festival updates & random musings.

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Hello, my darklings. Hope you’re enjoying the warmer-than-usual weather in February (at least in Toronto). Just wanted to post an update on the various film festivals that are screening my work over the next few weeks.

Firstly, I’m truly honoured to have my short animated film La Petite Mort included in the “Independent (Canadian) Scene” program at Tricky Women 2016 in Vienna. Many heartfelt thanks to Madi Piller, executive director of Toronto Animated Image Society (TAIS), who curated this program. She is a tireless supporter of independent animators.

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Then, this tentacled darling of an animated short slithers her way to Lausanne, Switzerland for La Fête du Slip, an international porn festival. Needless to say, the preceding link is very NFSW unless you happen to work in a porn shop, or perhaps VICE Magazine. Oddly enough, I don’t consider this film as porn per se, but as a self-professed “sex-positive feminist”, I’m fine with that categorization, too. Evidently, the porn world has been craving more scenes of sexual exchange between a woman and an octopus. This could be a very niche market.

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My other cinematic child, Toronto Alice, travels to Los Angeles for the L.A. International Women’s Film Festival in March. Many thanks to Leslie -Ann Coles for curating the Canadian Shorts program that includes this film.

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I’m also excited to share that I’m currently developing a new script for another of my independent animations. This new project will be closer to La Petite Mort in look and feel, and has the working title of Wunderkammer. Stay tuned.

The Astounding Thaumatrope

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Photo of my thaumatropes in the Magic Gumball Machine of Fate located at Artscape Youngplace in Toronto.

Photo of my thaumatropes in the Magic Gumball Machine of Fate located at Artscape Youngplace in Toronto.

The thaumatrope was an 18th-century toy constructed from a simple disk or card featuring a different picture on each side and attached to two pieces of string. When the strings are twirled rapidly the card rotates on its axis and the two images appear to combine.

The embedded video below demonstrates one of the four different thaumatropes I created as an artist’s multiple for Nuit Blanche 2015 in Toronto**. You can purchase your very own for the princely sum of $2 from the The Magic Gumball Machine of Fate, which will be located at 522 Queen Street West. Bring your twoonies!

**an annual, all-night visual arts event that takes place in the downtown core of Toronto.

Tentacled Darling of the Underground.

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Hello, gentle readers. This summer — though not quite over yet — has whizzed by at an alarming rate and those crisp mornings so characteristic of autumn are beginning to cool the air, causing us to reach for that added layer of clothing. As many of you may know, I was preoccupied this summer with producing, and then promoting, my latest short animated film Toronto Alice. With this task now complete, I thought I should mention the activities of that other child of mine, La Petite Mort, which has lately become the tentacled darling of the ‘underground’ film festival circuit.

Last night (August 26), La Petite Mort screened at the UnderGround Short Film Festival in Cork, Ireland. (Wish I could’ve been there, but the finances just didn’t allow for a trip to Ireland). Earlier in the summer, this film was also featured in the Montreal Underground Film Festival — which touts the delightful acronym of MUFF — where it was nominated for the 2015 Jury Prize/Nomination pour un prix du jury MUFF 2015. It was also featured in the Planet X program at the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, a program that promised “some of the weirdest movies you will ever see” (a notion of which I most heartily approve) .
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Beyond the underground film fest circuit, La Petite Mort has enjoyed some loving from the, ahem, ‘alternative’ porn film festivals like the PopPorn5 Film Festival in São Paulo, Brazil, and the granddaddy of them all, the Berlin Porn Film Festival. Both festivals categorized La Petite Mort under “fetish”, which is a fact I find endlessly funny. These festivals are not dedicated to (what I would characterize as) the mainstream “bleached blonde, breast implants and long, acrylic nails” brand of American-produced pornography, but rather the “pierced, tattooed and hairy armpits” type of alternative, frequently feminist or LGBT, produced porn — which is something I philosophically support. Below is a write-up on La Petite Mort from Lucie Blush, a filmmaker who produces pornography directed at women.

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Toronto Alice update, January 2015.

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Baby, it’s cold outside. Good time of the year to hide out in one’s basement studio, making things move a little bit at a time. After a very busy Fall term at my teaching jobs, I’ve settled down a bit with a lighter course load for the Winter. This is very good news for my Toronto Alice animation project, which is now back in progress. Only 01:27 done thus far, but we’re getting there.

Walking loop for Toronto Alice

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Paper cutouts used in walking loop.

Paper cutouts used in walking loop.

Rough cut of a “walking loop” I created for my upcoming animated film “Toronto Alice”. Using the classical animation technique of a lightbox + peg-bar, I created 26 separate drawings that were then printed, coloured and cut-out. The sequence was then shot using the frame-capture software Dragonframe, swapping in the different cutouts frame-to-frame. The footage was exported into After Effects, where the background was keyed-out, and the walking looped using time remapping. A moving background will eventually be placed behind the walking character.

While all the preliminary work was time-consuming, the advantage is that the “walking loop” can be played infinitely, for as long as I need it in the scene.