Michael Lavine worked with Neo-beatnik, post-gonzo author and whiz-bang raconteur, Mike Edison, to promote his new book DIRTY! DIRTY! DIRTY! – OF PLAYBOYS, PIGS, AND PENTHOUSE PAUPERS, AN AMERICAN TALE OF SEX AND WONDER. Mike is a great writer and spoken word performer who tours with a back up band called “The Interstellar Rendevous Band.” This particular line up includes Jon Spencer from The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Mickey Finn from Boss Hogg and Dee Pop from the legendary Bush Tetra’s. Even though the video is chaotic and crazy, the devised formula was fairly systematic in its structure. But who really cares about that? Its just fun to watch!


Mike Edison from Michael lavine on Vimeo.

The video tells the story of Canadian amputee and more importantly, Paralympian,  Alister McQueen. McQueen sprints past vignettes of his rehabilitation process and preceding car accident. The entire one minute ad was filmed continuously with no CGI involved in the entire process. Directed by Mark Zibert, a behind the scenes look at the video shoot is below.


MZ_Paralympics - Making Of from VAUGHAN HANNIGAN on Vimeo.

Synopsis
Haydom Lutheran Hospital is one of the few hospitals in Tanzania. It is a donation/volunteer based hospital which serves over a million people of central Tanzania, currently set to lose funding in 2014. We are raising funds for a documentary film about the hospital which will be used to raise awareness and encourage countries and corporations to fund the future of the hospital.

What is LIFE WITHOUT CARE?
Life Without Care is a documentary film project centered on Haydom hospital in remote central Tanzania, 200 miles from Arusha, the nearest large town. For 60 years, a mostly volunteer medical staff has provided care to over a million people throughout the region with a skeleton crew and overwhelming need. The people relying on the hospital include the Hadza tribe, one of the oldest living cultures on earth, and the last full-time hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa. Patients travel for days with their entire families to receive care, which is provided free to those who cannot afford it.

In 2014, Haydom’s major source of outside funding is going to be cut, leaving the hospital unable to operate, and the million people who rely on it will lose access to anything but rudimentary medical care. In this moment of crisis, there are stories that need to be told and voices that need to be heard: the story of the doctors who give up everything to work in one of the poorest and most isolated regions of the planet, and the voices of the people who rely on that care - and face its imminent loss.

About the Team
Photographer Michal Venera first visited Haydom last year, and brought back beautiful footage and photographs of the hospital, its patients, and its work. In order to tell its story in full, he plans to return to the hospital with Norbert, a surgeon who, along with his physician wife, has given the last four years of his life volunteering in Africa, and documentary filmmaker Daniel Byers of Skyship Films.

Telling Haydom’s story means telling the stories of the people of Tanzania, reaching out into extremely remote communities to find the voices of those whose lives have been changed by the hospital’s work, and the patients who will be directly impacted by its disappearance. We hope through this film to let the many people who rely on the hospital - doctors, staff, and patients alike - to demonstrate how essential it is to the region. And who knows, maybe we can turn some heads and change some hearts, and keep the place alive.

Michal's photography can be seen at www.michalvenera.com and his Workbook Portfolio HERE

Here are some of his prints available as rewards:











Daniel's past documentary work can be seen at www.skyshipfilms.com

Why We Need Money
Haydom is extremely remote, and accessing it in the first place will mean a long and difficult journey - travel by air, jeep, and foot. In addition to our ground costs for the time spent at the Hospital, we'll also be traveling long distances to remote villages to speak to people and gather their stories.

While we are donating our own gear and time to the production, we'll need to make sure we're properly outfitted to shoot in an environment as harsh as the Tanzanian desert, which means special considerations for both personal and photographic gear.

In addition, the cost of creating the film from the material we gather will be considerable, and we want to be able to give it all the resources it needs to be great: professional editing, sound mixing, color, and graphics, as well as an original score. We also want to use the music of local artists, and be able to compensate them for their contributions.

How Kickstarter Works
Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing funding platform, which means we either make our total goal for this project, or we get nothing at all. That means that if we don't raise enough to meet our goal for the project, you won't get charged for your donation. Depending how much you decide to give (and every bit helps!), you'll also get one of the cool rewards listed to the right of this page.

Donating is easy - just click one of the rewards to your right, and pledge via credit card through Amazon.com's secure server (Kickstarter uses Amazon.com to do it's payments as it's extremely well-known and secure.) We'll keep you posted with new updates (one of the tabs at the top), and you can also monitor our progress towards reaching our goal and see who else has been donating. Thanks so much for your support!

Thank you for your support!
Through film festivals, television broadcast, and private and public screenings, we hope to raise awareness for this devastating event in the lives of so many people. With your help, we can create a powerful tool that can not only be used to give these people hope, but also empower an effort to save Haydom hospital.

Bill Gates is already a technology pioneer, Founder and CEO of one of the world's most powerful companies, and worth over 60 billion dollars. Now, he's added comic book super hero to his list of accomplishments.

The graphic novel titled, 'Bill Gates: Co-Founder of Microsoft' will serve as a biography of Gate's life, chronicling significant events such as founding Microsoft and his marriage to Melinda Gates.

The book is released by Bluewater Productions that has already released comics about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and late Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

"Bill Gates: Co-Founder of Microsoft" will be released next week and will also be available digitally on the Nook and Kindle.

Virgilio Villoresi, an Italian animator based out of Milan, has created a video titled ‘Fine’ that tells a soldier's story of birth, military life and death, with the protagonist painted on and pantomimed by Villoresi's own hands.

Villoresi—who is inspired by the works of Italian artist Mariotti— uses precise editing, a captivating soundtrack, and animated gestures to dramatically present the soldier’s life in an original format.


Fine by Virgilio Villoresi from Virgilio Villoresi on Vimeo.



(Read more)

Illustrated by Steven Noble



Kraken Rum just released three new advertising spots that will be aired during the ESPN March Madness that includes "Existence," Strength" and Survival" which can be view in the following links:

Existence: http://www.krakenrum.com/movie/6
Strength: http://www.krakenrum.com/movie/7
Survival: http://www.krakenrum.com/movie/8

The Design firm, Dead As We Know It, along with illustrator, Steven Noble, and animator, Adam Gault Studio, combined their individual expertise to create these unique animations. All the illustrations were individually hand drawn in the old engraving woodcut style and supplied digitally to the animators. For example, the Kraken octopus was illustrated over a supplied wire frame with different Photoshop layers applied for the shadows.



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Image by Thomas Broening

The Gren Group represents number of brilliant professional photographers including Pete Barrett, Mark Katzman, Eric Kiel, Jeffrey Lamont Brown, Thomas Broening and Jonathan Chapman.

They've also just created a video introduction featuring a variety of their photographers' motion work. Check it out below.


The Gren Group | Promo Reel from The Gren Group on Vimeo.

By Richard Borge



I've been working on creating a reel of "type treatments + film titles," and this is a small bite-sized project/assignment I gave myself. The piece was not done for an actual festival but simply as an addition to my animation reel. I've been advised that when creating animations for samples it is a good idea to make them "look and feel" as real as possible.

A musician named Maxwell Vann has been sending me clips of his music for a while now, so I reached out to him to see if he'd be on board with using some of his music on this small teaser. (He was.) I think the result worked out well. I like the warm "tube amp" sound of his music in this clip. I did the simple mechanical sound effects in-house. A big thanks to Maxwell Vann for agreeing to our collaboration...

No hands were injured in the creation of this video. More animations are in progress now, and I will post again soon.

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To celebrate the most romantic day of the year, Google has released an adorable little animated video on its home page. The video begins with a boy googling on how to impress a girl he likes, who is jumping rope. He offers her a number of different gifts but is rejected each time. The boy then decides to jump rope alongside her, and he finally wins her over in the end. Happy Valentine’s Day! Hope you can spend it with someone special!

The song in the video is Tony Bennett's, "Cold, Cold Heart".

By Miguel Endara



The making of "Hero," a drawing of my dad composed entirely out of 3.2 million ink dots.

Limited Edition Prints are now available here: miguelendara.com/prints/hero
Directed, Filmed, Produced and Edited by Miguel Endara

Music by Bonobo - Noctuary
Written by Simon Green
Published by Just Isn't Music
(P) Ninja Tune 2003



Hero from Miguel Endara on Vimeo.