Myself and Denis produced this for the Uniquely Dublin competition last week. The illustrations were created by Alan Lambert and were animated by me! I also created the soundtrack. Denis wrote and directed the piece. The excellent cast were Damien Devaney as Charlie Pigeon and Kian Murphy as the boy. Many thanks to Nick McGinley and Vincent Lambe for all of the help putting together the cast. I wrote a post on the process over here.
We enjoy our movie riffs! We did this to see what a 5-second time limit felt like before we started trying to write or perform anything within that limit.
Another experiment with a simple idea. This, like many of the other Half a Giraffe projects, was conceived, shot and edited all within a few hours as a creative exercise.
We had a guest director out on this one, the immensely talented Niall Owens.
A graphic designer walks away from his latest work and leaves his door unlocked. Though I didn't contribute much to this one, it reminds me of the also excellent You Suck At Photoshop series.
Our pitch for the 2011 Storyland round. We later turned the idea into a much nicer-looking sketch.
A cautionary tale about drugs. We have a very strong social conscience.
Rory and Gemma get a new roommate...
Available for hire.
We like to play around with cheap, fun ideas.
Part of Half a Giraffe's 5-second films series, this one kicked it off. Gemma came up with the idea and we shot it while Ciaran was over from Canada.
This is a video Nathalie and I put together using clips from our adventures in the last year. 2012 has had some bright moments, bring on 2013!
This is an interview with my creative partner Denis McArdle about our film Barry's Bespoke Bakery which he wrote and directed.
This fake PSA was made as part of a B-Side marathon - a personal quest to write, shoot, cut and upload a series of sketches in a single day. The others in this run were Pat-A-Cake for Men and Rory's Friend.
This charming piece was only our second sketch in Half a Giraffe. Many thanks to Jeff Doyle for coming out and helping us out on this one. We had a good time putting together the horrifying audio track after the shoot!
This is a companion piece to the other music video featured here Washed Up. We shot these over two evenings.
This is a music video for a NYC/Berlin band The Glass. We didn't have much time or any money, so we kept it simple, intercutting between the rehearsals and the live performance. This track is grungy and dirty, so we kept the blocking as dance-friendly as the music. This is a companion piece to the other, gentler piece Wanna Be Dancing.
I met Andrew Legge in December 2007 though Morgan Bushe, while I was working with Morgan in Fastnet Films. Together, the three of us made The Chronoscope, a project funded byWicklow County Council through theirPer Cent for
Arts Scheme. The film is a Zelig-like Historical Mockumentary about an Irish scientist Charlotte Keppel who builds a camera that can see back through time. Narrated by Jeremy Irons, starring Serena Brabazon and Eoin Whelan, shot around Wicklow, Dublin and London on 8mm and 16mm film, it was the biggest project I had produced by far at that stage in my career.
We have been fortunate enough to finish with a film we can be proud of, and have won several awards, including Best Short Film at the Belfast Film Festival.
You can watch the trailer here.
One of our more filmic sketches, this piece has screened at the Capital Irish Film Festival and the Galway Film Feladh. I loved the darkness of it when I heard it first and am delighted with how it turned out.
This is our first sketch – there are some serious problems with it; it’s far too long, and the ending is unclear, but as a first attempt, we managed to learn a lot while making something worthwhile from the great performances given by our cast. Emmett Scanlan and Sonya Kelly are terrific actors and we were honoured to have them in our inaugural joint.
We came up with this one while we were making the other short pieces – I wasn’t sure it would work, but it’s proven to be one of our most popular sketches. It’s also an abject lesson in filmmaking, especially for the internet; the shorter the better. This was made as part of our first B-Sides programme, as per Rory’s Friend, the first sketch on this page.
This was one of our first pieces to feature visual effects. In mid-2010, I began working in VFX. We conceived this piece around an effect I had been practising. The image is desaturated and noised to make it feel cheaper than it is, and the editing is meant to feel amateurish, with the intention of making the visual effect more surprising.
This is one of our first “B-Sides”, a personal challenge to write, shoot, finish and publish a short in one day. On this first day, we produced three B-Sides, Rory’s Friend, Pat-a-Cake for Men and Don’t Frape. Though it’s been a bit of a divisive piece, I love this sketch, it’s one of my favourites. The surreality and sense of escalating madness makes me smile.
Barry’s Bespoke Bakery is a project I produced with Denis McArdle, and is my first Irish Film Board-funded short project. The film is about two bakers with antithetical personalities clashing over the making of an ornate and complex cake. The film premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh in July 2012. Official Website | IMDb Entry | Presskit
One of our earliest scripted sketches.
