studioMiguel

A Taste For Music from Jordan Antonowicz-Behnan on Vimeo.

A Taste For Music is a personal documentary inspired by my memories and the record collection of my late father. The film is about being with a loved one during their illness, I wanted to express the difficulties and the special moments that we can share in these times. 

Whilst telling a story about sickness this film is also about mine and my father's love of music and particularly how we have experienced the music through vinyl records. Much of the animation was drawn onto paper recycled record sleeves thus creating a distinct film language for the film.

Directed and animated by Jordan Antonowicz-Behnan Assistant animators Stuti Bansal and Yoon Kyeong Yang Sound Mix Joe Hirst Additional mixing sound by Loïc Kreyden Made at the Royal College of Art (RCA Animation) Supported by BAFTA (Reuben Scholarship)

Award and nominations:

Factual Animation Film Fest - Best Student Animated Documentary The British Animation Awards - Nomination Best Factual Animation Rising of Lusitania AnimaDoc Film Festival – “Rising Award” Best Student Animadoc  ANIMAFANTASIA – Best Documentary  TAIS Showcase – Audience Award Winner London International Animation Festival – Audience Voting Animated Documentaries

Screenings and Official Selection:

Edinburgh International Film Festival Animafest Zagreb – Zagreb, Croatia Animated New Chitose Airport International Festival London Short Film Festival Anifilm– Třeboň, Czech Republic Internationales Trickfilm-Festival British Shorts International Animation Festival Soleil Fest Anča Brighton Animation Festival Melbourne International Animation Festival Lille International Short Film Festival ANIMED Mediterranean Animation Film Festival

In the court of the Spider King, justice rules. He rules side by side with his Spider Queen who looks very regal in the family Jewels.

There next to them is Junior, the prince and monarch-to-be. Practicing to rule, as does his father, over everything he can see.

Brave warriors stand ready to guard their liege, and they’ll fight to the death when the frogs come to lay siege.

No fear or anxiety is there found, good and right are that for which they stand. Except maybe the the flies, when they’re brave enough to land.

You can see more process shots of this over at my substack linked in my bio. (artofmiggy.substack.com). Share

OCTOBUS Never Stop Running from Michael McClain on Vimeo.

Boatie from Michael McClain on Vimeo.

I can't move forward I can't go back. 

It’s like I’ve lost my tenuous grasp on you and you’ve drifted away, into the current of time. Memory stands here, frozen, watching you drift away, dying a new smaller death every day. 

Every moment for the last 30 years is recorded and stored. But the medium, while well-cataloged, is imperfect tending toward decay over time. I try to regularly restore the damaged, erased and lost images.  

Sometimes there are memories that I don’t want and blot out those, but find that they are particularly indelible, able to reconstruct themselves. 

Usually the painful ones. 

Each time I reconstruct some favored moment, slight distortions occur, bastardizing the memory. The most devastating of these events is when I intentionally  attempt to eliminate some then out of panic or guilt and then try to bring it back. Like Frankenstein’s monster, the form may be there, but in substance, it is wanting. 

A cruel and ironic master is time. It is usually the smallest, quietest moments that mean the most, and are those most easily forgotten. Only later, when by unexpected happenstance we are able to recall one or more of these gems, our hearts are broken as we suddenly realize how quickly we dismissed these precious events. 

That is why i always come back to those i love. Even though time and space separate us like a vast sea, I build my ship and learn through trial error to navigate those waters: so that I can recreate those happinesses and possibly discover other loves that were tossed thoughtlessly aside. 

Usually, though, it is my own memory that betrays me. Those delicious relics are not found  only old wounds that had healed and are suddenly reopened only so that I can begin to mend again. 

I have learned a valuable lesson in my journey through life however: that the moment of ecstasy or devastation is only ever enhanced and intensified in both anticipation and memory. 

These two lenses, looking forward and looking back are a form of organic virtual reality where I can experiment and fantasize without repercussion. Will and warrant have no bearing in the closet of the mind. Or the universe of the imagined. 

#artofmiggy #sketchbook #sketchbook61 #portraiture #pencil #memoryisamemory 

Mike and Dev. 6/21/20 - When two kind souls meet, it is no forgone conclusion that they will connect and build a life. But when it does manage to spark and the forrest fire of life together is started, we are the lucky ones to feel it’s warmth and stand by amazed at the all-consuming nature that true love has.

True love, after all, is selflessly selfish, always thinking of the other, never self and in doing so, the self is ever cared for. In the west, we talk of love as being a thing we fall into or into which we become entangled… but true love, souls who mate and become one… do not fail. It is is no accident that they succeed. Hard work and revision, determination to advance and find peace are a mission true lovers pursue all their life. A failure is not a setback, but an opportunity improve and deepen the connection, becoming one flesh one kind word and moment of forgiveness at a time. 

Peace and contentment are not the possession of all men, nor hardly any these days. But from time to time, when you walk in the woods of life, quietly contemplating your own state of success and failure, you catch the warm glow from a newly started campfire destined to become a blazing inferno of love consuming two souls whole.

For better or worse, we don’t necessarily choose who comes into (or stays) in our lives. For better, Deb came into mine in the spring of life, when I was just a small town boy living’ in a lonely world, falling in love with her big sister. Soon after meeting them, she and the love of her life extended their friendship to me. First, they looked askance at this weird kid, then accepted and finally embraced me. 

Thirty-three years ago they invited me to pile into their brand new 1990 Isuzu pickup with a camper shell for a road trip to San Isabel National Forrest in Colorado. It was an AMAZING trip. One of the most memorable of my life. The first time I had ever seen a real mountain, breathed alpine air, felt the chill night in the middle of summer! I never knew such experiences existed. New experience after new experience. It put me in the mind of Jean George’s, ‘My Side Of the Mountain’ wherein a young boy named Sam escapes to the Catskill mountains and lives on little more than his wits for a year by making a home in the burned out hollow of a tree. Every morning, I would get up early, hike in the wilderness and imagine that I had escaped my droll reality to a life there in that paradise. On one of those walks would I cut a small sapling into a walking stick. Long-forgotten, they thoughtfully saved this and recently gifted it back to me. 

Every time I drive over Raton Pass on the southern border of the state, I remember the first time in that little pickup at 7800’ with those two dear friends-soon-to-be-family. We laugh together when the trip comes up and Deborah Anne points out that I had eaten the trip’s entire stash of homemade chocolate chip cookies before we ever left the great state of Texas. In my defense: 1) The cookies were delicious and 2) Texas is HUGE! Debbie & her heart understood John Muir’s famous statement: ‘The mountains are calling and I must go'. She and her family would answer that beacon many times in the following decades. 

The second of three sisters, she has always been an upbeat, outgoing and infectious personality with a rapier observational wit. Always the constant and stable mother-figure, it took me years to believe the stories my wife would tell of her wild side before she settled down to care for a family and raise two rambunctious boys.

Growing up as I did with two sisters, it was an easy transition to include a new one in my life and as my own siblings and I grew distant over the years, she proved to be a wonderful surrogate-sister filling that emotional place in my heart. It has always brought me especially great joy that Debbie brightens my own wife’s disposition so and their relationship is perfectly portrayed by Louisa May Alcott in Little Women. If my own love is Jo, then Debbie would be analogous to Meg… maybe a dash of Beth from time to time. Perhaps sisters understand each other in a way that one one else (especially brothers) can. Neither she, nor those like her, realize the feelings of envy that many women feel toward families like her own. Not perfect by any stretch, but thoughtful, engaged and always always connected. I like to say ‘thank God that love is temporal and not geographic’, I have truly seen love defy time and space between my wife and her sisters. 

Rich in the possession of a good man's heart, Deborah raised two children, drove trucks, roofed, baked cookies, worked disaster relief, started (& retired from) a career as a white-hat and now in the third chapter of life in this existence, I see her face new and terrifying realities. Always one to wear a brave face (what mother isn’t), you’d never know monsters stalk in her shadows. I suppose something else she is teaching me is that it isn’t the looming threats or realities that define us, but the faith we exercise when we face them, confident, as my dear sister is, that victory will be ours. 

YAWYE (you are what you eat) from Michael McClain on Vimeo.

YAWYE (you are what you eat) — This was a short project designed to practice the use of match-cuts. The exercise is from week 03 of Ben Marriott’s very excellent Master Motion Design. — If you want to get into motion design and animation, I can’t recommend @ben_marriott_ enough. And if you feel like Master Motion Design is maybe a bit too much, he just introduced an introduction to Motion Design course. @angieromy is on that course right now and doing great! Budget a problem? Ben’s got a boatload of really really good free content on YouTube. Again, can’t say enough good things about this guy.

YAWYE (you are what you eat)

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This was a short project designed to practice the use of match-cuts. The exercise is from week 03 of Ben Marriott’s very excellent Master Motion Design.

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If you want to get into motion design and animation, I can’t recommend @ben_marriott_ enough. And if you feel like Master Motion Design is maybe a bit too much, he just introduced an introduction to Motion Design course. @angieromy is on that course right now and doing great!