WINDOW HORSES

Rosie Ming goes to Iran and learns about building bridges across generations and cultures through the magic of poetry.  An animated feature in progress.

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The Tirgan festival was a blast! We were invited to to talk about Window Horses and tell folks what we are up to and why we are doing it. Thanks to Maryam Najafi for helping make this happen:-)

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Tirgan

This Friday and Saturday Window Horses will be at Tirgan in Toronto!!! For those of you who don’t know Tirgan is the world’s largest celebration of Iranian art and culture, and it is being held at the Harbourfront Centre of Toronto, Canada from August 20th-23rd.

What we will be doing:

- Sandra Oh and filmmaker Ann Marie Fleming will be in conversation with journalist Marc Glassman on the making of the animated film Window Horses: the Poetic Persian Epiphany of Rosie Ming.

- Filmmaker Maryam Nafaji will provide cultural context and discuss what drew her to collaborate on Window Horses.

                                                          AS WELL AS

A three hour crash course animation workshop with Kevin Langdale and Ann Marie Fleming! 

Participants will be introduced to visual storytelling for the screen,  basic traditional animation principles and techniques including stop motion and drawn animation – as well as getting a sneak peak at some of the animation being created for WINDOW HORSES.

We hope to see you all there!

-Animation workshop 

- Conversation with Sandra Oh, Ann Marie Fleming, Marc Glassman and Maryam Nafaji

-Tirgan Festival 

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Today is Ann Marie’s Birthday!!! 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!! 

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Meet the team of talented young people who are animating for Window Horses! You may recognize Pyrrha because she was working on Window Horses during our Indiegogo campaign. The new faces we have with us are Natty, Reid and Gemma. (Left to right) We are so excited to welcome them on board!.

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Sandra Oh voicing Stick Girl as Rosie Ming!

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Happy Birthday to Sandra Oh!

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Part of the Window Horses animation team got together, and the other part joined them via google hangout. 

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Happy Canada Day! Bonne Fête du Canada!

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The Internship: Part 2 Window Horses Revisited

It was during the late dog days of 2014 when I started to intern for Ann Marie again. ( I interned for her in 2012 as well,but that’s for a different time) I was bussing home from a very long day at work when I received a message from her asking if I wanted to work on the project again. At that exact moment I heard the heavenly choir and the clouds parted. The next week I was back on Window Horses.

Working for an independent animation film company and artist is a very unique experience. There are not hundreds of people with very specific roles. Instead there is a handful of people with many tasks. What I really like about it is in a big company you may never meet the director or the producers, however over here at Window Horses Ann Marie is the director and one of the producers. We even had the opportunity to meet the other producer Sandra Oh, but I’m getting a head of myself. There is a very welcoming feeling and she tries her best at employing students and local artists. She even makes us lunch!

My tasks are extremely varied. At the start of my revisitation to Window Horses, I was going over the script again and doing very basic and minimal social media. Ann Marie had the idea that she wanted to do the crowd source funding  campaign but she was torn between Kickstarter and Indiegogo. I had no experience with either but everything was about to change...

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The Internship: Part 1 Temp Track

This tale starts back in 2011. It was a rainy Vancouver Saturday morning, my dad calls me to the kitchen and asks if I wanted to go to his friends (Ann Marie Fleming’s) apartment downtown. He tells me that she was wondering if I would be interested in helping out at her *temp track recording that day for her next big film. I obviously agreed, so I threw on my clothes, gumboots and off we went. As soon as we entered her apartment a surge of excitement rushed in. The apartment was a heritage loft style, filled with art, instruments, many people who would be lending their voices that day, many chairs, microphones, scripts, recorders, pens and a baby grand piano as the main attraction. It felt like a set and I was giddy to no end. I was working along side my dad that day, and our job was marking the script with the takes and being in charge of all of the recording and audio. As the day progressed the takes increased, and I was starting to learn how different people interacted with one another on set, as well as how many takes you actually need to do. I started to learn about the story and the characters from Ann Marie’s direction, the actors portrayal and marking the script continuously. As the day came to close and the sky went from the grey hue of January day to bruised coloured clouds of the night I packed up all of the chairs, and I asked Ann Marie more about her project. This was the start of my involvement with Window Horses! 

*A temp track is temporary audio that is used in production, in this case it was voices. We used the temp track for the animatic; which is a rough cut version of the film just using the stills and shots from the story board.

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Ann Marie Fleming painted her neighbours garage on the weekend!

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Hello one and all. My name is Devon Ellis-Durity. I have been interning for Ann Marie Fleming at Sleepy Dog Films since 2011. On this blog I will be telling you about the behind the scenes of Window Horses, what it is like being an intern at an independent animation film company, and the many things I have learned.

Thanks for following us :)

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Today we went to the NFB to look at some animation and design tests on a large screen, as there are things you just can’t see on smaller formats.  I think we caught Rosie mid-lip position move!  

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Today, Ileana and I are -fingers crossed- finishing tweaking the rough cut.  Kunal Sen is already starting working on one of the poetry sections- Rosie and Dietmar’s jam- but the rest is still to come!  Kevin Langdale is all but finished the backgrounds and main character builds.  We have many animators/artists in line to begin working.  We’ve been working in Final Cut 7 but are making the shift to Premier to take advantage of the workflow between AfterEffects and Photoshop, were we are doing the bulk of the work.  It’s painful, but I hope it’s worth it.  I have been working in Final Cut since 2000.  I didn’t like  the interface or the lack of nuance of X… and 7 just isn’t supported anymore.  So, it’s back to Premier, where I started, many years ago.  If I remember correctly, the cover of the package had a white horse on it.  Looking forward to some contractual good news this week.  Fingers crossed AGAIN!

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Sunday Team Window Horses attended the Norouz Bazaar at Capilano Mall to spread the word about our project and collect some more names for our mailing list.  It was a mainly farsi-speaking crowd and Maryam Najafi did most of the talking for us.  We were there to mix a little hung hay fat choy with sale no mobarak.  Mehdi Darvish, who voices Sassan, the translator, came by to say hello. People were interested and had their own stories to share. This is our first community outreach effort and it felt a bit strange, but we were able to get a bunch of signatures and could see that people actually DID go and visit the Facebook site and check out more about the project.  Pyrrha was really helpful, too.  We’re going to go to the fire jumping event at Ambleside Park tonight, too.  

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Stickgirl's advice on Friday 13th