Thursday, April 28, 2005
"Dandaka Dharma" from Sita Sings the Blues will be featured at the upcoming ASIFA-EAST Animation Festival here in New York. There were a lot of cool films up for judging this year, so it's sure to be an excellent program. Party afterwards. And it's FREE!
SUNDAY, MAY 1, 6:00 PM
The New School, Tishman Auditorium
66 West 12th Street, NYC
SUNDAY, MAY 1, 6:00 PM
The New School, Tishman Auditorium
66 West 12th Street, NYC
Monday, April 25, 2005
Sita host back ON
All the Sita Sings the Blues movies are happily living here again - even Hanuman Finds Sita. Thanks Raaf!
Sunday, April 24, 2005
the perils of fame on a weekend
UPDATE: Best way to get the movies right now is to download 'em from SepiaMutiny.com They're all available as bit torrents.Sita Sings the Blues enjoyed a lot of new attention last week when Turbanhead.com posted a lovely write-up and link to "Hanuman Finds Sita." This was followed by links in BoingBoing.com and the very cool SepiaMutiny.com. The resulting hits and downloads shut down my site for a while, and when it came back, my host started charging me gobs extra for the additional bandwith, prompting me to move my "Sita" files here. But today, that site stopped working, and I probably won't know why, or get it fixed, until Monday or Tuesday. All the files except "Hanuman" are still here, if you want to see them in the mean time - I'm being charged extra anyway. Which reminds me, some kind souls have emailed to ask if they can send paypal donations. Yes!
ANOTHER UPDATE: this WAS a paypal button, but it kept going to a "paypal technical difficulties" page. So if you want to donate, go to paypal.com and send $ to my account, nee-nah at nee-nah-pay-lee dot com (de-phoneticise it, of course).
I've been thoroughly enjoying the responses to "Sita" I've seen online, even the pissy one posted here. The SepiaMutiny comments include this gem from "simp," which sums up the whole project better than I could: "A beautifully nuanced act of heartfelt cultural cannibalism and witty postmodern regurgutation." Also, while self-indulgently tracking comments in various blogs, I came across some references to Sanjay Patel, whose beautiful work I'd never seen before. I'm a new fan!
Saturday, April 16, 2005
Whew! Another Sita Sings the Blues musical number finished: Hanuman Finds Sita. Even at 25 MB, the compression knocked out significant detail of this web version, especially in the night scenes. But overall I think it's a good'un. Gags, gimmicks, AND narrative - hundreds of pages of text crammed into 3 minutes. Plus it contains all 4 main characters: Sita, Rama, Hanuman and Ravana, with extra added bonus demons.
People already familiar with the Ramayana will probably enjoy these musical bits more, but I'm trying to make the story understandable to anyone. To test how I'm doing, I've posted a short synopsis of Hanuman Finds Sita. If you're unfamiliar with the Ramayana, please watch the movie first, then read the synopsis and determine how much you "got" from the animation alone. Then please post your comments here and let me know - is the narrative working?
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
New & Improved Sita Sings the Blues
I've posted a few new over-compressed Quicktime clips of my self-animated, unfunded, destined-to-drive-me-to-the-poorhouse feature-in-progress, Sita Sings the Blues. And a new & improved treatment. Actually it's more of a short script. I'll put up something about my wacky no-budget production process soon. Then I'll start begging everyone for money.
