Wednesday, March 19, 2014

"A Change of Mind" - A look back, before looking FORWARD.

So a few years back I pitched a project titled "A Change of Mind" to an NFB animated short competition where the idea was to create a short film with the theme of "Changing your mind".

See what I did there? Give em what they want kids!

*Or don't... cuz I didn't get picked to go into production.

However, I still liked the idea, and thought it would make for a cute kids film.

The idea I had for the short was a kid who finds a guy selling "minds". You could change your own mind for one of his amazing minds. This mind salesman rips the kid off, leaving him with the lesson of thinking first before changing your mind.

My friend, Greg Kovacs, who is likely one of the best writers I know, came up with the poem for the project. This guy is a wordsmith. This guy makes me want to be a better man - and also a better writer - and also win trophies (this guy is always winning film festivals... the bastard).

Here's a trailer for the latest Greg Kovacs film:



And here's an animated short from WAAAAY back based on a comic of his. Animated and directed by "Car2Na", D. Campbell Mackinlay (Does the Harry Animations on the top corner of www.ainticoolnews.com)




 Hey, I know those sound effects!

So there you have it... from the mind of Greg Kovacs came the poem, "A Change of Mind".

As part of the pitch you had to include artwork, and since my drawing skills haven't improved since film school, I had my friend, Darren Shmidt, do a couple of drawings for it. He literally scribbled a couple of sketches on scrap paper, and I then cleaned them up (poorly).



I was wanting this project to have the look and feel of those old 50's UPN toons - but in flash ('cuz hand drawn is just too expensive).

So all this was waaay back in... 2007?

I never lost interest in this project. I had a few people here and there interested in getting it into production, but for whatever reason it just always fell through (the reason is usually because there's really no money in this... this is film making because we love making films).

This brings us up to speed! In the next post we jump to 2014 and introduce animator, Colin Giles, and the further life of this "A Change of Mind" project.

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