Bellflower – 22 Oct @14.00 – Ballet Room

Inspired by our trip to SWSX, we’ve invited Coatwolf Studios, producers of critically acclaimed Bellflower to come and talk about their extraordinary DIY special effects skills.

Bellflower
An agonizingly intense, almost unbearably beautiful first feature from the writer-director Evan Glodell. He also stars as Woodrow, a self-described dude from Wisconsin transplanted to a grungy corner of Los Angeles, who, with his high-strung roommate and lifelong friend, Aiden (Tyler Dawson), tries to fulfill “Mad Max”-based, comic-book-fuelled apocalyptic visions by means of shotguns, souped-up cars, and homemade incendiary devices. But when Woodrow meets and falls in love with the devil-may-care Milly (Jessie Wiseman), who knows she’s trouble, he’s sucked into his own inner apocalypse from which his whizbang gadgets offer no escape. Glodell and his cast bring the story to life with a shambling charm, impulsive energy, and hair-trigger violence; his images are as fiery and bruising as the action he depicts, and the meticulously wrought, raw rock-and-roll fury of his visions, joining cosmic conflagration to post-adolescent romantic bathos and banal self-destruction, is realized on a budget that would be Hollywood lunch money. Framing everyday intimacies on a terrifyingly grand scale, Glodell blasts open a new dimension in the cinematic imagination. (The New Yorker)

Shadow Puppetry workshop by Daithi O hEignigh & Yvonne Woods – 22 Oct @11.00 – Dragon’s Den

Yvonne Woods is an NCAD graduate who, in between curating exhibitions and making her own art, works with recovering drug addicts in creative settings. Yvonne uses various different art forms as part of this work, Shadow Puppetry being one of them.

Daithi O hEignigh is a musician (recording under the moniker ‘Sfumato’) and visual artist who has just finished recording an album and is in the process of making and editing numerous music videos to accompany the album. Daithi also has a keen interest in Dramatherapy and the application of theatre art as a form of therapy.

Yvonne and Daithi met a couple of years ago and decided to collaborate on a shadow puppetry video for one of Daithi’s songs after Yvonne showed Daithi a shadow puppetry video she had made when working in an addiction recovery setting.

Daithi and Yvonne will make a short presentation on Shadow puppetry concentrating on its practical and artistic applications. The presentation will be followed by a workshop on how to make both elaborate and simple shadow puppetry stages (it’s possible to make a stage from an empty cereal box!) and the actual puppets themselves. Audience members will be invited to make their own puppets and act out impromptu scenes from their imaginations using a pre-built stage. Some scenes from Daithi’s video will also be acted to round off the workshop.

Links:

Sfumato – http://www.SfumatoMusic.com/ / http://www.facebook.com/SfumatoSongs

Shadow Puppetry – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_play