Sale at Zazzle ends Monday

If you've been interested in some Leonardo stuff -  t-shirts, mugs - Zazzle is having a sale until monday.  Click here to go to Store

Leonardo showing tonight in Jacksonville, FL.

As part of a sneak peak of the upcoming Citrus Cel 2010 Film Festival - April 9th to 11th - Leonardo is playing with an Oscar nominated shorts program in  Jacksonville, FL. For show time and more info click here

Dates for Leonardo at da Vinci Film Fest.

The dates and times are now posted. The old man shows three times!

Leonardo showing at the da Vinci Film Festival in March

I think there would have been great disappointment if the old man couldn't show here at the da Vinci Film Festival. Haven't gotten the word yet what days and times but will let you know. I am hoping to go.

btw you can follow Leonardo now on twitter at ~ leoanimation
also Aerial Contrivance Workshop at ~ the_contrivance

Thoughts after making a film #1: Will it ever end?

The final end run of making a movie is probably the hardest part of making a film. It seems that if anything can go wrong it will. Maybe it's because you now have a more concrete goal you are heading toward.  Things that you could of leisurely fixed before you now have no time for.

About this time last year I thought I would be done with Leonardo. The big plan was to finish the film to send to Annecy. That was my goal and where I hoped Leonardo would premiere. So first Craig Foster and I pushed to assemble the film for a test screening at 2009 BAICFF in January, in which it played great. Then we had a few more weeks to finish it up to meet the Annecy deadline. It turns out with festivals that your film doesn't have to be completely finished to be sent for consideration at a film festival. Which was a good thing because my estimate turned out to be totally off. Well, first of all Craig had his own work to do and was squeezing this in much like I had done for 10 years. The other thing was we were still playing a bit with the final look. We both underestimated the complexity of putting together all these elements. Not to mention sound! Dave Slusser after 10 years of patently waiting for me to be ready for him to start his sound design work could now start. Dave did a rough pass for our BAICFF goal but then needed much more time to do all the sound design for the final version. He too was fitting this in when he could. We made the Annecy deadline with a "Work in Progress" version of the film.  Wether this hurt Leo's chances of being accepted I will never know. In the end, the big goal I had to premiere at Annecy did not materialize but Annecy's rejection was also a blessing. The only other festival I applied to at that time was Newport R.I. this was because the previous year I had shown Your Friend the Rat there and knew the head of the children's programing Andrea Van Beuren. Andrea had just happened to call me looking to see if Pixar had any films, I told her I could connect her to the right people but if she was interested I had my own short.  So Leonardo would premiere at a smallish film festival in the North East. Not the big splash I was hoping for at the most prestigious animation festival, but little did I know what was going to come out of Newport. But that is a later story. Now, Craig, David and Jennifer Chang (handling the final backgrounds) and myself had until May to finish the film and we used up all that time.  I don't know how we would of finished it if we didn't have those extra months. My advice would be to budget in at least twice as much time as you think you will need to finish your film. Don't under estimate the amount of work that goes into polishing up, little tiny fixes,  sound design, final editing, mistakes, not wanting to finish, and final output will take.

Leonardo to play in front of Secret of Kells at SBIFF

Leonardo will screen in front of the Academy Award Nominated Secret of Kells Saturday 10:15 Am at the Metro as well as Sunday time TBA at the 25th Santa Barbara Film Festival.  We thank Candace and the festival staff as well as Tomm Moore for making this awesome combination a reality.

Leonardo showing at the 25th Santa Barbara Film Festival

Leonardo shows 10 pm Friday 2/5 and 10:15 pm Monday 2/8 at the Metro 4
buy thickets here:http://sbiff.org/main/