When Aaron Vanek asked me for an animated promo for this year’s H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival event in Los Angeles, I knew I couldn’t resist. I also knew I was in the middle of about 12 other projects and I’d have to carve out the time to do it.

So I spent this past Labor Day weekend hip deep in Flash animation. I reused some cartoon heads from an abandoned Lovecraft short (I may get back to it some day), but all other tentacles, rats, and gravestones are new.

If you’ve been watching my social feeds, you’ll know I’m in love with the work of British animator Cyriak. His use of loops and editing was an influence here.

I also took the opportunity to play with textures and color modes in After Effects. That’s something I’ve been doing in my still work lately, and it’s a fun challenge to apply it to the flat images from Flash.

Music is by Alec Jenkyn Williams.

For tickets and info on the HPLFF in LA September 11, 2010, visit http://bit.ly/hplffla

This Saturday, July 10, Tulsa will be home to Oklahoma’s Underground Horror Filmfest. The event will feature music, horror hosts, vendors, and movies movies movies.

One block of films is being programmed by my internet friend, Craig Mullins of Unfilmable.com. The theme? H.P. Lovecraft Cinema, of course.

This means I’m happy to announce another public screening of Subterranea’s The Other Gods. In addition, here’s what else will be playing:

- The Silver Key a film by Gary Fierro and Conor Timmis (CT)
- H.P. Lovecraft’s The Book a film by James Raynor (United Kingdom)
- At the Reefers of Madness a film by Brian Clement (Toronto, ON)
- From Beyond a film by Michael Granberry (CA)
- Frank DanCoolo: Paranormal Drug Dealer a film by Andrew Jones
- The Crimson Robe a by Russell Welch
- Elder Sign a film by Joseph Nanni
- plus clips (House of Black Wings, Pickman‘s Muse), trailers (Lovecraft Paragraphs, Colour from the Dark, Dirt Dauber, The Terrible Old Tran) and teasers (The Seventh Shadow)…

For more information, visit the Underground Horror Filmfest on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter

After looking through my blog archives, it turns out I never posted here about the H.P.Lovecraft Literary Podcast. (It must have slipped my mind when I was posting over at Unfilmable.com back in December.)

Listening to the podcast is like reading Lovecraft with sarcastic (yet intelligent) footnotes. What turned me on to it was episode 22, which covers “The Other Gods.” Hosts Chris Lackey and Chad Fifer dig deep into Dreamlands lore to review the story… and the short film I released through Subterranea Entertainment.

They’ve got a great understanding of Lovecraft’s work, and I was thrilled to hear their thoughts regarding the animated film.

So crawl over to hppodcraft.com to listen online.  Or get obsessive like me and download every episode and listen on your iPod!

Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated has been nominated for a Rondo Award! Lovers of animation and horror alike can vote for NOTLD:R as Best Independent Production of 2009.

The Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards are highly revered in the independent horror community. The voting is open to anyone! I highly encourage you to vote, not only for Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated but for the horror sites, blogs, hosts, movies, and magazines you love.

Visit www.rondoaward.com to find out more.

EDITED TO ADD (03/08/10 )

Maybe you’d like to watch the film before voting?

Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated will continue to be hosted by Count Victor Von Scary and the gang at ‘Friday Night – Fright Night’ until this Friday, March 12th at
http://www.fridaynight-frightnight.com

So if you haven’t seen it yet, this is the last week.

We all like going behind the scenes, right?

When Mike Schneider, director of the Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated project, asked me to contribute a featurette to the upcoming DVD release, I was afraid I wouldn’t have the time to do so. Well, last week I gathered strength and put together a 6 minute tutorial on interpretive rotoscoping.

Rotoscoping is an animation process that involves a lot of tracing. For NOTLD:R, I changed my style up depending on the shot — and sometimes that meant tracing 15 pictures a second with my Wacom stylus.

In this video, you can see some of that process, albeit sped up to make it more interesting.

Interpretive Rotoscoping for NOTLD:R from Mike Boas on Vimeo.