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We are real dumb. Like just so fucking dumb.

OH BOY! We sure are dumb.

Chris and I have both been so busy in our lives these days that we totally forgot to tell everyone that our first silly stop-motion, The Flood of 1924, got into the Toronto Animation Arts Festival International!

Our film will be playing amongst many other wonderful shorts this coming Sunday at 11:15 am, details can be found here.

Chris and I spend a whole lot of time whining and complaining about how impossible it seems to ever get any real recognition for what we do, or the passion we have for creating. We would love to make this our full time job, but at this point that seems like a crack pipe dream. BUT WE ARE DUMB. Today, instead of fretting over our anaylitics numbers, or what we would say to Ellen when we go viral, we are just going to give ourselves a break and realize that having our film in  TAAFI is a wonderful honor and accomplishment. Our first ever silly little film is going to be played alongside some great shorts in a real theater, and I think that that is pretty darn great.

Thanks for following us and I hope we can put out some dumb new things soon.

Progress Report

As some of you may have gathered, the Ain’t Friends team is preparing to make another stop motion film. Next week I am flying out to Halifax to visit my buddy Chris and play with animation. It’s very likely that one of us will have murdered, or maimed,  the other by the time I am scheduled to fly home.  I wanted to I give you a sneak peak at some of the props and characters I have been working on.

The process has left my apartment generally trashed.

Our 4 lead characters, my favorite is the shoemaker on the right.

Lots of tiny books.

The set props are the funnest things to make. I could sit for hours making tiny books and chairs.

A ladder and some buckets.


When The Toad, Came, Home!

I really love Wind In The Willows. Mind you, I spend more time watching kid’s shows than anything else. If you don’t know it, it’s a series of children’s stories written by an Englishman way back in the early 1900s. Since then it’s been made into radioplays, cartoons and apparently even a live action movie with much of the cast of Monty Python?!? The version I love is the stop motion animated series that was done in the 80s.

When I got my hands on the complete DVD collection (what a day that was!), I watched the entire thing in about 2 weeks. I spent much of that time explaining to my girlfriend just how much of a dick Mr. Toad is. To be honest, I don’t think the story was ever part of my childhood, but it does a scary good job of capturing that feeling of being a kid at grandma’s house. And it’s real nice to look at with your eyeballs…

So, if you are looking for some old stop-motion inspiration with really nice sets, find it & watch an episode or two. There is an episode called “The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn” that gets pretty weird, but in a good way that makes your brain feel funny. I can’t recommend watching all 5 seasons in a row, after Season 1 I think the writer’s just stopped trying and Mr. Toad’s constant screwing up becomes obnoxious…. But! The general look and feel is amazing and has definitely inspired what we want to achieve with our next stop-motion, People Who Live Under Rocks. Just check out this clip (you can skip to around 1:00 in) of Mole End and look at all the tiny details…

P.S. This clip also has a good moral about how high society is a bunch of tiresome phonies, and drinking beer while playing skittles with your family is what it’s really all about… 

A Draw For Free Books!

Next week is Colleen’s birthday. She doesn’t really like people to know about it. You can’t find the date online (until now). She’s not really big on celebrations…

So, I thought it would be cool to have a big contest for everyone on the internet and give away a bunch of awesome free stuff to celebrate! She’ll be pissed! From now until the big day (March 24th), everyone who signs up to our mailing list will be automatically entered to win 3 free zines from We Ain’t Friends. We’ll ship you hard copies of EZ Grocery & Video, House Hats & Carpalapse! We’ll also publish any sort of Happy Birthday message you might like to share here on the website and on our Twitter. (I’m available to help make this the maximum amount of embarrassing for Colleen).

All you have to do is visit our mailing list, enter your email address and you’re all set! You can also enter by simply commenting on this blog post below. For those of you who join the new mailing list, we’ll be sending out bi-weekly comics, animations and clever little pieces of the internet.  You’ll get to see exclusive behind-the-scenes stuff that we don’t release to the world, we’ll check out your stuff, you’ll check out ours, it’ll be a good time!

Sign up now for your chance, we will announce the big winner on March 24th!

Winner Announced!

People Who Live Under Rocks: Location Scouting

I went out looking for locations to shoot a few scenes of our next stop-motion project, “People Who Live Under Rocks”. Without giving away too much, here is a taste of where we’ll be shooting. Colleen is hard at work on the mannequins and I’ve got some more script editing to do, but we’ll fill you in on some more details about the project soon!

Reshelving Project @ Eyelevel

Our debut comic EZ Grocery & Video will be at Eyelevel Gallery‘s Reshelving project starting March 1st and running until the end of the month. If you are in Halifax, go check out the show. You’ll find the gallery at 2159 Gottingen St. There are loads of cool zines and these are some of the last copies of our first book. More info on their website.

See our listing here!

Chris don’t thunk so good.

Now you can go inside of Chris’ head and read some of the ridiculous things he tells himself are intelligent thoughts. Don’t particularly recommend it though. Here are a few examples…

I never used to like walnuts. Now I have a lot in common with them.

People who go to dog parks just to watch are more lonely but also happier to be there.

One of the funnier parts of life is running into someone you know had sex with one of your friends in the past. But them pretending you still don’t know about it. Maybe thats just me, cus all my friends are nerds who I imagine aren’t very good in bed.

Read more at thunk.aintfriends.com .

Grabbing the bull by it’s…horns.

I often struggle with huge feelings of inadequacy as an artist. Unfortunately it often leaves me afraid to draw for months on end. But sometimes you just have to face these fears head on and start again.

Thankfully I have great buds who aren’t afraid  to say “Colleen, enough is enough, we need to get back to work.” We Ain’t Friends is back, Chris has filled my Google calendar with too much work and I am pretty happy about it. My styles might change and shift over the next few weeks while I try to find where I am comfortable and I hope you can bear with.

I have started on our new bi-monthly comic. We are feeling pretty darn good about it. Chris and I have always mostly communicated by computer, as we share a general avoidance of real human interactions. Over the next few months we will try to share some of the more ridiculous conversations we’ve had with you via comics; a little glimpse into our fairly twisted friendship.

I’ve been warming up with some sketching… I idolize so many great graphic novel artists, Adrian Tomine being one of them. He has an ability to capture expressions with minimal line work. As a study I have been going through his “Shortcomings” novel and studying the way he draws mouths while speaking, something I struggle to do gracefully.

The first of our comics will be released on Wednesday, January 11th, here on our blog. Stay tuned and hope you like it!

 

We’re baaaack!

We went AWOL for a while there. We had a leave of absense. Nobody was home.

Colleen was catching up on Gilmore Girls & Coronation Street (she alternates each episode to avoid puking her guts out from cheesey sappy overdose). Christopher locked himself in his room for 4 months. A small sign on his door read “I am exploring my darkest secrets, leave me alone!“. Colleen got buried in her apartment under a pile of yard sale trinkets, sketches and tear-soaked snot rags.  Who knows what Christopher saw. He was ordering Chinese takeout every day. After a while, we both emerged and made a pact to never do anything like that again.

None of that happened, but life did get in our way for a while there. Chris moved to the east coast, Colleen got a new place and a new job. Things got busy. Now we are back. Over the last few weeks we’ve been making a lot of plans for what We Ain’t Friends will get up to in 2012.  We have a lot of work to do…

First and foremost (and most excitingly) we are going to be releasing biweekly online comics!  We think they are going to be real funny. I don’t want to give too much away, so you’ll just have to wait and see, but we are pretty excited that we’ll be creating something every other week.

We are also currently starting pre-production on a full length graphic novel that will probably take us all year to create. It is a partially autobiographical story about a young girl with a ‘crazy‘ occult mother who rebels by finding the church, and then ultimately rebels against that too. (Colleen had a weird childhood). (She’s a nutter for sure). More info on that soon when we’ve developed a little more.

On top of those two ongoing projects, we’ve got another stop motion short in the works that Chris is writing at the moment, titled “People Who Live Under Rocks“. We’ve been throwing around ideas about possible gallery shows, something about human relationships, get back to you on that… And we are gathering material for a project called “Shipwrecks“. Ever since Christopher took off to Nova Scotia a few months ago, he has been collecting random things he finds on the beach by his house. Relics washed up by the ocean. We are going to be producing one of a kind art works with these relics alongside portraits of ship captains done by Colleen’s talented hands. It’ll be awesome. They will be for sale in our online shop ! That’s right we have a shop now. Go check it out.

Moral of the story is, we have planned a busy year for ourselves and we hope that is good news for everybody! Stay tuned for a lot more activity here and we’ll keep you in the loop. Thanks friends! Happy New Year.

Here is a photo of Colleen’s cat, Velma, looking out the window. 

 

We are international!

Ritual Music and Books in Australia will soon be carrying EZ Grocery and Video. Jackson, the owner, was kind enough to ask us to send a couple of books his way. Unfortunatly it will take quite a long time to get to him so give it a couple of weeks. It’s encouraging knowing that our books are being seen by people on the other side of the world.

If you are in the Melbourne area and are looking for a rad independent music, book and zine store, please check out Ritual Music and Books. Also take a look at some of the other good stuff in the shop HERE.

Ritual Music and Books
189 St. Georges Rd.
Fitzroy, Australia, 3068

Ratcatcher Song Chord Reference

In Ez Grocery there are characters called The Ratcatchers who play songs on the roof of their apartment. Colleen thought it would be cool to actually write these songs and hide them in the margins of the Ratcatcher scenes. This video is me doing just that and filming my fingers as reference so that she can draw the fingers chording accurately. How’s that for detail.

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