The smallest film ever made gets outdoor Dublin premiere
It's the work of award-winning novelist and former Toasted Heretic mainman Julian Gough.
The Hot Press Newsdesk, 08 Oct 2009
Tod & Viv, a two and a half minute animated movie by Irish writer Julian Gough, will premiere on Dublin’s Liberty Hall late Friday night, as part of the Playhouse Project.
The Playhouse Project has been showing short animations for the past two weeks, using two sides of Liberty Hall as an immense 16-story television screen.
Says Julian Gough, “It’s a very low resolution TV screen – each window is a pixel, so it’s only 10 pixels by 16 on each side. So very strong, simple images show up well. People have done some great stuff, mostly a single idea, often a single image, moving or repeating, and a bit of music as a soundtrack. Someone did Space Invaders, someone did static… But I thought it would be interesting to be madly ambitious, and make an entire feature film, with love and death and murder and forgiveness… I wanted to see if you could make a film that told a story that was strong & simple enough to work on this amazing screen, that was so primitive and high-tech at the same time. And a film that was written for Liberty Hall, that used the fact that the screen was also a building in Dublin. And could you pack it all into in a couple of minutes?”
The result is Tod & Viv, a-two-and-a-half minute murder mystery/ghost story/drama that starts with the words “Tod & Viv live in a big house…” as two windows light up on Liberty Hall. It wouldn’t be giving anything away to say that Tod & Viv are trapped in a hellish relationship. And, as Flann O’Brien said (in the original title for the Third Policeman), “Hell goes round and round…”
“You could loop the film, and they’d be killing each other forever,” Gough resumes. “I wrote it as a loop, because I couldn’t be sure people would catch the start of it, walking along the Quays, or over O’Connell Bridge. This way, they’d get the whole story even if they only started watching halfway through. But you wouldn’t want to watch it more than twice, it would wreck your head pretty quickly. It’s all death, nightmares, and slamming doors.”
©Hot Press 2011. Why be a member? | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy