💌 SLS May News 💌

Our May screening was this past Friday (05/01) & whether you were able to make it or not, we’ve got some news to keep you in the loop!

May Screening Highlights

• We featured 23 live action and animated shorts by LA filmmakers + a filmmaker who traveled from New York to screen with us!

• A rat was in attendance…. and no, not a snitch, but a real life pet rat.

  

• Here is the teaser trailer (edited by our Co-Executive Director Ben Sharpe) with clips of the films from this month’s lineup. It features the song ‘Maybe I’m the Reason’ by Dev Lemons which screened as well.

• On the El Cid patio we had vendors including:
  -Animator/Artist Napoleon Chavez with his Cordaroy the Rat merch! It’s a little tough to see it, but the real life rat met the plushie rat (in the photo below on the right) and it made my night.

  

  
  
  -Wacom was in attendance doing demonstrations with their tablets. Thanks to their generosity, we also had a giveaway of two 11” Wacom Movink Pads (valued around $450) that went to two happy artists in the crowd! Can’t wait to see what they make with them :)
  
  -The SLS merch table featured a brand new t-shirt design by Matt Siegel (he’s also the animator who made the ‘Endless Office’ SLS interstitial that we feature in screenings).

  

  We’ve gotten realllly overwhelmingly positive response to this new design and you can see more about Matt’s thought process and design journey on his post below:

• We have two New Gold Sponsors we’re very happy to announce!
  
  -Smosh is a long standing Comedy channel on Youtube that started out as the founders, Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla, posted funny videos as kids in the early days of Youtube. Their first video ‘Power Rangers Theme’ was posted 20 years ago and as one of the top comments for the video says “Just remember: Pluto was still considered a Planet when this was made”.
  Today, Smosh has grown to a full scale comedy production company that has expanded to games, animation, and a variety channel among several others. It had three spans as the most subscribed channel on Youtube, has won awards like the Webby, Shorty and Streamy Awards, and is independently owned.
  
  -Tierney Corp is an independent animation company headed by Nigel Tierney, an award-winning Director and Creative Producer who has an extensive resume of work in animation. He worked with DreamWorks for several years and has also collaborated on work with DISNEY, SNAP, NFL, IMG, & TIME.

• Film Restoration
  
  Through our partnership with Fotokem, we’re working with Mauricio Alvarado of Rockin’ Pins and supporting the restoration of 24 classic animated films this year. We have a whole page dedicated to this on our website that is updated with each new restoration that is completed. So far there are three, including Alice’s Egg Plant that we screened earlier on this year. There’s also Felix Hits the Deck which features Felix the Cat, and most recently completed is A Coach for Cinderella that has been digitally restored in 4k.

  

  A still from ‘A Coach for Cinderella’

Previous Event Recap from March:

• Animated Shorts Showcase at El Cid on 04/15
  (In partnership with Animation Scotland & Glasgow Film Festival)

  

  On Wednesday April 15th, we had a unique showcase of 16 animated shorts from incredibly talented filmmakers based in Scotland and LA. The same program was shown at both the Glasgow Film Theatre in Glasgow, Scotland and El Cid in Los Angeles, CA. Glasgow is 8 hours ahead of LA so around lunchtime here in California, they were sitting down to their screening. We had a full house inside and outside at El Cid for our screening at 8pm PST and it was a great special screening, a few people even went out of their way to tell us it was one of their favorite lineups we’ve done. That’s a big compliment we don’t take lightly!
  
  Another cool aspect of this is that there was a virtual networking session the week after so that the filmmakers could all “meet” each other and chat about each other’s work in some breakout groups. Our Co-Executive Director, Jared Corwin, attended this and had some meaningful talks with the programmers and filmmakers about the screening and the films. We were particularly interested in how a short called ‘My Breakfast with Barf’ by Peter Javidpour (an especially left of center and ridiculously hilarious short from LA that parodies the film ‘My Dinner with Andre’) played over in Scotland. The response was overwhelmingly that it was super weird but they really enjoyed it! Amazing.

  

  
  Events Coming Up This Month:

We are very excited to present a special Cinco De Mayo fundraiser screening featuring the work of Jorge Gutierrez. While the indoor tickets are sold out, there are still some tickets for the outdoor screening! The indoor tickets went quickly because they include the Q&A with Jorge after the show but you can still come out and enjoy the outdoor screening and contribute to funding our fellowship films!

Get tickets and find out more at the link here!

Ego Plum is an Emmy-nominated composer for animation that worked with us to score the restored film ‘Alice’s Egg Plant’. Since these older animated films have aged, the score was either performed live originally or it has been lost in time due to deterioration of the film so it is necessary to make something new.
We’re excited to help present this live musical event at the Lodge Room and our Co-Executive Director, Ben Sharpe, will be going up on stage to say a few words about Silver Lake Shorts. If you’re on the fence considering it, in part of the event’s description it says The Ego Plum Laboratory “Blur[s] the line between laboratory experiment and live performance, the ensemble transforms intricate studio creations, whimsical electronic oddities, and cartoon soundscapes into vivid, theatrical musical multimedia events that feel equal parts concert, and living artifact from an alternate electronic age.” Needless to say, it’s sure to be a very unique experience!

Get tickets and find out more at the link here!


Thanks for reading!

<3
Karissa
& the Silver Lake Shorts Team