Friday, June 03, 2011

Animazement Hell 2011 Playlist



The Animazement 2011 Hell played to a capacity crowd, who laughed, cried, and frantically waved their arms back and forth like metronomes. You can relive all the magic with the handy Animazement 2011 Hell playlist, now available over on the Animazement forums. Thanks go to this year's Hellions, Cameron Blashka and Chris Culpepper, with special thanks to David Smith for his editing assistance.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Sweet!

Now the question I have is how do you get away with playing 10 minute plus clips? I have to trim clips to 3 minutes to keep 'em from getting up and walking out.

DFS said...

I think it's a couple of things. It depends on the content, and it depends on when you show it.

F'rinstance, you can play long stuff at the beginning of the show (when people are feeling open-minded - we like to say that you can open Hell with anything) and you can play long stuff at the end of the show, when they've decided to stick around for the long haul.

There's particular stuff that the kids especially like and they'll stick around for. We've shown Don Hertzfeldt's new joints, which clock in at, what, 20 minutes and change? And the kids love it because they love Hertzfeldt.

There's some subject matter that really hooks them. A few years ago, when I think we were re-running the "Billy's Balloon" short from the Bitter Films disc, we looked at the INSANE reaction from the crowd and realized something: Hell hates children. Hell loves to see bad things happen to children. This conclusion has been borne out over the years, and so Phil can get away with showing stuff like the "Live and Learn" safety videos. It's about 12 minutes and it has its low points, but it has little kids breaking their legs and being horribly burned, so the Hell crowd loves it.

So I guess it mainly comes down to knowing your audience. Luckily out here we've had years of pretty consistent viewership to develop a good idea of what they like and what they'll stick around for.

Phil Lee said...

What David said. I can attest that Legend of Koizumi went over amazingly well, even as a double feature clocking in at 16 minutes, and that the crowd also ate up Kings of Power 4 Billion Percent, even though that's several years old at this point. So, chuck some of those in and see what happens.

I should also say that long clips don't always work, such as the year I closed out Hell with the animated video set to Kraftwerk's "Autobahn". That was awesomely room clearing. Not that I minded - it's Kraftwerk, for god's sake.