The Facts in the Case of Mister Hollow

This is another short film in the Cannes/YouTube/National Film Board of Canada award shortlist you can vote for over on the NFB's YouTube Channel; I think this one is fascinating, well worth repeat viewings as essentially the viewer is studying an old photograph, but as the camera moves in and around the different parts of the image we see more and it becomes increasingly disturbing, creating, without any dialogue or real movement, a rather Southern Gothic narrative in the viewer's mind. You can vote for the films in the running until May 20th. The Facts in the Case of Mister Hollow (which sounds a bit like a short story for a Neil Gaiman or Poe tale, I thought) is co-directed by Rodrigo Gudino and Vincent Marcone.

The Diagram Prize

Each year the Bookseller magazine runs the Diagram Award which is for the book published in the last year with the oddest title; these are real published books, submitted by booksellers - last year's winner was If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs. This year's final shortlist contender are:

• Baboon Metaphysics by Dorothy L Cheney and Robert M Seyfarth

• Curbside Consultation of the Colon by Brooks D Cash

• The Large Sieve and its Applications by Emmanuel Kowalski

• Strip and Knit with Style by Mark Hordyszynski

• Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring by Lietai Yang

• The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais by Professor Philip M Parker

The award will be announced on March 27th and is an annual event enjoyed by British booksellers. Personally I've always loved it, its a bit of fun and it appeals to my sense and love of the Absurd that these are the real titles of actual books (it also nicely reinforces the commonly held perception that we in Britain, especially among the literary fraternity, are, to put it politely, 'eccentric', which is no bad thing in my opinion. Booksellers, librarians and bookshops should be a little eccentric and individual). Link via the BBC

This Way Up

Britain's nominee for possible Oscar glory in the short animation category this year is This Way Up, a lovely little Edward Gorey-esque dark comedy of a father and son undertakers attempting to bury a little old lady after an unlikely accident sees the hearse flattened with a boulder, taking them struggling across country with the coffin and then into the Afterlife in their quest to finish the job, all performed without words. For a change instead of just reading about it or seeing a clip we can actually watch the entire short animation on the BBC's Film Network site (the Beeb part funded the film by Nexus' Adam Foulkes and Alan Smith). While you're there have a poke around the rest of that site because the Beeb have some other animation and other short film gems there (I'm not sure if it is geo-locked to only play for folks with UK ISPs or not though and you will need Windows Media Player or Real Player to watch it).

Diagram prize

Each year the Bookseller run the Diagram prize, one of the more unusual literary awards; while many mainstream literary prizes can, if we're honest, be a bit up their own arse, the Diagram accepts nominations from booksellers and librarians for the daftest genuine title. This year's shortlist is out and comprises of (and bear in mind this is not me off on a mad make-up-something-silly jag, these are real books):

How Green were the Nazis? by Franz-Josef Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller

D. Di Mascio's Delicious Ice Cream: D. Di Mascio of Coventry: An Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans by Roger De Boer, Harvey Francis Pitcher, and Alan Wilkinson

The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification by Julian Montague

Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan by Robert Chenciner by Gabib Ismailov, Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov and Alex Binnie

Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium edited by Robert J Anderson, Juliet A Brodie, Edvar Onsoyen and Alan T Critchley

Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence by David Benatar

Channel Frederator

Posting on the Black Horse animation reminded me that I had forgotten to mention the recent Channel Frederator awards here. Frederator was set up to encourage animators and video makers; there's been a ton of interesting material on there and the recent awards page has links to the winners so not only can you read about them you can see them (too many to link to here, so just follow this main link). I wish the Academy would do something like this for the short animated movie nominees in the running for Oscars this year, since otherwise most of us will never get to see them. Some SF awards like the Hugos have done this with some tales in the short story awards nominations, making them available online so more people can get to read them and I think short animations could benefit from this in the same way, especially now it is so easy to upload short videos for mass viewing online.