It's a COMbination of things that each needs a seperate POST - it's COMPOST!

We entered the "Ninth Level" video into film festivals, and it screened at the RIP Film fest over the Nov.8th weekend in LA.

We had so much fun making Ninth Level, that Jerry (Ochoa, director) wrote and was awarded grant funds through Houston's SouthWest Alternative Media Project (SWAMP) to produce another film featuring a brand new Two Star Symphony score - it was our first project using a RedCam, but we had a fantastic cast and crew and it turned out beautifully. Not only did This Neighborhood get a great response when it premiered at the 2013 Houston CinemaArts Festival presentation of the Short Filmmakers' showcase, it was also accepted to and screened at:

2014 Action On Film Festival  in Monrovia, California
2014 Unreal Film Festival  in Memphis, Tennessee
2014 New York City Independent Film Festival in NYC 
2014 Molins de Rei in Barcelona, Catalonia, where it was nominated for 6 awards in the short films competition, and received a Judges' Special Selection!

We will release This Neighborhood online soon - but while you wait impatiently for its release, another local Houston band - Glass the Sky - liked Jerry's previous directorial efforts so much they asked him to make them a video.  So we produced and Jerry directed Touch, which. is. GORGEOUS. thanks to the heroic efforts of our talented cast and crew. You can peruse pictures of said crew and talent looking like epic set deities behind the scenes here. Or not. But you have the choice.

Holy Flaming @%$#*^!!!! An update!

The incredible Two Star Symphony finally has a full fledged music video for their fantastic arrangements!   Not only did I get to PA on an amazing set with a great group of talented professionals (and a psychotic insomniac donkey), but I got to animate the haunted illustration that appears in The Book In the Library.

As you will see from the whopping 3.5 second run time, all four members of the quartet writhe in flaming agony. Considering they are really cool people, it was a little odd and disconcerting planning and enacting their gruesome pain and suffering. (Well.... except for Jerry, the director. It was kind of disappointing not being able to push his gruesome demise further).

 In addition to animating all four members of the quartet, this was my first attempt at animating fire;  I would have liked to tinker with the flame animation looping a bit more, but deadlines.....

Here is the full 4 frames of animation as I submitted it (I think they had to trim about 12 frames from the beginning).    It needs to be viewed in HD mode, or it looks like fuzzy cubism. The full video for The 9th Level can be found on the Two Star Symphony site - it is gorgeous (I did mention that the entire cast and crew are BAD-ASS, right?)

the 9th Level Animation from Sophia Vassilakidis on Vimeo.

this is going to be bats@!% cool!

Two Star Symphony, Houston's awesome local string quartet extraordinaire, needed a poster for their awesome upcoming live performance at the awesome Discovery Green venue of their awesome original score for the awesome public-domain-footage film "Silent Shadow of the Batman" by awesome writer/director/editor Andre Perkowski.

So, I came up with this poster for them. People seem to think it's cool. If you think the poster is cool, or even if you don't, you should go to the screening. I got off of work just so I could attend (it's going to be bats*&% awesome!)