Filmmaker and fellow Mad Monkey Steve Daniels has scored big with his short fantasy “Dirty Silverware.” To date, the picture has appeared in more than nine film festivals and recently took the “Best Short Film” award at Sitges in Spain, widely considered the world’s foremost international festival specializing in fantasy and horror films. Mad Monkey and Tom Clark served as executive producers on Dirty Silverware, which tells follows a man as he travels deep into the forest to stop an ancient creature from creating cursed silverware that brings unhappiness to the world.
Not one to rest on his laurels, Daniels has already completed and released a follow-up entitled “T for Termite.” This four minute narrative was created especially for “The ABC’s of Death,” a contest whereby independent filmmakers produce shorts inspired by the letter T and post them on the web. Whichever entry receives the most votes will be incorporated into a feature length anthology featuring short films from 25 notable genre filmmakers. To view and, hopefully, vote for Daniels’ film, visit The ABCs of Death and click the vote button in the top right corner of the page.
For the eleventh consecutive year since its founding, Mad Monkey left the local ADDY Awards Saturday evening with the Best of Broadcast trophy in hand. Awarded in recognition of “The Service,” a spot in the recent campaign for Rush’s restaurant, the ADDY was celebrated with agency collaborator Dave Ruddle of The Ruddle Agency. Other elements of the campaign garnered two silver awards.
“We had a blast making those spots, so it’s especially rewarding that one of them got the ‘best of’,” said Monkey president Lorie Gardner. “What a wonderful reminder of how lucky we are to collaborate with such committed partners and great brands.”
Mad Monkey was also grateful to have worked with RIGGS Partners on award winning work for The Cooperative Ministry, Harvest Hope Food Bank for its fundraising piece “The New Faces of Need,” and the South Carolina Education Lottery on it’s silver earning brand campaign. Additional recognition came in the form of gold statues for special effects work on an NBA promo for Turner Broadcasting and a sequence introducing the new Dreamliner for Boeing. Finally we received a possibly ill-advised bit of silver encouragement for our shameless self-promotion piece, “Smiling Faces.”
If you’ve recently smelled something smoldering in Columbia, it could be the maze of cables that link and feed the edit suite at 808 Lady St. Resigned to the recirculated air and all-to-familiar darkness of that room, editor/director/sound-designer/cine-Swiss-army-knife-incarnate Steve Daniels sits dead in the eye of an exhaustingly prolific storm, battling not only the usual Mad Monkey deadlines, but those from a string of personal projects likely to up the wattage on an already luminous body of work.
First to be released, a music video for “Still Sound”, the lead single from Toro Y Moi’s new album Underneath The Pine. To kick off his second offering under the Carpark Records banner, Chaz Bundick (Toro Y Moi) sought an organic, spontaneous affect, free of narrative constraint. Daniels, it seems, was more than happy to oblige.
“The video was free-styled all the way,” Daniels says. “We agreed it should be fun and reflect a kind of “day in the life” of Chaz dancing about Columbia, hanging out with friends, performing with the band.”
The result is raising industry eyebrows and creating the pre-release buzz demanded from an album in the digital era. The day it leaked, the video claimed front-page real estate on indie music site Pitchfork and has subsequently charted more than 38,000 views on YouTube (link to the video here). Most recently, the video and its director were profiled by the Art & Design blog The Black Harbor.
Take a peak here {http://theblackharbor.com/steve-daniels-still-sound/}, because it might be your only chance to hear from Daniels for a while. With a Heather Henson produced puppet film, Junk Palace, now in the can and final cut of his own fantasy short Dirty Silverware due at the end of the month, he’s all but welded a Do Not Disturb sign to the edit suite door.
