Thistle is a 10 minute stop motion cartoon featuring music by Astrohenge with musical saw by Ruby Wright. Mixed by Toshi Kasai (Big Business/Tool/Melvins).
Thistle from Douglas Pledger on Vimeo.
If you’d like to buy a copy on DVD which features artwork by Maurice Pledger (my dad) then please contact me at email hidden; JavaScript is required £4 each.
Thistle is finally finished, and after 2 years of screaming at my computer I can say it’s a big relief.
I worked on this at home over weekends and through the night when I got back from work. Taking over 10,000 photos to bring this little guy to life. Below are a whole heap of bits and pieces which led up to final film.
I made the film for everyone, it didn’t have any dialogue in it so it can be watched by anyone all over the world. It was originally going to be narrated with a poem I’d written for it but there’s so much going on in the film it really didn’t need it in the end.
Here are some drawings I did to begin with in 2006. It was going to be a 2d cartoon to begin with..
The storyboards I scribbled up which originally I handed to my friend Ian Spendloff who was going to make it in CGI. I still used these loosely when photographing the shots.
Here are some behind the scenes photos I took throughout the course of making the film.
Some Posters
Wallpapers
I spent one evening a few weeks back taking photos of my dad’s bug collection. Here are a few that I’ve turned into monsters..
When my mate Dom asked for someone to appear in his new music video for Isis I jumped for it.  The track is Holy Tears from their album ‘In the Absence of Truth’. Involves me falling off a building and landing on my head. Grim.
Once again for Ipecac, this single is finished and now out in the shops. Which has Melvins & Lustmord remix and also a live version.
If you haven’t seen any of Dominic Hailstone’s other videos you should certainly have a look. Sniff out ‘The EEL’ ..this boy is very good. Anyway, here’s the video..
 Coming out 26th August on Ipecac Records, The Live DVD of Fantomas & Melvins performing their 2006 London show.Â
In early 2006 I asked Greg Werckman at Ipecac if I could come along to a Melvins show and take some photos, being my favourite band, I really wanted to get some good photos to include some cartoon monsters in. Then one thing led to another and ended up going along with my video camera and friends Matthew Rozeik and Alex Gunnis. We all had a camera each, Matt sat on the balcony and Alex wandered around and I sat up front under Dave Lombardo’s drums. He owes me two new ears.
We recorded the whole show and then I spent the next 6 months on and off through weekends and after work editing this beast together. Whilst doing this Matt, using a really crappy desk recording of the performance, had to pull audio from the cameras and mix together the show, I saw what he was doing a few times and it looked like a massive headache yet he did a brilliant job. Well, it finally got finished after a lot of tweaking and redoing certain songs and whatnot. We spent a bit of time doing some wonky menus for the dvd with help from Dominic Hailstone who authored the dvd for us. Ooh la la.
The DVD also features a commentary track by the Melvins and Fantomas’ no 1 fan Danny DeVito. Which is worth it alone.
here is a bit taken from the MovieWeb interview with Mike Patton
“I have to admit. I am not crazy about music DVDs. Just the thought of sitting and watching a full concert, you know? From front to start is hard enough in person for me. Let alone on a fucking DVD. To me, unless the footage looks really spectacular…Unless it’s a one-time project that I want to document, I have no burning desire to do concert DVDs. That being said, every now and again someone does something really cool. And the next one we will be doing after Patton/Kaada live is The Fantomas Melvins Big Band. That is a similar case. It was a friend of Buzz’s, from the Melvins, that happened to be at one of the London shows. And he said, “Hey, I am going to do this whether you want it or not. You don’t have to pay me, blah, blah, blah.” I was like, “Okay. No harm. No foul.” And he sent footage. It is fucking stunning. He did a bunch of visual effects. It is more than just a concert. There is animation in it. It is really well done. We will be putting that out in the summer of 2008.”
 and another bit from Buzzo taken from the Billboard website..
“At the last minute, Greg Werckman [who runs Ipecac with Mike Patton] came up with this idea of doing a commentary on the whole thing. Mike Patton and Greg are friends with Danny DeVito, and he agreed to come down. So it’s me, Greg, Robby Frazier from William Morris, Dale and Danny all talking. Mostly, it has nothing to do with the DVD itself. We got to ask him any question you can possibly think of — what it was like to work with Andy Kaufman, and who was the biggest a**hole he ever worked with. He told us really great stories — all of which are on there.”
DVD Review here
http://www.movieweb.com/review/REu7jBwByhIkxB
Couple of youtube clips too from the dvd. Night Goat from the Melvins & Cape Fear from Fantomas.
Frank & Stan is an idea I’ve had for a few years now.
Frank being the monster and Stand being the little kid who’s created him to beat up the bullies at school. I will be working on this project later this year after Thistle and the Melvins are finished.
In the meantime here is a computer animated clip by Ian Spendloff. Voiced by myself which I stuck in the horror episode of Stronzo. The design of Stan will change somewhat but Frank I think looks pretty swank.
Frank & Stan © Douglas Pledger 2001-2008
 
Electric Meat was a half hour show that I made with old school friend Paul Goodman. It was about a group of kids sat round a table talking about old tv shows they remembered, which of course we then showed, a bunch of made up tv show clips.
In amongst all this were sketches and little cartoony bits we’d made. A lot influenced by the mighty ‘Amazon women on the moon’ and ‘The Groove tube’.
Below are some clips I’ve shoved on youtube, will try and stick up the whole thing at some stage. So there.
2004
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxeTWJdBJ3Y A film I made with mates Paul Goodman and Carey Williams. Puppet Kangaroo goes missing in the big smoke and gets screwed up on drugs and dumb broads.
Music ‘Pink Feathers’ by a less hairy Matthew Rozeik . 2004 or 2005, can’t remember..
 
After drawing a cartoon character for a glowstick company for them to use as their logo, they sent me an enormous box of glowsticks, hundreds of the things. It sat in my room for about a year before deciding to go to the woods one night with my mate Dom and just film something stupid. So we did and this is the mess that came out. We couldn’t see anything other than the glowsticks as we were quite deep in the woods, it was really trippy. Fell over the same Barbed wire fence about 3 times and Dom almost blinded himself when a glowstick blew up in his face. September 2005 about 3am.
Music ‘Not Fall’ by Matthew Rozeik.
Edited by Paul Goodman
