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flux flies high with US film and literary greats

New Zealand's award-winning Flux Animation Studio is grabbing US audiences this week on the website of prestigious American magazine, The New Yorker.

The website is screening It was a Dark and Silly Night, a five-minute short film produced and directed by Flux. The film is a 2D animation of a story written by Neil Gaiman, acclaimed as one of the top ten living post-modern writers, and illustrated by renown cartoonist and illustrator Gahan Wilson.

The New Yorker website is showing It was a Dark and Silly Night as a feature on the special screening in New York of Gahan Wilson: Born Dead Still Weird, a documentary about the life and work of Wilson whose cartoons have been published in The New Yorker for many years. It was a Dark and Silly Night will be included as a special feature in a planned DVD of the Gahan documentary.

The film, which tells the amusing story of a children's party that takes place in a cemetery with some unusual ghoulish 'guests', represented a complete "labour of love" for Flux founder and Managing Director Brent Chambers.

"Gahan Wilson has been a hero of mine since I was a teenager buying National Lampoon magazine for his cartoon strip Nuts. To find myself working with his drawings was beyond a dream", says Brent Chambers.

Wilson is highly complimentary about the work of Flux. He has been reported as saying: "It's a new adventure to see my work on film, and it's thrilling to see this thing done so well" He described Brent Chambers as "very sympathetic" to his story intentions and techniques.

The pair met up at the highly-regarded Hamptons International Film Festival where It was a Dark and Silly Night featured last year. It was also shown at the St Louis International Film Festival in November and, closer to home, featured in Ohakune's Big Mountain Film Festival where it won the best animation title.

The original story was written by Neil Gaiman after watching his son playing in a cemetery. Gaiman's works include The Graveyard Book which has just won The John Newbery Medal in the US for the most outstanding contribution to children's literature, Coraline, Neverwhere, Stardust, Good Omens (co-authored with Terry Pratchett), the script for the Robert Zemeckis film Beowulf and Gaiman's series of comics, Sandman.

Flux created It was a Dark and Silly Night using traditional 2D hand-drawn animation techniques which were required for the short film by the projects' overall director and producer. Producer Lesley Chilcott and Director Steven-Charles Jaffe are both highly prominent figures in the US film industry, and it was through a long-standing relationship with Lesley Chilcott that Flux was selected to produce and direct It was a Dark and Silly Night.

Lesley Chilcott was the producer of Al Gore's global success, An Inconvenient Truth, for which Flux directed the animated sequences.