FIRST ENTRY

Five years ago I graduated from Edinburgh College of Art with a short film titled Solo Duets.

This degree film was selected in over thirty international film festivals, picking up some awards and earning me a place in the kingdom of animators.

I have not been Idle in these past years. Much time has been spent creating work for the FeltusFeltus exhibitions I had in art galleries around the world with my brother, Tobias, and there have been various other projects here and there.

In 2006 I started production on a short animated film to follow Solo Duets. Though I am a puppet animator, my desire to paint, and the inspiration from many films I saw during my festival tours, brought me to try making a film in 2D. My intention was to film the character's faces in live-action, and combine these with oil paintings, as a cut-out animation.

Work on this film lasted between 2006 and 2009, but it did not advance beyond the live-action shoot and many months of interrupted painting. I was not successful in funding the project, hence it became unsustainable.

oil painting made during the Tchaikovsky's Garden period, as a gift to Tobias Feltus, © Joseph Feltus, March 2009.

(Thank you to Asaf Agranat for his support, to Nolwenn Daste for lending herself as actress, to my mother Lani Irwin, to Alan Feltus, William Bailey, and to Tobias Feltus, for all his support, and to my wife, Liz Krause, for being the angel that she is).

In September of 2009 I reopened a project I had been working on in 2007, and which carried some of the earlier DNA that Solo Duets had come out from. This project was called "The Unattended Lessons", and it was a new puppet film.

Welcome to the production diary of The Unattended Lessons.

(I must thank the author Sally Gardner for opening my eyes, and for lending me her garden shed to write in...)