This was originally begun for Etsy's 'Handmade Moment' competition, but then a series of unfortunate personal events occurred and we missed the deadline. We decided to finish the project anyway, however, and hope you enjoy it.

Score composed by Romain Battaglia. This is a somewhat special project for me, as it represents the first project I have animated fully by myself, as well as directed.

In Uncanny ValleyGirl 2, I kvetch about being a penniless freelancer, and give an overview of current digital distributors. This has already proved somewhat controversial, and there's a lively debate about iVerse (not dead! just not interested in us!) and LongBox in the comments. Go, see, contribute: http://bit.ly/1al1fo Or just read, and laugh at me tripping and faceplanting into the technology curve. Or even, perhaps, be inspired to create your own comic or find a new way to distribute/make money from an old comic you've already created.

Obviously enough time has passed for me to forget what a gigantic pain in the arse writing a column is, because I've started another one on digital comics. It's basically a diary of Valentine up through its launch. Go, read: there is sample art, I talk about sea monsters and insult various interest groups, and more. Also, if you enjoy the column, post a comment there as I am a dirty attn:h0r and that pleases me immensely.

Column is weekly on Mondays. Next week, I talk about Pere Ubu and digital publishers. Merdre!

As some of you know, in October I will be launching my first new comic book series in some time, VALENTINE. It's action, with a side helping of action. It's coming out first EXCLUSIVELY on iPhone and Kindle, and in fact has been written and drawn specifically for those platforms (Fret not, there won't be any lame "motion comics", or speaking unless spoken to.) Once my co-conspirator and generally fabulous artist Christine Larsen and I have finished the entire story, we will also put it out as a full-colour graphic novel in good old paper book form... presuming of course we can find a publisher willing to take publishing rights only.

Where you come in is this. I need translators. Electronic distribution gives us a wonderful opportunity to have, at no additional fixed cost, a book launch in several languages at once, day and date. This is really important to me because, well, I have awesome friends in lots of different countries.

I am looking for people natively fluent (or near as dammit) in languages other than English to commit to translating around 60 panels of comic a month. You don't even have to letter it, if you don't want to/don't know how... you just have to send me a Word document I can copy-paste from.

In return for doing the translation and promoting the book in that language (via comic sites, blogs, whatever), we will give you 50% of the comic's net earnings in that edition. In other words: You live in Brazil. You translate VALENTINE into Portugues. You get 50% of the net sales of the Portuguese-edition episodes, so if you write to a few blogs or comics news sites about the book, you stand to earn more.

So yes, come ye, oh speakers of Hebrew, of Japanese, of Hindi, of French and of Russian... and any and every other language. Let's take this series global.

I have several more graphic novel projects on the way; various old friends of mine and I have basically decided, fuck it, we're going to work on really cool stories, really slowly, and see how far we can get without publishers. Igor Kordey and I are planning to continue SMOKE (yes, finally); Alem Curin and I (our ESCAPIST story may someday see the light of day) are planning to collaborate on something called FAUSTINE that will be pretty damn disturbing and psychedelic; and my old Humanoids collaborators Ed Ocana (MESSIAH COMPLEX) and Luigi di Giammarino (ADAM) are also planning stuff.

Speaking of my French series MESSIAH COMPLEX and ADAM, I bought the rights back to those books and soon electronic editions will be available in French and English for iPhone at a bargain 99 cents per issue. Translators: if you're interested in doing translations for those books as well, or indeed SMOKE which is already available at Comixology, the same 50% deal applies.

I'll post some art soon. It's all getting pretty exciting round here.

...Although this one feels a bit more like an art piece.

Also on vimeo, if you'd rather. More to say about this later; it was originally going to be a live video but then we decided not to so this was built up over a couple months of filming, and contemplating societal beauty standards and the feminine pursuit of youth. Marcella is wonderful to work with because she thought this was a FINE idea for a video.

I have spent the past three days driving between Brooklyn and the South Bronx in a box van, collecting furniture from Craigslist sellers/donators. (Should I be proud that I am 37 and my new husband's and my first apartment together has been furnished via Freecycle and $50 Craigslist furniture bargains? Or is it just a bit pathetic?). Anyway, three days of Manhattan-related road rage plus a unique stellar alignment of work-related women being utter arses has left Alex not a happy girl.

But there is salvation, as ever, in comics. I've been saving up my comics-related news for a while and it's time to spill.

If you have an iPhone, and have never bought the three issues of Smoke - my action/sci-noir that came out from IDW some years ago - you can go Comixology's fab iPhone app and get each issue for a mere 99 cents to read in iTunes! Or just nab the free 17-page preview of issue 1. At comixology this week Smoke is the featured item and there is also a podcast with me where I say "um" a lot, mumble a little, and mention several pieces of exciting news. I'll leave the podcast to explain the exciting news first, but will mention it all next week once the podcast has moved on to its next victim subject.

Later this week, the League of Extremely Ordinary Gentlemen podcast name-checks my soon-to-be-published Kat & Mouse 4 (Tokyopop) as an all-ages comic to read. The podcast also guest-stars Harris O'Malley or

graphicnovelist

I have mixed feelings about Kat & Mouse 4 finally being published. On the one hand, it's some of my, Fe', and Cari's best work and I'm glad it's finally out of limbo and able to conclude the series. On the other hand, Tokyopop are only rushing it out because if they don't publish it by 26 September, the rights revert to me - and I'd actually do something with them, instead of just sitting on them as Tokyopop is doing. They won't even let the book be put on Comixology, which blows as it's JUST the sort of book that would work great being read by tweens on their phones.

But that's been my week - win some, lose more. Nothing's really a clear-cut "good" at the moment. Unless you like my comics, in that you'll think it's a clear-cut good I'm finally writing some new ones, and getting around to finishing some old ones. If you don't like my comics, oh internet person, I refer you to Tina Fey's Golden Globes acceptance speech.

What do I have to do to get a bit of good luck, or traction as a director? I blew two months' rent money on making an Amazon Kindle spec commercial, dragooned in some of the nicest and most talented film crew and cast I've worked with to labour for free on the very complex shoot, then spent 10 days painstakingly doing VFX by myself in Photoshop (the only VFX programme I knew/could afford)... then we get hosed by Amazon for being "too professional" - not even being included in their top 50!

Compare and contrast:

Their "top 5"

Our entry:

I am so mad right now I could cry. It looks like I will never get paid to direct or be able to make a career out of it and I should probably just give up and stop spending my money making crap like this off my own back...

I'm doing a couple more music vids (kind of handmade stuff, not nearly as grand as, say, "Leeds United") for friends then I think I'm going to call it quits at the end of September. It's just too hard, and I seem to have the worst luck in the world at getting people with budgets to notice what I'm doing.

I had so hoped we'd get somewhere with this Amazon thing, and I worked so hard on it I nearly had a nervous breakdown...

The next step for my directing career is to make a lo/no budget feature. I do not have a screenplay for one at the moment, and am interested in any COMPLETED spec screenplays any of you have written. The screenplay must be good, finished, and appropriate for low budgets (eg no giant crowd scenes, etc). Please note there's a real art to low budget; understanding that you can do a space opera, as long as it's mostly interiors; or a car chase scene, as long as it's on an "abandoned" country road rather than down 5th Avenue at rush hour.

Screenplays can be on any topic; I have a slight preference for projects featuring tween girls (eg 13-15 yrs heroine) as I know a producer who is interested in such a film. However if there is another screenplay not about a tween subject which is hands-down fantastic, I'll just forge ahead on my own.

If you want me to sign an NDA or expect an option fee, you aren't really getting where I'm coming from on the lo/no budget front. There is no pay. There is just the pleasure in seeing something get made, plus a share of any eventual profits (don't hold your breath).

Feel free to pass this post on to writer friends.

Latest. Won't write much about it at the moment because I am still crazy-buried in retouch work for this Amazon commercial. Fun, multi-camera super8 shoot inspired by "Red Indian" end of pier dances and early-1970s exploitation/slasher flicks. As always, rating/commenting on youtube is appreciated because I am a pathetic ball of neuroses requiring constant attention and validation.

Some stills from the Forget-Me-Nots shoot can be seen here (dancers) and here (band).

We're still working on this one, just shot a series of domestic murder scenes last night and doing stop-motion footage with medical supplies over next two days. Expect this pair of videos end of June, hopefully. It's nice to be working for friends, in an organic way where we can carry on thinking about / working on a project over a couple of weeks.

I will be back in London from 23 May-7 June, filming one, possibly two music videos. Would love to see any old friends. The first (definite) video is a crazy live shoot for Marcella Puppini's very groovy new band, the Forget-Me-Nots. We're shooting their May 30 gig at Last Days of Decadence in Shoreditch on 8 super8 cameras, which is either genius or a recipe for disaster. We'll see! I've built a special lighting cage for the occasion which I'm quite proud of, and I can't wait to see it in action.

If you would like to come along on May 30, I have some guestlist spaces, so please let me know in comments. (NB: do not assume you are down for guestlist unless I respond and say, yes, you're down.) If you happen to have a super8 camera and want us to give you some film and you can shoot, note that too. t will be an amazing night, and if you haven't been to LDD it's a fantastic club. Please come! The party is a Capote-style Black & White Ball and there will be swing dancers and nekkid ladies and Dusty Limits and all sorts of good things. Voila, Facebook events page. Voila, flyer:

See you all soon!

Friends: do any of hail from and/or reside in West Virginia, specifically the coalmining parts thereof? If so, please get in touch (or suggest nice folks who do). I have strange and harmless questions to ask about the local flora and fauna. (This is not weird Alex code for anything. I actively want to know what are the main trees/shrubs/flowers in those parts, what colour the dirt is, and what it generally smells like.)

Directed by me, animated by the wonderful Jorden Oliwa. NSFW due to, oh, a whole bunch of animated Naughty.

NB: Unofficial fan video. As in, not official or sanctioned, just done for fun because we felt like making an animation and Amanda was kind enough to let us use the song. For Evelyn Evelyn's song "Have You Seen My Sister Evelyn", out on the album Elephant Elephant from Jason Webley's Eleven Records, and containing contributions from Amanda Palmer and Jason. There's also a high quality version on Vimeo (plus mov to download) which has been waiting to process for about 6 hours because Vimeo sucks like that unless you give them money which will never happen. As usual, more on the video (& process, & toys and extras) soon in the friends-locked part of my blog. But it's Sunday night in Brooklyn in the spring, and there are cocktails to be mixed.

I'm now on Twitter (as alexdecampi), if anyone cares. I'm doing it as a once-daily observational haiku type thing, which is to say I'm too poncey to break down and write about what sort of sandwich I had for lunch. I am instead writing cleverclogs Brooklyn verite about OTHER people's sandwiches.

On Sunday we moved to Park Slope in Brooklyn. New York is the ninth town in which I've lived and the flat in Park Slope must be the 30th or so temporary borrower of the phrase 'my home'. Drove down in a snowstorm; nothing like getting to know New York traffic in a 10-foot truck during a blizzard. The dog was curled up between my and Charlie's seats, her sleep interrupted by the occasional kick and whimper of a puppy-dream.

I'm already mostly unpacked (I've had practice). Charlie's in Manhattan filling out forms at his acting school; I've stayed home all day with the internet. New York is exciting. Park Slope is exciting, in that it's basically Primrose Hill with bagels and I liked Primrose Hill a lot.

I'm also terrified, of course, as I don't really know anyone here and all the casual work I pick up to keep myself sane from friends' bands and the burlesque/cabaret scene and all that... it's not around. Or I don't know how to find it. So, if you are in NY and know any decent bands/performers that want videos, drop me a line. I also rather fancy getting involved directing theatre... it's nice to be back in a big city.

(Londoners: there is a vague plan afoot for me to come back around Glastonbury time, but it requires a number of people getting organised, not least myself. So yes, I am trying to be back soon. I do miss you all, terribly.)

We'll be at the Peculier Pub, 145 Bleecker, from about 5pm. Come say hi. Pass it around as I have utterly failed to organise seeing any of you as I'm rubbish.

Note: if your LJ consists more than 80% of Loudtwitter posts, you shall be defriended within the next week. Your twits are duller than a day trip to Croydon, and no substitute for actual content.

I have two short films I dearly want to get off the ground. They have been postponed due to my general lack of a physical abode for the past year, and due to my not having progressed very far on the feature screenplay that was to follow hot on their heels. I'm now nearly finished my feature screenplay* (page 94, represent!) and it is a new year and all that, so: ONWARDS.

I am looking for a producer for these two short films. And by "producer" I mean fundraiser/organiser/marketer/etc, not a production manager. One short film is a bit of a crowd pleaser - a 12-minute silent comedy; the other is a long (25min), very absurdist tale of love and existential fear. The idea is to shoot one or both of these (perhaps back to back?), campaign them in the large festivals (Sundance &c) and use that as a springboard to get the feature project moving. They could be shot in either the UK or America. (On that note, I now have my British passport. Huzzah.) My music video career should be moving up a notch this year as well, since I've just signed to a very good mv/commercials production company in LA and another (for the UK) in London. More details on that once they've made their announcements.

NB, in case you are not familiar with my work, it is fairly avant garde/absurdist and often deals in socially inappropriate ways with the ghey, the drug, and the generally 'immoral'. This is my world, and that of many of my friends, but I realise it is not everyone's and thus if you have issues about any of these subjects you probably won't like my films. NB2, I want to shoot both of these on 35mm.

*This is not my first feature screenplay. This is about my sixth. It took me five previous to figure out what I wanted to say in my debut feature. It's an odd little absurdist rock and roll It's A Wonderful Life.

It's been quite a busy month in terms of interviews. Awesome music video blog Shots Ring Out talked to me about the "Leeds United" video so if you're interested in the "behind the scenes" or making-of, have a look. SRO have been a huge supporter of my work so if you do stop by, give them lots of love.

Joanna Draper-Carlson at Comics Worth Reading (the only comics blog, in fact, that I consider worth reading) talked to me about Tokyopop, my series Kat & Mouse and comic writing. Make sure you read the comments as there's general hilarity when a guy named Tom, who's a bit more sexist than he thinks he is, stops by and suggests to the mainly female audience that our widdle brains might not be able to handle higher thought... saying not to investigate this is anti-science, but then not backing up any of his claims with, you know, actual science.

Lastly, and thank heavens this isn't in a more widely read site, I crack jokes about class A drugs and childrens' books. What can I say? I was in a very, very sarcastic mood, and was quite exhausted.

There's another good interview on my whole music video creation process going up on the 27th November on UK fanzine The Antagonist, do check it out - it's actually one of my favourite interviews of recent times. Jess (the journalist) really did her homework and asked some interesting things.