Back from Annecy

Hello,

Yes, that's right, the 49th international Animation festival has been and gone and I was blessed enough to be there not only to watch fantastic features such as 'Coraline' which, incidentally won the big crystal prize, but also to see some small scale short productions that were no less inspiring such as Slavar (also got a prize) and some beautiful stop-mo work from Jean-François Lévesque in the form of his film 'Necktie' http://www.awntv.com/videos/the-necktie-clip. One thing I foolishly missed but will endeavour to find on DVD when it comes out was 'Mary and Max' by Australian director Adam Elliot, which apparently had people in tears at its closing. Another big highlight was Mifa which ran alongside the festival for most of the week. This allowed for all sorts of industry pro's to showcase their work as well as students to have a sniff around at the stands and have interviews with companies such as Disney and pixar. I didn't go for an interview as there weren't any stop-mo companies present, but I did bump in to some inspiring talents from the world of stop-motion and beyond. But enough about all that; I have resolved, as of today to try as best I can to weekly update my blog with new and exciting things for y'all to have a gander at. Here's some of me character designs to kick- off with. Enjoy.

Nearly there

Hello, we're just in the finishing stages of our grad film at the moment so I'm still quite busy, (and therefore have a legitimate excuse for not posting recently). I've put up my showreel as it stands to tide you over until I'll hopefully have lots of stuff to post up (watch this space). Please let me know what you think of it.

Sorry bloggers for my long time away, I have been busy getting my work ready for my final deadline next week. To lend some credibility to my claim that I am a stop-motion animator I thought I'd slap up a test I did last year with every stop motion animator's best friend, the house-hold desk-lamp. This is done with captured with a programme called Monkey jam which you can download for free (how about that!) from http://www.giantscreamingrobotmonkeys.com/.

I'm quite fond of the timing on this, I think you can tell he's sneezing. I just had a stop watch and timed my self doing each phase of action and then just animated right there and then off the cuff; no dope sheets involved! I like to work that way, it's less restricting, but I do need to test myself to sticking to the timings on a dope sheet that I have planned, so any prospective employers will be dead... impressed.

Welcome!

I'm not too sure what to write for my first blog post...


Well, for starters: I'm currently working on a 2-minute piece of stop-motion animation which acts as my final major project and takes up most of the year. I think we're about half-way through shooting at the moment. As the production process sort of mirrors that of the industry we've had to do all the concept work for the film which took a few months and included all the design work- including puppets- to be sent off to the kind folks on the modelmaking course for them to build them. I've animated a few scenes now that I'm reasonably happy with and I'm also trying to animate whatever I can on the side. I'm not sure how much I can talk about the production itself as I don't want anyone nicking any ideas from it, so I'll mainly be talking about my own test animation, if you don't mind. I'll look to get some animation up for you to have a look at sharpish; in the mean-time please feel free to look at a more full-up blog.