Bully For You

The impulse with my latest short "Bullies" is to keep things all very hush-hush as it comes together. Why, however is beyond me; I'm not exactly making the next season of "Breaking Bad". Wikileaks doesn't have a special category labeled "Ben Mitchell's Cartooney Horseshit". I think it's more a reflection of my own over-cautiousness as it's a different type of film than I'm used to, story-wise as well as visually, and if I were honest I'd put up the whole warts'n'all process so the world (by which I mean the microscopically small percentage of its inhabitants who read this blog) can see me trip up at every hurdle.
But I'm not honest. No, I'm driven entirely by deceit and misrepresentation - not just on here, but in every facet of life. Don't judge me, it's society's inability to accept grown men who still watch "The Real Ghostbusters" on DVD and count Tangfastics as one of their five-a-day that has forced me into this corner.
The hell was I talking about?
The hell am I ever talking about?
Well, anyway, in a bid to get over my preciousness, here are the concept designs for the main characters, in full view for the first time. Meet Patrick and Liam:They're douchebags. Of the lovable variety, if I pull this little endeavour off right. And here they are in non-sequential storyboard form (my compromise is I'll keep the actual dialogue under wraps for now):






So there you go, the first gander at film #4, albeit a sketchy and smudgy one. I'm storyboarding the whole film as written (which is presently a tad overlong) and will put up some more excerpts in a few days. In the meantime, here's a man in his underwear:

"No more singing a cappella..."

I'm really pleased to say that recently I had the privilege of being involved in a very nifty mass collaboration for Plymptoons. As I'm a huge Bill Plympton fan you can appreciate that this was something of a dream opportunity and a great excuse to familiarise myself with lots of incredibly talented animators.The project is "Guard Dog Global Jam", a multi-animator shot-by-shot re-imagining of one of Plympton's best shorts, the Oscar-nominated "Guard Dog". Of the chosen applicants, each animator was assigned a shot to reproduce. Mine was a quick cutaway of a mouth gearing up to sneeze.

Concept still

As it was only two seconds I decided to do it on ones (24 frames-per-second as opposed to 12, which is what I usually stick with). The fluidity of movement is really appealing, almost to the point where I'm considering having my next film be an entirely on-ones affair. Composition-wise, the shot combines full animation (the lips) with tweened animation (the teeth), the throat being the background. Here's a quick vid of the various stages, beginning with the original shot as animated by Plympton, then the line test, coloured mouth animation, teeth animation and finally the fully composited shot:

I was also able to jump on board Mike Schneider's incredibly ambitious flicker-frame concept in which a different illustrator tackles each individual frame of his allocated shot.Mine simply resorted to the fabric-texture-with-relief-shadow look I've been pulling out a lot lately, most notably with the Channel 4 project last spring. It's kind of practice for the ever-growing Struwwelpeter music video I'm still working on. Here are some other, more visually adventurous takes on it by some of the other illustrators:

From top-left: Grant Fuhst, Sameul Guin, Steven Archer & Christopher Panzner

The choking mouth of the first shot is coincidentally apt when considering my ongoing graphic novel project "Throat", the next progress update for which I'll save another entry, however for similarities sake I thought I'd throw up the finalised cover design:
The main artwork has been posted before, but the added bandage/subtitle came from smearing an Ace bandage with hot chocolate mix, blending/warping/blurring the typography to match it and then tweaking the colour to make it look like blood (trust me, it's a far more distressing visual when it's smeared brown). Hopefully it represents the story well, sort of a mix of goofy and grim.

Back to "Guard Dog", I'll leave you with an animatic (consisting of concepts and the odd finished shot) that was recently uploaded to give a preview of the wide range of styles used:

Phlegmatic

As alluded to earlier, the main focus for the rest of the year as far as personal projects go is a new graphic novel I received an advance for after pitching it during my recent jaunt overseas. This one is pretty autobiographical save for changing names and likenesses (kind of the opposite of 'Mitchells In England', where all the characters were named after real people but the stories were completely fictional) while hopefully being sort of amusing.

The working title was 'Throatfukt' which has been shortened to 'Throat' as my first concession to its potential publishers, it's also a little less on the nose. The story is essentially an illustrated adaptation of thoughts I'd jotted down during a pretty significant and sobering health scare I went through earlier in the year, with dialogue added and a lot of the plodding, self-involved, morbid streams-of-consciousness shit edited out. Apart from this blog I generally don't keep journals - not being either a girl or, y'know, twelve, - but this was kind of done on impulse as a coping mechanism. It took a lot of the drama out of the situation and helped hugely when it came to moving on.

Concept/(possible) cover art for 'Throat'

The drawing style is kind of new territory for me. It came from a rather stressful period during a work commission where none of the concepts we were coming up with were quite hitting the mark, so I wound up just throwing out as much variety as possible, including this loose, thick-line style. In the end we went with something more conventional, but the style really appealed to me as it doesn't really look like anything I've done before. There's something Ralph Steadman/Dave McKean/John Callahan-ish about it that seems to complement the medium of graphic novels and the writing style rather well, so I decided to pull it out.
Here are some character designs, not coloured or properly textured at this point but they should more or less set the tone.

Chavettes

Another one of the SuperMe animations I produced for Channel 4/Somethin Else is now online, this one was visually a lot simpler and came together under a pretty tight deadline. It deals with the fairly relatable topic of teenage girls talking nonsense.

I really enjoyed doing the character designs on this one, it's a huge departure from my usual style and it was a lot of fun brainstorming.

Fine tuning during the concept art stage.

Here are some of the original sketches the two girls were picked from:

Self-Esteem (or "A Transvestite's Journey")

In recent months I did some animated segments for a project as part of Channel 4's education department. It's called SuperMe and is targeted primarily at teens to bolster their self-worth and whatnot. A noble cause, although none of the cocksure, swaggering packs of adolescents that roam my neck of the woods seem to need any encouragement in that regard - if anything the irascible scamps need taking down a peg or several.
For the benefit of the less visible (holed up in their rooms with the curtains drawn, no doubt) shy'n'introverted contingent, the SuperMe site went live this month. Here's a fairly detailed Guardian article on it:
SuperMe: Channel4's plan to make the world a nicer place for teens
Personally this has been one of my most positive industry experiences to date. I had a lot of creative freedom for the visual side of things while at the same time being actively encouraged to explore some new visual styles. You can see as much from the development of the concept art:The final animation is now online on YouTube and also as part of the site. Have yourself a look:

Sketchmas

As my new film 'The Naughty List' is nearing completion I figured that this month's preview of images from the forthcoming collection 'Brain Spillage' should relate to it. These were the original character designs and concepts that I came up with ages ago.Aside from a specially-produced xmas card I circulated in December, nothing really came from these until March when I knocked out a storyboard, then it was dead again until a month ago, and now it's almost finished. Weird how the mood just takes you to bring something to the top of the priority pile.With that in mind, it's gonna be a bit of a mad rush to get 'Brain Spillage' put together in time (I'm aiming for the end of this month), but it helps to have another project waiting in the wings to take one's mind off the inevitable post-completion anticlimax.

Spread 'Em!

It's another monthly update for 'House Guest: The Graphic Novel', my endeavour to milk the film for all it's worth by making it into a comic book. I've finalised the layout of the entire book and it now comes to about 106 pages. So, it's not 'War & Peace', but pretty respectable for a graphic novel.
As the film adaptation itself only takes up two thirds of the book, I wanted the additional material to be justified and not just filler. Admittedly the last couple pages will be ads for my other projects (books, music and so forth) but I'm such a whore I would've included those anyway.
Aside from an intro and an afterward, the book is divided into four sections. Here's a little glimpse of how the spreads will look:

Section A: The Graphic NovelThis is essentially the story as told in its original, animated form. I've also included some dialogue and visuals that were eventually omitted from the final edit.

Section B: Concept Art
This part features all the original drawings I slapped together for my UWE pitch presentation back at the start of '07. Between then and the film's completion there is an obvious chasm of stylistic development.

Section C: Rough LayoutsThis section gathers together a selection of layouts on which the animation was based. I'm really fond of the way these look, just pencils on creased paper. While it is undeniably more watchable and professional, the cleaned-up/coloured-in visuals lose a little bit of the artist's soul in translation. That isn't self-aggrandising on my part (well, not deliberately), I find it true of all animation.

Section D: Production ScrapbookA short, sweet and indulgent note to end the book on, this last part features a handful of behind-the-scenes photos with scribbled captions.
Excitement!

Simmering Away

There’s a rather depressing thread over on Bob Camp’s blog bemoaning the effects of the economy on the animation industry. It’s a sobering thought that a man whose credentials include ‘Ren & Stimpy’, ‘Cow & Chicken’ and movies such as ‘Robots’ and ‘Ice Age 2’ still struggles at times to find work.
Personally I keep myself ticking over with freelance commissions that see me working about two weeks out of each month. It pays well when it comes in, but the gaps in between jobs can get downright unsettling at times. As there are more frequent openings for graphic designers, I’ve been reverting back to that in lieu of animation work. In my free time, however, I’ve been working on a number of ideas for shorts and projects, mainly to brainstorm in the hope of coming up with something worthwhile. A good way to motivate oneself is to search out whatever funding schemes are out there. These usually have deadlines which help kick me into gear and get stuff done.

Still from 'Life In The Key of Aaaargh!', a UWE/RAM collaborative project. This character was developed and animated by Sarah Lawrence.

For example, in November my friend Sarah and I worked on developing a story based on a character she had created as part of a previous collaboration. The new story was for a local funding scheme, and while our idea wasn’t developed enough to get selected we had gotten it off the ground, which was the important thing.

Script excerpt for 'The Best of Intentions'

Then in December I developed a script for the film for a Canadian screenwriting contest, the main prize being a budget and additional resources to get the film made. Again, we didn’t make the cut, but now our project had a script. I don’t know if I’d have found the time or enthusiasm to make the effort otherwise. I probably would’ve just wasted it watching YouTube* videos.

Concept art for 'The Best of Intentions'

Presently we’re working on layouts, backgrounds and storyboards, as the next call for projects in February warrants more presentation material. This one we almost certainly won’t get as it’s extremely coveted and high-profile, but nothing ventured…
And by mid-February we’ll have a lot more substance to work with.
My long, meandering point is this - as long as there’s something to work toward, work gets done. This is a film that didn’t exist three months ago, but if we keep incrementally developing it we won’t even need funding. As Ralph Bakshi commented in the now-famous speech I referred to previously, with today’s technology material costs are negligible - the real expense is time.
Other projects on the boil include a possible web series that would be made very minimalistically, combining CG and Flash. The premise is based on possibly the worst job I ever had, as a bouncer for a nightclub in Southampton. Here’s the absent-minded doodle I’m working from:
I’ve also been giving serious consideration toward developing something for children - either a short, series or book. I’ve been scribbling a character currently named ‘Cameltoe Jo’ (which will obviously have to change - believe it or not the name’s origin is perfectly innocuous). I see her as some kind of moral crusader - unfortunately my own morals are sketchy at best so I may need some help in that respect. Here are some early scribbles:
So all this along with the ‘House Guest’ graphic novel (the film incidentally has been picking up more steam and getting some pleasing feedback), the new Struwwelpeter LP and an unexpected fondness for Salsa dancing is keeping me at peace with myself. Not that my day job isn’t riveting.
Give me a break, I gotta eat.

*Yeah, okay, YouPorn. Who am I kidding?