Quickies

In my continued effort to keep the holiday season alive ('cause I just don't know when to let go) I'm happy to say there's another 2011 screening for "The Naughty List", this time at the 6th Athens Animfest. It's really nice to find this out as my second film "Ground Running" screened at the 4th edition back in '09. It's being shown as part of the Tributes 2011 Panorama section, haven't worked out the date/time just yet but check out their website and Facebook page for more info.
On another note I've finished the first of several supplemental showreels, these are spun off from my main showreel which kind of lumps all the animation stuff together. The idea being that I can submit tighter, more theme-specific reels when certain job applications call for it. Plan is to have one each for character animation, digital animation, motion graphics and VFX work, which will give me an excuse to create some new content in all those areas. In the meantime here's the first version of the character animation showreel (which features the first looks at some in-the-works projects such as Alpaca Gals and Erica):
Any thoughts always appreciated, especially if you can somehow use the opportunity to tell me how handsome and sympathetic a fella I am. Not sure how that would work exactly, but roll with it.

The Giver In Me

Tomorrow I'll be heading off to Canada for a while to cavort amongst the grizzlies like Timothy Treadwell. So consider this the final chapter on "The Naughty List" unless it gets picked up by some festivals later on down the road. Here's a promotional teaser-clip I slapped together for it:I've fiddled with the edit a bit but it generally represents the film quite well, hopefully it'll leave people wanting to see more of it. The video is up on Vimeo and also Youtube, please circulate it amongst any animationey-geek-type-peeps that might find it interesting.
Bye for now, until I can locate a tree stump in the Laurentians that might have wi-fi.

Merry Xmas Everyone!

"The Naughty List" is finished! As it's the end of June, pretty much the equidistant point between holiday seasons, naturally it's the perfect time to unveil a xmas-themed short...what an ass I am.
Although if the reception to my first film was anything to go by, I suppose if I start sending it out now it could take a fair few months for it to pick up steam. Also, while it definitely screams 'xmas' on the surface, at its core it's a film about the frustrations of dealing with upper management, which people can relate to all the year round. To that end, here's an excerpt from my funding pitch back in March:Eh? Eh? What a blagging little shitbag I am. I guess they didn't buy it 'cause no cizzash was ponied up, so I'm doubly proud that I persevered with it and was able to follow through. Plus the trade-off with the smaller amount of private funding I was able to secure for it was that I could stick to my original idea and not have it diluted or tinkered with. I'm still at a point in life where I'm kind of precious about that stuff. Give me another year in this industry and I'll no doubt have abandoned such trivial concerns as integrity and self-worth. Until then, here are some stills to prove I'm not making the whole thing up:And to all a good night.

The Grotto

Backgrounds!
I'm no Bill Wray (who, of all the living background artists, fucking rules) by any stretch but, with the small number of backgrounds this film requires compared to my first two, I've been having a bit more fun with the details and texturing. Use your eyes for looking at them!I wanted these to be quite loose and playful (adorable li'l scamp that I am). Beginning with sketches, I overlaid colours and textures for each background element, using Photoshop's warp and lighting tools to create a contoured effect when necessary.Against these backgrounds the character animation comes off as a little too stark. I've decided to soften the look by colouring in the black outlines and applying lighting and gradients to the flat colours. This really goes a long way toward selling that the characters are inhabitants of the environment I've created.As my version of After Effects doesn't quite nail the lighting effect I'm after this means I've been having to go through every frame of character animation and make the changes manually. It adds a lot to the post-production but the schedule I outlined at the beginning of May left some leeway and I'm still confident that I'll get the film finished before July. I think it's worth the extra effort.

Rampant Naughtiness

Continuing my quest to represent just what awful creatures children can be in cartoon form, I've knocked out a bunch of tiny vignettes. Here are some of my favourites:The last one is a cameo of sorts (in a 'Muppet Babies' sense), my sister actually had an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem tattooed on her back. Could've been worse, it could've been Maya Angelou.
Generally with these shots I was going more for 'silly' than 'dark'. I reckon these are ultimately innocuous enough to keep it a family-friendly film.
'Family friendly'...what's become of me?

'Tis the season for line tests

A quick progress update for 'The Naughty List', my mini-short about the tribulations of middle-management. Or Santy-Claus, whatever melts your butter. Focusing on the film as a combative measure against evening snacking, I've knocked the bulk of the character animation out over the last fortnight, which is sort of unprecedented given my usual fits-and-starts approach to these types of personal projects.There are a few remaining shots of channel-hopping that need to be worked out, which I'll tackle next along with the cleanup. As always I've been aided tremendously by my own little batch of worker elves in this respect, and the unexpected stretch of warm weather we've been having has given me an excuse to take some work outside (although there's something incongruous about working on a xmas-themed film in the blazing sunshine). All in all it's been a weirdly calm, organic process putting this short together, and one I'm starting to have some faith in. So here are a smattering of line tests to go out on before the colour footage starts coming together:

Spirit of the Season

The last week has been very productive as far as my third film's progress goes. Having come up with the idea a while ago, I've had a lot of time to familiarise myself with the character personalities even though I didn't really start working on it before March. This has really helped with the animation, which has been going very smoothly so far. The short is essentially a single conversation, charged with a lot of different emotional conveyances such as awkwardness, fear, boredom, incredulity and so on. Consequently it's been a balancing act of having the movements and expressions be considered while not over-animated. Looking back at my first two films, it draws from elements of both."House Guest" was dialogue-driven and had a number of conversational scenes where the animation was very limited in terms of movement and range of facial expression. In a Family Guy/Simpsons kind of way it worked and was an essential means to an end when it came to meeting the MA deadline.My second short, last year's "Ground Running" was "House Guest"'s opposite in the sense of it's absence of dialogue, instead relying on fully-animated sight gags and body language alone to convey the story.
With "The Naughty List" I want to apply this level of acting detail to a conversational scenario. I'm keeping it short (around three minutes) so I can really take my time with it. Just looking at the line tests I'm feeling pretty encouraged, the lip sync and mouth shapes will be a vital contributor to the acting but in the meantime the body movements alone seem to be going quite well with the dialogue. Here's the same segment I posted as a storyboard animatic last week in pencil-test form:
Hopefully next week I'll be able to start the cleanup. The one coloured shot of the Elf in the footage above should give an idea of how the film will look overall. Gives me a good feeling...

Animatics, dope sheets and coughin' my fuggin' eyeballs out...

Finding myself committed more to actual 'work' work of late, I haven't been spending a lot of time on the various recreational projects I've had on the go. I picked up some piss-irritating illness the other day, doubtless from the Bristol Arts Trail which, while a fine idea in theory, in actuality sees one traveling from damp house to damp house, picking up every Bristolian's germs on the way. Unable to move much from the resulting superflu, I've been soldiering on with the animatic for 'The Naughty List'. I'd hoped to do this last month following the storyboard I put together in a (presumably unsuccessful as I never heard back) bid for funding, but I only located the dialogue record yesterday.The film has two characters, a traditional-ish Santa and Elf, both voiced by me for economic reasons. I don't think I'm a dreadful voice actor but I certainly don't have the ability to play two characters and not have it be obvious that their source is the same person. Mel Blanc I ain't. Thus I've used the Trey & Matt cheat device of digitally pitching up the Elf voice and pitching down the Santa voice. In both instances the effect is applied moderately but enough to give some necessary distinction. Here's a tiny snippet to show what I mean:
The other issue is that I'm a total mushmouth, so hopefully not that many people will pick up on both characters having the same lisp.
Now that each shot is timed out I'm eager to break out some dope sheets and start work. The time-consuming nature of animation is such that it's an ideal distraction from being sick so I'm hoping to use this time as best I can. Otherwise, let's face facts, I'd just be looking at a fortnight of nonstop onanism. At my age that's finally starting to lose its novelty value.
And on that unnecessarily unsettling note I bid you adieu.

Like Pulling Teeth

Here are a handful of stills from my in-production short "A Cautionary Tale (Of Coital Mishap)", the delightful romp about sex and dentistry, a pairing that I felt needed more exposure. Rather than go into too much detail and ruin the story it seemed like a better idea to just have the images speak for themselves. I'm also a lazy fuck and can't be arsed to type much today.


The film's coming together in a fairly atypical way. Rather than having the whole film storyboarded and written, I'm finding myself continuously writing more material as I animate. After its initial, inaccessible length of ten seconds, the revised version is about two minutes. My plan, cackhanded as it is, is to continue to embellish and flesh it out as I go, until it takes the shape of a coherent, appropriately-paced short film. Probably somewhere between three and five minutes. It's an experiment and it may end horribly, but I have to say I'm having a lot of fun working on it and the animation itself is turning out far better than that of 'House Guest' and 'Ground Running'. If nothing else, it'll make for plenty of new showreel footage.

Me Me Me Me Me

Shameless tool that I am.

Looking back over recent entries, it's dawned on me just how much of a sickeningly egotistical celebration of my film's reception this blog has become. I'm an utter tool. Thinly veiled as a resource for festival information, all these updates really say is 'look how great I am'. How tempting must it be to just track me down, backhand me, then sneer with disgust as I gaze at the floor, knowing I've done wrong.
The only logical thing at this point if I want to salvage the measliest scrap of humility would be to delete all the offending entries and lay off the self-congratulatory bullshit in the future.
I'm not gonna do that. I'm just saying it'd be the right thing to do.
Fuck being modest. I'm going to milk 'House Guest' until it's droopy, wrinkled and all dried-up. Come December it'll hopefully be out on DVD and the festival season will be done and dusted anyway.In the meantime, I'm well into production on my third film (my second, 'Ground Running', still inhabiting a sort of limbo while I decide on the best way to go about re-editing it). The film I'm currently working on is autobiographical, though it will hopefully offset my onanistic praise by depicting me as a morbidly obese sexual inadequate. But, y'know, in a cute way. This is an extension of a ten-second animation I produced for a competition that never happened due to a number of irreconcilable technical issues - the number being 'one' and the issue being that the guy with the projector got baked and never showed up on the night.As ten seconds wasn't really enough time to cram the story in, it consequently came off as a bit of a clusterfuck. I put together an overly-ambitious pitch for a ten-minute film that would detail a number of regrettably slapstick sexual encounters, usually ending in irreparable physical and emotional damage. While pursuing that film without funding isn't a feasible proposition given its length, I'm opting to produce a short that falls somewhere in the middle.
As it stands, the plan is to have a three-to-five minute animation elaborating on the story in the ten-second version, incorporating dialogue, foley, music and all the other stuff that makes a film watchable.
I also want the overall look of the film to be a tad more polished than that of 'House Guest'. I've identified three main factors that should help in this regard.
1. Better animationThe film has very little dialogue, the action mainly playing out while I narrate offscreen. As such there will be a lot more 'full' animation shots, as with 'Ground Running'.

2. Thinner linesIn abandoning my beloved Berol Color Fines for proper, art-store, extra-fine drawing pens, the visual quality takes on a more professional look, especially when scaled-down and in motion.

3. More love for the backgroundsWhile the background designs for 'House Guest' were knocked out at a pretty fast rate (there being call for about a hundred of them), I'm taking more time to draw detailed and textured backgrounds. A little bit more time in Photoshop takes a lot of sterility out of the finished shot.
On that note, let's end with a couple of said background designs, because I can't think of something funny or clever to write that'll wrap this up.

Style Over Substance

Shortly after I finished 'Ground Running' and sent it to the first batch of festivals, I decided to keep it on the QT when certain similarities were pointed out to me. What surprised me was that the original version ended up getting into some of said festivals and garnered some pretty encouraging reactions.I've finally settled on an alternate opening sequence which, along with a few other new visuals that appear throughout the film, take it to between two and three minutes. It occurred to me, however, that if I'm going to change it to this degree, it may be worthwhile to extend the film in other ways. As most of the animation's done, it wouldn't take much effort to add clean-up and colouring, which would betray my original intentions (the whole point was to have a film entirely in pencil-drawing form, peg-bar holes and all) but, in all honesty, make the film easier to watch. The 'pencil-test' look has more appeal to me and my fellow animation-geek friends, but to the general public who are more or less conditioned to seeing cartoons inked-in and in colour, it probably just seems like it isn't finished.I have no intention of eschewing the original short - after all, it's done pretty well in its own right - but I'm not above making a comparatively slick version to appease its potential audience, especially if doing so will increase the film's visibility.
And if the whole thing turns out to be a horrendous, misguided disaster, I'll just pretend it never happened and finally get a real job.

Who'da Thunk It?

Either as a consequence of the film's recent screenings and reception, or just randomly, 'House Guest' has been invited to be listed on the Internet Movie Database.
It's pretty exciting until you realise how much fucking work goes into it. So I thought I'd do a little breakdown for y'all. From talking to other film-maker friends, I've gathered that the website is, in theory, a free-for-all in terms of who can submit, a bit like Wikipedia. Although IMDB's filtering system is a lot more strict. If it wasn't, every Joe Q. Douchebag-Nobody would be submitting their dreary, waffley, studenty crap and the database would be bursting at the seams with mediocrity. It's primarily for this reason that I never would've submitted 'House Guest' unsolicited - after all, I'm the biggest Joe Q. Douchebag-Nobody there is.Even proper, award-winning film-makers I know have reportedly had trouble getting their work listed. My guess is the only guarantee you have of being on there is to either be with a major production company or have the site approach you. In my case I got sent a code to type in which I guess puts you nearer the top of the pile. From that point shit gets tedious.Names and titles have to be checked and re-checked - am I sure that the film I'm submitting isn't 'Houseguest' - the 1995 madcap romp starring Sinbad? Because if it is, they already have it listed. Am I sure I'm not either of the Ben Mitchells of 'Neighbours' or 'Shortland Street' fame? Am I sure Joanna Hepworth didn't play a prostitute in 'Gangster Kittens'?
Actually, I wasn't sure of that last one. She could very well have a secret acting career playing prozzies and kept it on the QT.Duller still is the technical info, which can't be interesting to anybody. I mean, it's my film and even I could give a fuck whether the sound is Dolby or just plain ol' stereo.
When you're done with that stuff you get to add less important, trivial bits, I guess to make the entry less clinical. Although, to be honest I couldn't think of much to add. Crazy credits...well, I did credit my pseudonym as playing a character who has no lines. Pretty kuh-razy, right?Ugh...I sicken myself.
Then you throw in some stills and a poster and, shazam, you're done!
They say it'll be a few weeks before it's listed, if they give it final approval. If they do I'll post a link, if they don't after all that fucking work I'll most likely just delete this entire post in shame. Then I'll spend the rest of the year trying to scrub the stench of failure off. I'll scrub and scrub until my flesh is raw but it'll never go away completely.
Either way, time will pass and events will occur. That's a certainty, boy-howdy.Ugh.