'Cast Away

Quick podcast roundup. In episode 37 Samuel Ortí Martí - AKA Sam - talks to Steve about his Spanish stop-motion horror pastiche Pos Eso, which looks like great fun. Also Katie Steed of Slurpy Studios joins the podcast to give us the lowdown on this year's Dublin Animation Film Festival.

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In episode 38, which just went up today in anticipation of us all being at MAF this week, Laura-Beth joins us to discuss the special Skwigly showcase screenings we've put together and the success of Tinman Creative's Super Science Friends. Guests in this episode are Sheldon Cohen, director of the NFB classic The Sweater discussing his latest film My Heart Attack, as well as Rhiannon Evans who some may know from her short film Heartstrings and recent NFTS grad film Fulfilament.

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Both My Heart Attack and Fulfilament will be part of our MAF showcases, on Tuesday and Wednesday respectively. See you there!

The "What the hell happened to October?" Blog Post

Despite my semi-regular declarations of being snowed-under with life, work and other fabricated commitments, it's actually quite rare to let over an entire month go by without forcing my inanities on the blogosphere. Things have kicked into gear in an amazing and, at times, slightly terrifying way and my time is rarely my own. Probably for the best as when I have free reign over my own time I tend to use it playing emulated SNES Lemmings while eating dry cornflakes from the box. I'm not even talking name brand here, folks; I'm talking ASDA's own. Eeyup.
All in all, life is good. Faith No More are plugging away in the studio and Twin Peaks is coming back, so those two alone should give me a will to live at least through 2016. Work-wise I'm back in the bits and pieces world of animation freelancing alongside the now quite full-on Project Group Hug (it's a book, by the way, though I doubt there was any lingering mystery as it's been up on my LinkedIn for a while now).

Whilst researching for this film I lived with The Stig for eleven months

This follows a quite long contract with the fabulous folks at Slurpy Studios doing a series of educational videos for Oxford University Press. It wrapped up in September and you can have a look at a couple of the vids I worked on at the Activate Kerboodle site.
Skwigly is still maintaining its stride with some great coverage up since I last posted. New articles include reviews of Signe Baumane's wonderful Rocks In My Pockets (which I'm delighted to see is performing brilliantly) and Floyd Norman's quasi-autobiographical animation handbook Animated Life.

Interview-wise there are new chats with Canadian NFB directorial duo Nicola Lemay and Janice Nadeau (No Fish Where To Go) as well as Australian animator Anthony Lawrence (Grace Under Water), both of whose films were screened as part of this year's London International Animation Festival which I was able to swing by. Another NFB film which premiered in the UK recently was Seth's Dominion, a brilliant feature documentary on Canadian cartoonist Seth directed by Luc Chamberland (interview here).

Also worth catching up on are the latest episodes of Lightbox, with J.G. Quintel (Regular Show), Mikey Please (Marilyn Myller) and Dan Ojari (Slow Derek) of Parabella Studios and experimental, drawn-on-film artist Steven Woloshen (1000 Plateaus). 

October's podcast has a fabulous line-up also: Animator Craig Smith interviews Tonko House (who made the amazing Dam Keeper), Julia talks to Jorge R. Gutiérrez (director of Reel FX's The Book of Life) and I chat with artist Lisa Hanawalt, designer on Bojack Horseman, a show I have to say I'm quite tickled by.

All the usual listening options are here for you, folks. Stream below, download for keepsies or subscribe, whydoncha?
This marks the twenty-fifth episode to date (not even including the various specials and minisodes) and I have to say the continuing support and feedback over the years has been amazing, so thanks so much to all for keeping us going. From my perspective there's no danger of it slowing down soon, so here's to twenty-five more!

Gawd 'elp us...

Squeezing All The Goodness In

It's been many moons since I last updated my showreel, being distracted by the very employment it led to. Deep, eh?
I may have also been distracted by Breaking Bad a little bit. And, far more alarmingly, Catfish. But I'm all out of episodes for both, so unless I overcome my violent aversion to the voice of the narrator and fall into a destructive spiral of Come Dine With Me reruns, my time has freed up a bit.
The last few years I've updated the same reel by swapping old, ropey footage for new, swanky footage, keeping the main structure intact. Having been assured by many previous and prospective employers alike that it was overlong by at least a minute, this time around I redid the entire reel from scratch to get a concentrated 90 seconds of my absolute favourite shots:

Consequently I had to be pretty ruthless, and a lot of the earlier films of mine - House Guest, Ground Running, The Naughty List and my ode to Opie & Anthony Chicken Chokes You - have been whittled down to a few seconds of footage each - ol' zombie duck barely gets a look-in nowadays. After a hideous commission that started the year off (represented above only with a fleeting, modified shot of a cat running - nothing else from that doomed project need ever see the light of day) I've had a pretty good year of short commercial projects as well as the ongoing HuHa webisodes which, coupled with my love affair with Toon Boom, have been a great shot in the arm and give the reel a lot more stylistic range. Other projects thrown in the mix include work for Channel 4, Slurpy Studios, Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg and New Impulse Media. I'm still holding back on the Bullies footage as, even though it's all animated and awaiting a distribution plan of action, for the time being I want to keep it under wraps until the final version's been seen in full at least a couple of times. Some HuHa clips represent the same animation style so it'd be somewhat superfluous anyway.
I also wrote the music specifically for the reel, I wanted something quite punchy with a simple enough 4/4 to make effectively editing the clips a bit easier. At the moment the piece is merely titled "Hire Me Already" and features some nods to a certain band I may have professed to admiring once or twice.
For no other reason than I have a YouTube channel, it's also up on my YouTube channel. So if, for whatever reason, your machine or device or doodad doesn't like Vimeo you can watch it there instead:

Travellers

I don't usually post commercial work up on here but I'm rather fond of the way this recent one came out. Put together by the lovely folks over at Slurpy Studios, it was designed and composited by Katie Steed with character animation by yours truly.

I can't speak for the the service the company being advertised provide but I'm sure they're fine, upstanding chaps and chapettes. I mean, they work in insurance so they'd have to be, right?