Reprazentin'! (...sorry)

It's that time of year when I take stock of where I am and where I'm going with this cartoon malarkey. This year was pretty strong, work-wise as well as for personal projects, but my hopes that this may have been indicative of an industry upswing have been dashed for their childlike foolishness by an increasingly bleak forecast. Work out there in 2012 seems sparse and if it weren't for "Bullies" keeping me occupied for the next couple months I'm not sure what I'd be doing with my time. Come January I could be up the proverbial creek, scrabbling about for the proverbial paddle.
So, in true 'keep calm and carry on' tradition of head-in-sand denial this nation is so famous for, I'll plod along and do all I can do. To that end I've revised my showreel:

There isn't a whole bunch of replacement footage as I want to keep what "Bullies" animation I've done under wraps until I start promoting it. I've also brought my animation CV up to date with various work commissions since the summer, as well as developments with my films and an additional screening history section.

Ben Mitchell - Animation CV (.pdf, 3.3mb)

To supplement all this is a mini-portfolio I'd put together not that long ago to showcase my graphic design, character design and illustration work in brief:

Ben Mitchell - Design/Illustration Portfolio (.pdf, 5.3mb)

So there you go. That's me and the brass tacks of what I've been up to. Help a fella out, folks.

Creature Discomforts

Here are some more indeterminable creatures following on from last week's, using a significantly different colouring process. This relies heavily on public domain watercolour textures that I've been playing about with since slapping together the "Book of Women" album artwork. I don't really have any planned projects that involve them (their main purpose is to add more contemporary content to my portfolio) but I could see them as part of something targeted toward younger audiences. I'm pretty pleased with how they came out and how not-my-usual-style they seem so I might just sell the images as a series of prints.




Here's a sped-up vid that more or less shows the process, taking one of the uglier initial sketches and making it look sort of passable through textures and relief shadows. Actually kind of an effective cure for a hungover Sunday afternoon.Speaking of Christmas-themed animation, which I absolutely wasn't, the second edition of the Cagliari-based Skepto International Film Festival will be screening "The Naughty List" on April 9th. As with Salento Finibus Terrae, it's an Italian fest which also screened a short of mine the previous year ("Ground Running" in this instance) which fills me with fuzzy warm validation and seasonal cheer.

Hellbound

It's becoming increasingly apparent that this planet has finally acknowledged that the human race is a disease, and its immune system is doing its damnedest to get rid of us. Beautiful in its way, when you take a step back and observe the Earth's biological cleansing as a miracle of nature our heads will never truly be able to wrap around. Of course, being in the thick of it, the general attitude is less one of quiet awe than a kind of screeching, repeated "HOLY SHIT WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE WE'RE ALL FUCKED IT'S ALL OVER WE'RE GONERS AND I NEVER FULFILLED MY LIFELONG AMBITION OF INVENTING TIME TRAVEL AND PERSUADING L7 CIRCA 1992 TO DEFILE ME!!!"
Or something to that effect.
Of course, it may all just simmer down...but I dunno...worldwide tragedy and devastation's stock is definitely on the up these days. Haiti, Brazil, New Zealand, Japan and now Rebecca Black. All of a sudden this 2012 shit is starting to seem more feasible.
My impulse whenever things get too real is to bury my head in the sand and focus on the inconsequential drivel of my cartooney nonsense. It's called 'being a grownup'. Or 'being alarmingly disconnected and childish', whatever melts your butter.To that end I'm putting some time into colouring in some random character designs I whipped up over the new year, mainly to balance out my in-development portfolio that's quite people-heavy and animals/creatures light.



This first batch are for an as-yet-undetermined project I'm referring to as 'Brimstone', which will take place in Hell (oddly appropriate given, y'know, it's the apocalypse right now) or possibly a similar, non-theological underworld-type setting.
While I like the line art quality of these characters, others I've designed I feel lend themselves to different colouring/texturing approaches. I'm still finalising how they'll be grouped (many thanks to Maria, Jo, Natalie and Nusha for the feedback in this respect) but here are some to give you an idea:

My Pretties...

I've had a few (as in literally three) emails from people who have noticed that, of late, my main website URL ben-mitchell.co.uk just links directly to this blog. The simple reason behind it is that the Great G5 Crash of 2010 took out all my website source files and assets. While the pages that were already uploaded survived, it's rendered the updating process a chore that'd take the same effort as redesigning the site from scratch which, to be honest, is the better idea. I liked the way last year's site came out and it was a valuable project in terms of getting acclimated to Actionscript 3.0, but it was pretty dense and I think a series of separate sites that cut through the treacle would serve me better professionally.
To that end I'm putting together a new design portfolio that will filter out a great deal of my earlier work and focus more on commissions of late. As my animation work has increased, there have been a fair few graphic/illustration offshoots including character design work. Digging through external hard drives and backup DVDs I've been piecing together the ones that stand out and, in my mind, go together well. Here's the first smattering, from my favourite project of 2010, Channel 4's 'SuperMe'. These were all partially inspired by the young Bristolian clubgoing contingent, glimpsed spilling out of pubs/clubs/taxis/clothing at 3am when their nights are just beginning and tired old men like me are headed home, judging them sanctimoniously while my memory glosses over the many years in which I behaved just as cretinously.










Of the twelve designs, the bottom two were the ones that ended up being used. The other short I animated for the project made use of all the proposed designs as it took place in a populated nightclub, though some are only glimpsed briefly or in the shadows.








These are twenty-one of nearly a hundred designs for people alone, so it's very possible that once I've amassed them all I'll need to do some filtering. If you have any thoughts about which characters are more expendable don't feel shy about letting me know. There are also less proliferate sections for 'Animals' and 'Things' which I'll have ready soon. Meanwhile I'll bow out with some adorable transvestism: