You can't keep a good Klementhro down

A good year in, I've finally gotten off the ol' tuchus and slapped together a teaser trailer for Klementhro. Enjoy the vagueness!

I've also learned my prior assumption that the film would be having a quiet month until July has turned out to not be the case. The film will play in Romania (the country of its premiere) at the Ploiești International Film Festival in their Dark Comedy screening, which runs at 8:30pm Thursday June 16th and again at 4pm Friday June 17th at the AFI Palace.

That week I'm very happy to say I'll be back in France for the Annecy Festival, mainly for meetings about a few projects on the boil, but I'll also no doubt be pestering some of the talent for interviews and hopefully getting some sunnage and swimmage in. If anyone's there do give me a shout! Daytime drinking is always more acceptable when one has company.

Cover your damn mouth...

More line tests for the “Throat” promo. I’m not sure if calling them ‘pencil tests’ would really apply as the lines will still be penciled in the final animation. In fact to match up with the style of the book, the line quality is actually being coarsened and made scratchier rather than being cleaned-up, so if anything these tests are smoother than how the animation will eventually look when it’s done.

This one was really fun to do, especially the extreme poses:

Once it was all timed-out it made for some pretty interesting in-betweens.

In my head this shot would’ve been one sweeping hand motion, picking up the glass along the way to throw the contents in her face. This is how the panel looks in the book, as you can see there's not much to go on:

In reality to do that in one single move would be a borderline physical impossibility, so I acted out a few ways to go about it and came up with this fairly obvious breakdown:

This last one’s pretty basic, although the motion of the hands pulling up the sheets is a little too mechanical so I’ll probably add in a couple frames to the final animation to give it more of a natural settle.

That’s all for this post, so I’m going to stop writing. That’s how I roll. Though by all means, feel free to watch these all night if you like. Nobody judges here.

Return of the Magical Moving GIFs

It’s that fabulous time again: Line test season! That wonderful stage of an animated project (the animated "Throat" promo in this case) where the awful things I draw obtain the glorious power of movement (and with it, I can only assume, hopes and dreams). I’m a little miffed to note that Sitesled, the site that had hosted all my prior line test GIFs, decided to disappear without a trace taking all my files with it.
Those wonderful, glorious bastards.
While I’m sure they’re backed up somewhere it’s gonna be a pisser locating them, re-uploading them and fixing the embed links in all the prior blog posts. Which doesn’t mean anything as fair as these new ones go, I just like to complain because I’m a big complaining complaineypants.
On with the pixelly-pencilly stuff:

There’s something vaguely eerie about watching these characters trapped in their limbos, doomed to constantly repeat the same handful of seconds over and over until the end of time. By ‘eerie’ I really mean ‘gratifying and immeasurably pleasurable’; I’m so horribly empty inside.

Back to the Box

While “Bullies” is progressing in a more or less entirely digital manner, a thought occurred recently that a potentially effective way to promote “Throat” might be to put together a teaser trailer for it. After contemplating the motion graphics angle briefly, I figure it would be better suited to proper, traditional animation so as to be truer to the overall look and feel of the panel art. Which means it’s time to dust off ol’ Molly the lightbox (who’s served me well as a very effective coat rack since I bought Cindi the Cintiq) and get back to some lovely, ol’-fashioned pencil-on-paper animation. The idea is to pick several excerpts from the book that might translate effectively as brief 2-5 second animated vignettes, edited together in a way that doesn’t reveal much of the story but hopefully percolates the interest of people who haven’t read the book yet. I’m still in the throwing-stuff-against-the-wall-to-see-what-sticks phase but here are some sample layouts:

As mentioned above, “Bullies” has been pretty much a completely Cintiq-centric affair, but in keeping with the old-school theme, here are a few pencil sketches on which some of the layout and background work will be based:

And with that I think I feel the familiar twinge of carpal tunnel coming on. How I missed it so!

Army of One. If that.

I'm something of a lone wolf. Not in an appealing, alpha dog sense - more the limping, out of shape runt who can't keep up with the rest of the pack, whose 'lone' status is out of his hands. As such I'm fending for myself in a lot of respects, questioning of late the satisfaction of freelancing. A part of me is starting to itch for a regular studio gig lasting beyond a few weeks or months at a time. Of course, who's to say as soon as that happens I won't immediately start hankering for the comparative freedom of the way things are now. The grass is always greener on the other side. You like that? I made that up. True story. You can use it if you like.
What?In the meantime I'm prepping for my visit to Cologne where "The Naughty List" will be making its festival appearance at the Cologne Comedy Festival as well as its TV debut on WDR, a network I fondly associate with several pro-shot Faith No More concerts. I'm sure they have other valuable programming too. The film closes the Köln Comedy Kurzfilmfestival broadcast this Friday (15th), beginning at 10:40pm and repeated at 1:45am on Einsfestival.The trip is in the midst of my continuing effort to redefine my professional representation and I'm getting a bunch of materials ready to pimp my sweet self, like new business cards, promo DVDs, flyers etc. As I'm still debating several options for potential sales agents - and having no studio representation to speak of - promotion and marketing is on me. It's kind of what I'm comfortable with, but self-representation is kind of like onanism with a lot more self-hatred, depression and money spent on printer ink. When I describe myself as 'award-winning animator' or list accolades for any given project I cringe and bite my fist, but it's a necessary evil. After five years it would be fatuous to say that there isn't a direct correlation between the amount I big myself up and the frequency of work that comes in or festivals that pick up my films.To supplement the "Naughty..." bumph I've put up some new web teasers for "House Guest" and "Ground Running". In the case of the former it's to help promote the DVD, delayed from last year's planned release after the film got an unexpected second wind on the festival circuit. Have a gander:

In case you didn't see it when I put it up previously, I may as well throw in a snippet of "The Naughty List" for your viewing pleasūr:

On a closing, non-me note, my pal and former "House Guest" helper elf Joanna Hepworth has her latest film "Dinnersaurs" included in this year's Animated Encounters online selection. Give it a vote because it's cute and you'll glean some dating tips:

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.

Trailer Trash

Well, I've cemented my fate. There's no backing-out now - my film has a trailer and I'm gonna have to follow up on it.
As I mentioned previously, the full-time students on my MA showcased their finished films today, and with their permission I hope to link to them if at some point they go online. Frankly I'm in awe of several of the films produced - the bar has been dramatically raised compared to the output of prior year-groups' and it's going to be no small feat producing a film of my own that amounts to the same level of quality.
The best thing is that there isn't one film that's remotely similar to another. The range of genres, methods and styles is huge. To have gotten the chance to study (and, in some cases, work) with this particular group has been a real privilege.
Well, nobody likes an asskiss so I'll just get on with showing the trailer:

An excuse to leave the attic

On the 16th we have a screening in which the full-time students will showcase their films. As a part-timer, 'House Guest' isn't due to be finished until June, and at the time of writing is still in bits and pieces. I'd like to include some indication of my progress as part of the screening and figured that a trailer would be an ideal way of cobbling said bits and pieces together. This has motivated me to get some footage completed for scenes other than the attic/trophy room sequence that has dominated the last couple months. Going through the animatic I decided to focus my energies on some shots that would look good if thrown in the mix for my trailer.

The above are shots that aren't especially difficult to animate and don't necessitate line tests as such. Their execution is fairly simple through limited animation and a lot of the work is in the editing. Here are a couple other shots that require somewhat fuller animation:


A fairly simple reaction shot, for when the Prospective Lay first sees the Duck. This is only a handful of frames but to sell it in terms of convincing acting (and to refine the secondary hair movement) it's worth doing a pencil test first.

After a few passes to get the hair and mouth action right I ended up with the above shot. Here's how it looks inked-in and coloured:


The following shot is also dependent on facial expression, although it's a little longer:

In this one, the Creepy Kid prepares to finish stitching the Duck together, guivering with eerie glee, only to be snapped out of his unsettling reverie when his offscreen mother calls him for dinner. Here's what I came up with for the pencil test:

I wanted him to switch from docile to anticipatory quickly, and then to snap back just as fast. To emphasise this I used a mild 'smear' transition going in and an extreme one coming out.

With a slow zoom and some moody lightning applied to the colour version I'm really happy with the end result:


The remaining shot requires some full-body acting, from a scene in which the Duck melodramatically unveils his partially-decomposed body.

The body acting in this shot is determined by the dialogue, which means the movement has to be specifically timed and lip-synced. Here's the test animation after all the dope-sheet transcription was done:

After tweaking the lip-sync a bit (that's another reason these tests are so crucial - the erasability of pencils can really save some heartache) I wound up with one of my favourite shots in the entire film so far:


Special mention has to again go to Jo Hepworth who did all the inking-in for these shots and thus ensured their completion. As I've said before, her line work is far smoother than mine, and if I'd worked on these shots on my own they would not only have taken far longer to do, but also wouldn't have looked half as professional.
Knock wood by the next entry I'll have the trailer finished. Shazizzle!