For the Arthouse Crowd

I'm chin-deep in Encounters festival coverage this week, so here's a special cultural treat for you - the entire series of Wobble Box (so far and with the odd exception of episode 5) en français! 
Mais oui!
Eez it not très belle?

If all the above awesomeness is too much to handle here are a couple of bits I animated on their lonesome:

Roundup

With this year barreling by at a scrotum-tighteningly terrifying speed, I keep falling behind with the whole blogging thang. Currently my existence is an impenetrable soup of what's happened/what hasn't, what's online/what's not, what's public/what's private etc, so it can all get away from me a bit. I'm gonna be 30 in a few seconds so give me a break.
There've been a few HuHa! updates in the last couple months worth rounding up. Firstly the plucky Assassinen Babies (as they're known in Germany) make an appearance on their own in a standalone version of their debut skit. Those who speak the language will gather from the comments that its whimsical subtlety didn't play quite as well to the German YouTube crowd.

There's also the French version, Bébés Assassins. Good god, it's like Muzzy up in here.

To an altogether more positive reception here on their home turf, the English Assassin Babies made their thrilling return to Wobble Box in episode 6. Who knows what peril and adventure they'll face this time around? Find out below (around 2:13 in)!

Here are a few yummy mummies I sketched for it. These are all loosely based on some real-life new mothers I know. From what little time I've spend with their respective young'uns I expect they're just as effective in a combat situation.

 Two more skits I did the visuals for show up in episode 8 which went up today. Starting with High Seas which is a fun, concentrated 15 seconds of swashbuckling that was a joy to design.

I liked how this one came out so much I took the assets and made an illustration piece out of it. What an onanistic delight I am:

Secondly is High Winds. That's wordplay humour, son, let it wash over you. Like the pirate one, this was quite simplistically animated with some special sauce courtesy of After Effects.
The skits show up at 0:36 and 1:53 respectively, but why not go ahead and watch the whole ep? It's only wee, sure it is.

There's also a more recent episode of Fantasy Office, which saw me charged with designing some 'Salesman D-bags'. The main antagonist was loosely modeled on Michael Douglas in Wall Street.

Check out the full episode here:


Also, as I don't want to leave what I'm certain is a monstrously high percentage of this blog's readers who live in France hanging, you can watch the French translation L'Office de la Fantaisie episodes 2 and 3 below:




Hourra!!

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?

Community Spirit

"Down in front!"

I'm very pleased to report that the Skwigly/Encounters Showcase evening was, by all accounts, a resounding success. As it turned out demand exceeded supply as far as available seating went so a lot of folks had to prop themselves up at the bar, but to everyone's credit they stuck around and the films themselves got a brilliant response, which is the main thing. The venue was great, with screening facilities that really did the films justice and pint glasses of popcorn that seemingly appeared out of nowhere for the audience's nourishment.

Pic via @EncountersSFF on Twitter

As well as the amazing friends of mine who came by, some of the filmmakers themselves were also in attendance and it was great to chinwag with some new folks from the Bristol animation scene. Due to work and distance constraints myself and a couple of writers were the sole Skwigly-ites there, but the Looking Glass staff and Encounters Fringe Events organiser Steve Presence were very helpful. After the screenings wrapped I quickly devolved into a babbling, local-ale-fueled drunken degenerate as a reward to myself (putting on a facade of competent professionalism really takes it outta me) and had a brilliant evening overall.

 You can check out a full list of the evening's selection over at Skwigly. Thanks so much to Lee Daniels, Oli Putland, Linda McCarthy, Ant Blades, Špela Čadež, Will Adams, Emma Bell, Rumpus, Animade, Yonni Aroussi, Ben Genislaw, Paul Hill, Craig Knowles, David Ridges, Ross Butter, Isabel Peppard, Will Anderson, Sam Morrison, Darren Robbie, Jamie Smart, Jane Davies, Philippe Vaucher, Jon Dunleavy, Georgia Yorke, Barry Purves, Dan Ojari and Mikey Please for letting us screen their work!
The subsequent phone/email/social media feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and while there are no immediate plans to have these types of events be a regular Skwigly thing, as a trial run to cut our teeth I can't imagine it having gone better.
Now to catch up on a week's worth of snoozage. I am plumb-tuckered out.

Skwigly Showcase - Wednesday Flier

Our Skwigly Showcase event is tonight at the Looking Glass in Bristol! If you're free, come by around 7:30, say hello and watch some free toonage of an evenin'! More info on Facebook.

Skwigly Showcase - Tuesday Flier

Hopefully see some of you sexy folks there tomorrow!

Fringe Inducing

This year Skwigly's media partnership with the Bristol Encounters Short Film & Animation Festival is a little more involved and has extended to its Fringe Events programme. To that end I was approached a little while back to put together a screening of short films on behalf of the magazine, which was a lot of fun and made fine use of our recently-launched Skwigly Showcase.
If you're not aware of it, the showcase on the website is basically a means to get any animation work someone has already posted online to the Skwigly audience. It's gotten a lot of great feedback so far and been a wonderful insight into how talented our readership is. For the showcase evening we've picked some of our personal favourites and I've also reached out to a few filmmakers whose work, while not available to the general public as of yet, has really bowled me over.
I think it'll be a fun night, so if anyone's around Bristol this Wednesday (28th), swing by the Looking Glass just next to St. Nick's Market, around 7:30-8ish. You can find out more info on the event at Skwigly or on Facebook. It's also totally free, so don't say I never treat ya right!
Here's an e-flier to whet your whettable bits:

Miss Us?

You've probably all noticed that the sun is shining brighter and food is tasting sweeter today. That's of course because it's NEW PODCAST DAY!

Alright, alright. Contain yourselves.
After a not-especially-intentional summer break, we've come back with some pretty great guests on offer. Steve interviews Eric Goldberg and Lauren MacMullen from the Disney camp on their new Mickey Mouse short Get A Horse; Laura-Beth talks to Saschka Unseld, the director of the Pixar short Blue Umbrella that's been accompanying Monsters University; and swarthy Bieber-alike Tom chats to Teri Hatcher on her voiceover roles in Planes and Coraline. That's Teri Hatcher as in Lois & Clark and Desperate Housewives, which is pretty damn surreal. We also have a more Planes-centric video of the interview which should help explain the 'swarthy Bieber-alike' comment:


As well as all this we chat with director and fellow podcaster Aiden McAteer on the Annecy film selections and read out some listener stories of freelance nightmare commissions.
Good, wholesome content all round. As always you can listen below, subscribe on iTunes and/or direct download!

Bedfellows

Here's the cover art for the second book of the trilogised "Throat" series. The proposed title is "Manageable Unease".

As I mentioned here when Book 1 was released, the hope was for this to have come out back in February, but now it's looking more like October/November. I'm not even going to begin to speculate when Book 3 will be released - as they say, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. Except in this case replace 'God' with 'subsidiary distributor with own, inscrutable marketing agenda'.

"Coffee please, Doris..."

At the end of last week the fine folks at HuHa discreetly put up "Fantasy Office" episode 3, following on from episode 2 back in May. While I did the animation for both, this one features a few characters from episode 1 which was designed by another chap, so I've attempted to bring the two styles together.

This one was written by Joel Jessup (apparently the credits at the end are wrong) and got some nice feedback over the weekend. Personally I found it quite satisfying as lip-sync on a skeleton is a f***ing breeze. Here are a couple of new character sketches:

As always I was up against it so the backgrounds were a bit rushed, that being said I'm quite happy with the crypt one:

Okay, that'll do for now. Frankly I've spoiled you enough as it is.