Scientific Animatic

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So, it's been a while since I posted anything substantial and that's mostly due to my spending less time on the internet and more time fretting about college work (David Foster Wallace said in an interview something to the effect of "I spend 10% of my time writing and 90% worrying about not writing", which rings so true.). I'm at a stage where I'm redrawing my pencilled frames in ink and adding detail, which is very slow going. But when I shoot the days work it feels wonderful to see the finished shots.

Soon, I'll be posting some stills from what I've been doing, but, for now, I thought I'd show some frames from my animatic. For those unfamiliar with the animation process, an animatic is basically a filmed storyboard - a kind of mock-up of the film, which allows you to get a sense of its pacing and to edit it before you start drawing. Initially, this was going to be almost the whole film; a lot of patterns depicting quarks, atoms, dna molecules and so forth. I had a lot of input from my friend Andy Eschbacher, who is a quantum physicist. The thing is, it's impossible to draw atoms and sub-atomic particles because they're like nothing we can imagine. So these drawings are only symbolical.

Since the beginning of the project, the film has changed quite a lot. It now centers on two characters (I posted a character sheet a while back). Anyways, here it is:

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Elisabeth Hobbs

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...is an award-winning, London-based animator. She works with watercolours and her films have a delicate, ethereal quality. The above image is, I believe, from her film The Witches. Elisabeth is going to be my mentor, thanks to a Screen Academy Scotland scheme. I'm very pleased because I love her work. You should check out her website.

Toastycats #4

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Hooray! The 4th issue is now officially out. It features lots of nice creatures and the next part of The Seed. Here are some sneak peeks:
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You can order it through the Fox & Comet Shop. The Creatures are waiting.

Zines!

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In the photo you can see me (to the left) with Dai Jones and the empty chair of Jonathan Prior. The three of us shared a table at the London Zine Symposium last week. It was a very good event: packed with people and nice zines. I didn't find the time to participate in any of the workshops offered, which was a bit of a shame, but I really enjoyed just sitting at the table and chatting to people. I sold quite a few Toastycats too, and some screenprinted patches. Dai and Jonathan were selling their own zine, 12 Gates to the City.

Unlike last year's Symposium, which was quite heavy on radical zines, this time most of what was on offer was pretty art-school. The former are mostly black and white, text-based and not so ambitious formally. The latter are usually in colour, and often experiment with techniques, fomats and materials. There seems to be a gap between these two kinds of zines and I would have liked to see more stuff that tries to bridge that gap. Personally, I'm more interested in the colourful, nicely printed zines but they are often just eye candy. It would be interesting to see some of these engage more with narrative and to exhibit the kind of urgency and energy that you find in a lot of radical zines. Of course, fancy zines mean fancy prices; I'm not feeling very rich at the moment so I didn't buy anything. But there were some things I really liked and would like to recommend:

http://artisproof.bigcartel.com/

http://www.bracketpress.co.uk/

http://www.illustratorselbow.com/