Life Drawing

A great, innovative little ad for a life drawing class at the Book Club in London, made by Wriggles & Robins. The way they've incorporated animation conveys the idea of what life drawing is really well.

(via Colossal)

An interview with the wonderful animator Don Hertzfeldt on today's A.V. Club.

Snapshots: EDINBURGH

My film A Game of String will be screened as part of Snapshots: EDINBURGH, an evening of puppetry and moving image curated by the Manipulate Festival, on the 3rd of February. More info here.

Liquid Telvision

In the 90s, MTV aired a brilliant animation showcase called Liquid Television. People like Charles Burns, Mark Mothersbaugh and The Residents were involved. It was the first to feature Beavis and Butthead and Aeon Flux. Now MTV has made it all (and more) available for free viewing online.

Lovely Animation by Alice Cohen

From the Big Bang...

... to Tuesday Morning, is the title of this wonderful animation by Canadian artist Claude Cloutier. (Thanks, Ericka!)

A Game of String: the Film Is Finished (kind of)

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At around 15.30 yesterday I handed a dvd of A Game of String, the animated film that I've been working on for the past two years, over to my tutors.

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It had been an intense couple of weeks, not just for me but for the whole Edinburgh College of Art; as assessments were closing in people were working 24 hour days in their studios, sometimes catching a nap in the corner surrounded by art materials, take-away food and energy drink cans. Thursday at noon I started the final edit and kept working until the next day, when I had to deal with a final hurdle in the shape of a computer clusterfuck - the animator's curse. In any case, I burnt the dvd and stuck around a little longer just soaking up the atmosphere of hundreds of talented people doing their very best all at once, as graduating students were putting the finishing touches to their degree show exhibits, before they would inevitably be kicked out at five o'clock. This is what I will miss the most about art college.

Then I went home and slept for 14 hours.

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Now, just to clarify, while the film is finished for marking, it's not quite ready to be seen by anyone else, which is why I'm not posting it just yet. However, to satisfy the curious, here are a few stills:

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If you're in Edinburgh, be sure to visit the ECA Degree Show which will be open to the public (and free) 12-20 June. More details here.

Winsor McCay = Genius

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I've been doing a bit of research on Mr. McCay and I might as well post some of the stuff. McCay was a pioneering cartoonist and animator and it's safe to say he was one of the greats. Gertie The Dinosaur is from 1914 and was performed as a vaudeville act. McCay would stand on stage and talk to Gertie, telling her to perform tricks for the audience. I would love to have seen it live but unfortunately that ship has sailed. So here's a video clip:

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It's so charming!

And here are pages from McCay's comic strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland. I love the endlessly inventive layouts and beautiful colours. You can tell that both Moebius and Chris Ware are into it too.

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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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Nice Animation

I love this showreel by animator Thomas Hicks. He's got a lovely, lovely style. There's a link below to more of his stuff.

Thomas Hicks Animation Montage from Thomas Hicks on Vimeo.

Who I Am and What I Want

A really great animated short from Dave Shrigley.

Notes on Puppet

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Puppet was my degree film and it’s been about 2 years since I finished it. My first instinct is to be very defensive about it. I think it’s flawed and might come across as gratuitously weird. I didn’t make it to be weird, though. I was just using a lot of ideas that had been with me for a while.

The story went through some very different permutations but the main idea was always that there is this world where puppets live, and where perhaps all lost or unused things end up. My first draft was a TV broadcast, from the puppets to us, in which they acted out a complex, ritualistic narrative based on their observations of the human world. It would have been the animated equivalent of Finnegan’s Wake so I’m glad I didn’t go through with that.

The next idea was a detail from the first one, which I isolated and elaborated on. There was a group of puppets, who would use a wire hook to fish out, as it were, objects from our world and collect them. They’d try to figure out what they were for and play with them and put them in glass jars. Then, because the puppet world is a magical place, the objects (a fork, an old sock, a severed doll’s head…) would come alive and be put together as new puppets. I simplified that idea and came up with the story of just one puppet, who has crossed over from the puppet realm and gotten lost. And there you have it.
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The film was shot on a set modeled on a specific place (an alley off Bread Street in Edinburgh) which is where the location shots were done. I tried making the set as grimy as possible (There were complaints from the janitors, who apparently didn’t realize that the rubbish was a part of the set – they just thought I was really messy). I winged it through most of the shoot; I hadn’t really planned much apart from the story and chose camera angles and lighting on the fly. This is one of the good things about stop-motion: it’s easier to ad-lib because you’re not drawing every single frame. The birthday cake at the end, for example, was not in the original story at all. It had come with one of the dolls and I thought it would be a nice touch. Only later did I realize what a crucial plot element it had become. Sometimes things just come together like that.

I was very conscious from the start that the film wouldn’t be liked by everybody and it did turn out to be quite polarizing, among fellow students and tutors alike. (Although the tutors in the animation department were into it, apparently there were some in other departments who hated it). I’m aware of the flaws in it. As a piece of work, it was obviously very a huge deal to me. My four years at art college essentially culminated in this one thing. In your first movie (as, I imagine, in a first novel or any first large artistic project) you put in ideas that have accumulated over many, many years. It’s an exorcism of sorts and in that way it runs the risk of being self-indulgent. I certainly realized even then, that I was cramming all these ideas (which some would find extremely weird) together into a pretext of a story and I can imagine people being bewildered by it all. The important thing to realize about film, is that, unlike a still image, it demands a larger investment from the viewer. You are asking for their time and attention and with that comes a responsibility: if they feel that their time has been wasted, you have lost. And people’s attention spans are very short so each second of a film has to be a convincing argument for the viewer not to turn away from the screen.

All this aside, I don't think that the movie could have been anything else than what it is. The main thing I was trying to achieve was atmosphere. I think that works ok. The second thing is the puppet itself, which is something to empathize with throughout this strange and dark experience.

Puppet

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At last, my movie Puppet has made its internet premiere:

I'm going to post a few notes about it tomorrow, hopefully. Mr Dan Gorman, who made music for Puppet, has a new, very lush, website, which you should visit.

Animation

My big project at the moment is a film I'm making as part of my MA at the Edinburgh College of Art. It's going to be a drawn animation and I won't say to much about the plot for now, except that it's about two characters who live in an observatory on a mountain. Through their telescope they can see everything. Here's a character sheet I drew up a while ago. A character sheet is part of the initial designing process for an animated film and is a good way to get a grip on the look and personalities of your characters.