Monday, December 29, 2008
Friday, December 19, 2008
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
This is a pencil test for a run cycle in my new film K9-Lives. It's based on my webcomic of the same name. You-tube doesn't seem to run it very smoothly but you get the idea. I will post some other tests and frame-grabs as I go along. I have almost completed the animation of the short....I am editing together the animatic so I can decide on any changes before I start colouring. I am going for a very limited style of animation because I feel that I can create some nice films in a short amount of time and really develop my film-making skills. I have been working in animation for almost 2 years and I'm finding more and more that the endless refining and tweaking to get full animation is a rather dull business. I prefer dealing with the broader strokes of storytelling, cinematography and gag writing, letting the animation be rough and less developed. At the end of the day the only way to become a good film-maker and to learn the elements of good film is to MAKE films..... make mistakes and move on to make another film where you will make one or two less mistakes. So this is the first film since my graduation film http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVW-zaY1Tbw&feature=channel and I plan to make many more.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Friday, December 05, 2008
Fritz the Cat: This crow character is introduced to us in a seedy bar room. He's a pool shark (actually he's rubbish at pool) but the way you introduce a character is very important in films.... and this pays off big time later on.
About 20 minutes later Fritz is leading a revolt in the streets and gets the pair into a riot with the police. Shots are fired and our crow friend is hit in the chest. The gun shot is replaced with a shot of the break on a pool table. We see him bleeding and kneeling on the car, then cut back to the pool table and the pool balls bouncing represent the beating of his heart slowing down until the black 8ball which cracks and we zoom out from his black pupil.
This moment had a profound effect on me and I have been constantly thinking of ways to bring this approach to film-making into my own projects.
Monday, December 01, 2008
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Just trying to get the hang of drawing the characters and tying down the structure. I want to keep quite a loose feeling to it though, I've been reading a lot of things on John K's blog about individual style showing through in animation and that is definitely what I love about 2d. The Simpsons had some great animation in the first few series before they "figured out how to draw the characters" and then lost all creativity and spontinaity.
I don't want to give out much info on this at the mo, it's more so that I can show my friends who will help me on the idea. Hopefully will start production on this as a short film in January, with the plan to make several films in a series if there is sufficient interest in it at festivals and on the net etc.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
This was my room for a couple of weeks while I searched for a permanent place, the people I was staying with were very musical and lent me a guitar which was great....