So this week, I finally got to work on my first shot for Sam Shaw's "Dead and Breakfast", and having finished it, Sam's given me permission to show it off, so I will! Here it is: There's going to be one or two minor edits to this before final inclusion, but other than that it's done, and personally, I'm really happy with how it came out. On to the next one!
I've now finished the animatic for the BBC Listening Project, pending final approval from the BBC's representative. But if that goes well, then I'll be able to get the green light to go into production, and I can get the ball rolling on crewing up and getting more animators involved for the next phase of production. I'll probably also get someone to fulfil the role of producer to manage timetables and schedules so I can focus on making sure the animation and look of the thing works out. The main issue I forsee in production is the move between live-action and animation - the short begins and ends with a transition between looking at a whiteboard and being zoomed out from that whiteboard to see the wider surroundings. If this costs too much time, then I can probably live without it, but I think it'd be a really nice touch and sort've explain the style of the whole thing. Still, now that I've got this animatic done, time to get it approved.
Casual commission for a friend - they wanted themselves dressed up as "Big One" from an old series of "Super Sentai" (the thing that Power Rangers takes most of it's footage from).
I'm now a third of the way through the animatic for the BBC Listening Project, with just 2 mins 8 sec left to do. I'm aiming to really knuckle down in the next week and a half and hopefully knock out the rest of it and get some feedback, and hopefully, the go-ahead to move to the animation phase. The basic jist of the short is that they're walking through a generic supermarket shelf, with cut-away sequences to illustrate some of the situations that they talk about.
If you want to listen to the clip I'm going to be animating, it's currently here on the BBC website. If I can build up my buffer for This is Normal more in the next couple of days, I won't have to worry about it next week and that'll give me some time to really focus on this. Here's my first showreel! Some good stuff in there, I hope, and a whole load of contact details. The music in this showreel was done by Stuart Fergurson (aka RainbowCrash88). Includes clips from "Under the Weather", "Cats Are Dumb", "Hover Llama in the Wild", "Joey and Remus", a promotional video I did for Hydra Books, an animation test I did for "Dead and Breakfast", a Gravity Falls fan animation I did using the audio from a vine by Jason Ritter, and the sting I did for the British Animation Awards.
Really managed to pack a lot in there in the end! I'm now working on Sam Shaw's 3rd year film, "Dead and Breakfast", a 2D Flash symbol-based film, about an unlucky duck who stumbles into the wrong hotel. Stylistically, it's heavily influenced by the work of Craig McCracken, and other 90's cartoons, and I'm quite looking forward to working more on it. As well as showing me and the rest of the team how masking works in Flash - something I'm rather surprised I hadn't learnt about before now - Sam got each of us to design a ghost to be used at some point in the film, likely on multiple occassions. I was originally going to go with a "Headless Horse", in parody of the "Headless Horseman", but decided to go with a "Horseless Head" instead. With my storyboarding work on the Ocean Acidification project done - pending a sign off from the client - I aim to balance animating on this film with the preproduction of a short for BBC Radio 4's "The Listening Project". I'll be trying to bring to life one of the conversations they recorded as best I can, using a mixture of symbol-based and keyframed Flash animation. I don't yet know when the deadline for that project is, but either way, I hope I'll come out with something I can be proud of at the end of it.
And while all this is going on, I'll also be aiming to come up with a script and a preliminary storyboard for the Doctor Chaotic short. Busy times ahead! I'm going to be looking at putting together a short animated film focusing on one of my original characters that I've been toying with for a while now. He's called Doctor Chaotic - he's an incompetent but aspiring supervillian who can't seem to be taken seriously by anyone. He first appeared as a minor supervillian in my thoughts for "Rick and Rooster", failing to intimidate Rick in a coffee shop, back in a single-page comic in 2012.
If I progress through my other projects with enough time to spare, I'll try and get this done in time for the Encounters Short Film Festival submission deadline, but if not, I'll cut the time to 90 seconds and submit it to Depict instead. |
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