Figured it was time to spruce up the ol' showreel and try to get back on the professional animation horse! Included some of the animation exercises I've been doing lately to stay in practice, as well as some clips from a project that hopefully will see release sometime this year that I first worked on back in 2017! Enjoy!

Finished the latest shot on "Dead and Breakfast", and I've already been assigned another shot to do - I'm just waiting on receiving the symbols necessary to do it.

I've also made some modifications to my CV based on the feedback of Sarah Cox (director at Arthur Cox) and Mark Taylor (director at A Productions), so here's the updated version of that:

So Sam managed to get me the next shot for me to work on, and I've made decent progress in it so far. After a few hours work, all that needs doing with the central character of the shot - in this case, the duck - is to animate his legs.

The animation's symbol based, but I roughed it out first using Flash's brush tool to help give me an idea of where to put the body and what I'm going to be doing with the legs in the finalisation of this particular element of the shot. It should look pretty awesome when it's done.

So while waiting for another shot to do for "Dead and Breakfast", I decided to use the base of the generic wiggly-tailed ghost to make one of Sam. He seemed to like it.

Another ghost for "Dead and Breakfast", this time a nice generic wiggly-tailed ghost which I know will be used throughout the film.

The line consistency around the right eye's already been sorted out, and the arms are likely to be a touch shorter in the film, but it probably won't be massively noticeable. 

Designed and animated another ghost for "Dead and Breakfast". Don't yet know if it'll be used in the film, but good practice nonetheless.

Also related to the project is this little doodle:

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'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!