Big thanks to everyone who's clicked that subscribe button so far, and hopefully this will just be part of launching onward to bigger and better things when I do eventually make a proper return to professional animation!
Powered by a surge in views on Grave Mistake, my YouTube channel has crossed the 10,000 subscriber mark! This is an awesome achievement that I honestly never thought I'd get to hit! In celebration, I made a short video, bringing back the character that really did the heavy lifting in getting my channel to this point, using original animation assets and backgrounds from Grave Mistake, dug up from an old hard drive. Big thanks to everyone who's clicked that subscribe button so far, and hopefully this will just be part of launching onward to bigger and better things when I do eventually make a proper return to professional animation! So the "Bring Your Own Animation" meetup group here in Bristol asked a few months back if anyone in the group was interested in creating some stings for them, and recently I finally got round to making my contribution. It'd been too long since I'd done anything properly with my character Sprakle, so I thought it'd be good to use him for it. Finally got round to making the second Sprakle short!
With uni winding down for the term, my aim is to get two more of these done before the New Year, so fingers crossed! After all this time, I've finally managed to find the time to animate the first of the two Sprakle shorts I had planned way back in the summer! There's also a Redbubble account with Sprakle merch now! Ok, so there's a lot going on to talk about at the moment! Firstly, quick note, "This is Normal" is still updating on schedule, so the most recent comic went up yesterday. Go check that out! Onto the main stuff, I have here a small gallery of sketches done in preparation for "Is Your Fridge Running?" that were done over the summer and in September, leading into the production of the film. In the time since the last update, I've received my grades for the final two modules on the second year of my course! I got a 2:1 in Professional Practice and a First in Developing Practice, so good times all-round!
I've also reached the half-way mark in the animation phase of the BBC Listening Project! It's progressing really well and looking really good so far. The transition from animatic to animation's been pretty smooth and I'm certain that the beeb'll be happy with it once I've finished so long as I keep the quality level up. On top of that, I've now signed up to do a storyboarding exercise/project with Justine Saint-Lo, an MA student at uni, where I will be taking her early beat-boards and turn them into a proper storyboard that can be turned into an animatic to hopefully pitch the project for further production. Exciting stuff and I'm looking forward to getting my teeth into it. And on a final note, I've started thumbnailing out a possible comic book. It would be a short one-shot comic, likely below 25 pages, but enough that I feel it would be worth getting printed as a zine and putting up for sale. I'm looking at the potential of getting a table at the Bristol Comic and Zine Fair in October, and maybe the Bristol Comic Expo next May, and this would be a good start for material for both of those events. The story revolves around a cutesy love story between a fox and a werewolf, and I reckon would attract a fair amount of interest. I'm also going to be turning the existing Sprakle animatics into proper animations soon, as well as producing more - but likely when some of these projects are a little more finished and off my plate. It's gonna be a busy summer! Another Sprakle comic, and another animatic! I'm almost certainly going to be trying to make time to make these properly this summer between the BBC Listening Project and the one-minute film in September. And in terms of the one-minute film, I've come up with another possible concept for it involving a couple of arguing astronauts on the International Space Station. So I'm probably going to be developing that further over the couple weeks or so, so there should be some related art up here at some point.
Ok, so for a while now, I've had an idea sat on my harddrive waiting to be used or developed into something more. The idea was basically a single character - a happy-go-lucky, utterly innocent and naive, immortal, childlike unicorn with no concept of death - done in the style of those pre-school "learning to read" type of books with minimal backgrounds and simple character design. This one comic has been sat on my computer since last summer, and I figured it was about time to put it to use. And while the Doctor Chaotic short would be quite good for full blown storyboarding and development into a proper short film, Sprakle definitely suits the bite-size sting style of content that's popular on the internet at the moment (ie - Vines), and the simplicity of it means that I could easily pump out either 5 animatics, or one completed 30 second skit within the time left in this term - and could quite easily be extended to fill 60 seconds if I wanted to adapt it for the one-minute film brief we're likely to be set for over the summer. Here's the animatic for one possible short: Picture that, but with an explosion sound effect at the appropriate point.
I already have ideas noted for up to 4 more shorts, and I doubt it'd take that long to brainstorm more ideas for him. The comic and this one animatic have already generated something of a buzz on DeviantArt, proving more popular than some of my fan art postings in terms of views, comments, and favourites, so I'm pretty excited for what the reaction would be to a more complete series run of these little bite-size shorts. |
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