A much needed update.

Life after graduation has been depressingly unrelated to animation thus far. 

After a summer spent using the last of my house deposit to enter Love Hate into as many festivals as possible, it seemed inevitable I had to get a job. So I'm back at faithful Waitrose once more. 

There was however, a little light at the end of the tunnel as myself and fellow coursemate Nigel (one of Love Hate's animators), were accepted to work as volunteers to the 12th Cornish Film Festival which took place in November. (I've got amazingly slow with these updates). 

Excitingly, Love Hate was also accepted into the festival, screening in both the "Made in Kernow" category and the Eye-Toons Animation shorts category. 

However, the festival became even more exciting as Love Hate went on to WIN the award for the "Made in Kernow" category. 

A complete surprise to me as I hadn't even known it was shortlisted! (Poor Nigel however had been told earlier in the day and had to struggle to keep it a secret!)

  

 

This win gave us a nice shiny trophy and £400 in prize money, which was split between the team and kept to bankroll the film into future animation festivals (at £10-30 a pop to enter - as well as postage, DVDs and printer ink - it's not cheap!).

Sadly things after Chritsmas haven't been quite so rosy, and I had to postpone working as a volunteer for Animated Exeter in order to attend Jury Duty (thankfully far better, and a little shorter, than I anticipated!).

However, things are beginning to look up again with the news that Love Hate has been selected to screen at the Holland Animation Film Festival! And after working pretty much non-stop since the start of November, I'll be using my next week off to enter LH into as many more festivals as possible!

Graduated!

Not dead!

I realise it's been a long time since I posted, and a lot has happened in that time! Thanks to my fabulous team: HUGH ELLIOT LYDIA DAN NIGEL ...Love Hate was finihed with two days to spare! They really are a top bunch of animators and left me (relatively) stress free once I knew it was in their hands and I'm super proud of what we've managed to create. And despite having a mad rush in the final week to write up 5000+ words worth of reports, I have now handed in every single bit of University work. Which has left me with mixed feelings about the whole thing, as stressful as this year has been I would gladly do it all over again (although, perhaps not the dissertation... you can keep that). The hardest thing has been adjusting to no deadlines and nothing to do now that my crazy 10am till 2am working days are over. Perhaps this summer I'll actually get a tan... Maybe. And now I've actually found I feel bad if I don't do anything, I redid my showreel today because I felt so guilty when I tried to play the Sims. I just hope this work ethic continues! Now that the film and everything else is done, we're hoping Love Hate will be able to make a run of the festival circuit! It's been entered into Bristol's Animated Encounters, so time will tell! (Sadly this means you won't be able to see it online, but there are snippets packed into both mine and Hugh's showreels). Now I must go and pack, for Hugh, Dan and I are off to Annecy! An exciting, but also scary prospect, so if there are any other animators out there who are reading this and are going, hopefully we'll meet!

Business cards...

...are here!

Love Hate Promotional Pictures

Business

So, I've been really rather quiet recently on the blogging front. Scarily we only have 17 days left of production time! However, I took time out yesterday in order to create a...

 PROFESSIONAL WEBSITE

Expect this blog to get an overhaul in the future so I can be all matching. I'm also working on matching business cards as part of our Professional Practice module.

Professional practice is designed to get us in contact with people in the "business" before we become part of the "business" ourselves. This constant thinking of business reminded me of THIS (Lets pretend Andy Wyatt is Sam the Eagle and I'm Scrooge, and instead of saying the "American way", he would say "the Animated way").



Anyway, here's a couple of shots I've been working on in the past week.





(Blogger's new editing system is disgusting).

Dinosaurs

The past few days I've been playing with Dinosaurs.

Original photograph:



Separate parts for puppeting in ToonBoom Animate (the final one has more - the leg is in 3 spearate bits):



One of the first videos (the dinosaur was then edited to look more like the original drawing, larger head, larger belly, for a bit more characterisation):




It's actually a lot of fun doing puppet animation. It takes quite a while to set up, but after working on Barista and only figuring out how to do puppets 3/4 of the way through last year, the amount of time it saves animating is worth the amount of time it takes to set up. The final animation will probably have an outline around the dinosaur - I'm thinking graphite stick or biro, but considering the edit here is only done with the original photograph, I'm really pleased with how it's turned out. I've also been playing around with the credits, but dinosaurs are much cooler.