He's behind you!

Everyone loves Chelsea, right.
Especially when their goals come in the form of daylight robbery.

Well, you know what they say

...You've got to pick a pocket, Eto'o.

Eto'odinho

Rough Shapes

Finished

An Executive Decision

A little doodle I did coming home from the Earl of Camden, having watched the Manchester United - Arsenal match

Oh, Bendtner is coming on. Our enemies shall be fear stricken.

Update

Director

After a good twenty seconds of trying to come up with a pun-laden title for this post, I thought I might just crack on with it. (The closest I got was some play on words of Gabby Agbonlahor's favourite band, 'One Direction')

I was given the opportunity to animate for The Institute for Research and Innovation in Social Services (IRISS), who are a charitable company that work to enhance the capacity and capability of the social services workforce for the benefit of people who use them, in Scotland, but I'll start with how I came to be involved.

The project commissioned by IRISS was to enhance visibility of a report produced regarding the benefits of the arts in social care. This was assigned to Pen Mendonça, a freelance Artist and Graphic Facilitator, who had works within private, public and third sectors with a history of working with charitable organisations .
I met Pen at an Animation and Graphic Novel symposium held at Central Saint Martins, and enjoyed how she spoke about her practice, and the development of her PhD. Having previously illustrated on a short video that was produced by a small team of creatives, for the New Economics Foundation, Pen asked for an animator to bring her illustrations to life, and create the final video for IRISS.

I received the brief of the project, and a script for the general idea of how it would be produced. With a short time for turnaround I suggested some changes and we met to discuss them at the CSM Kings Cross campus.

While from the outside illustration and animation seems like very similar disciplines there are various differences in the ways that work is produced between the two and different considerations that you encounter during a collaborative process.
Pen has experience of creating graphic novels, and working in a setting where all the action of an image would be told via a singular shot, if necessary, whereas I try to think of how different shot and frames move together, and how to get the best cinematic balance for them. We do, however, share the ability to storyboard and getting the ideas from script to imagery went very quickly over that afternoon. We devised characters and a basic set-up of the shots that we would eventually use for the final film.

After compiling the short animatic above, I began to sketch more detailed designs of the scene and shot layouts and sent them to Pen, so that she could start to design the backgrounds after she worked on designing the characters, and understand the camera angles that I wanted to employ for each particular scene.

Character Development

I broke the film down into five different scenes, and then a range of shots within those scenes. I'm not sure if this is technically correct, but I classified shots as each time the film changed environment regardless on whether it is a repeated environment.
To clarify, I laid the scenes as the care home, the festival street area, the home, the festival performance area, and the care home again.
From here on out it became a case of modifying, compositing and animating the shots given to me. I did most of the animation using After Effects, but found Photoshop to be a multi-purpose software as well.

Most of the shots arrived as JPEG files, meaning that the background colour needed to be erased, so that when given an Alpha channel only the characters remained visible. To cut the jargon, I had to erase the white from the background. In some cases I also cut out elements from a scene to create different layers so that individual body parts could be moved, independent of each other. For example, shot below would have been broken up into Background and Characters, then the animated elements of each character, be it a nodding head, or a moving arm. Furthermore, objects in the background that would be animated would be placed on their own layer, too. Off the top of my head there were roughly eleven moving elements from the still image below.

It's all connected

This process continued for several days and nights, receiving image files, cutting, layering and then animating them. Overall, the detail of the animation wasn't too strenuous when compared to the sheer volume of work there was to do. Regrettably, waiting for the illustrations to be ready meant a lot of my time was spent trying to tighten the development side of the work, such as animatics and considering editing techniques as the length of the film seemed to be spiralling out of control, and the time that I had left to spend animating, was rapidly decreasing.

Pen and I met again to discuss what was essential to the brief, and what elements of the story could be cut, either because they did not lend anything to the story, or were perhaps too ambitious visually, given the time we had left to us. We decided to alter the ending, interns of scaling down the animation we had planned to do for it, and also to involve the use of visual fading transitions to cut from different shots. Once these tough decisions were made we got back to working on the project, meaning even more late nights and early mornings.

How you livin'?

In the final week of the deadline the workload really began to pile up. My social calendar had long since been ditched, and family members knew I was only leaving my room for refreshments. With the illustrations still ongoing at this point, I knew that I could not complete the project without external help. To reiterate again, the volume of the work rather than its complexity was proving to be the issue. Rather than plough on alone, but live with the very real danger of failing to complete my first project as a director, I hired Jamie Kendall,  to work on some shots that I wouldn't have had time to complete, as it turned out and after an arduous weekend of working flat out we completed the animation. We survived the weekend on copious amounts of tea, and cutting sarcasm.

The next stage was to edit and composite the files that we'd finished over that period mainly using Final Cut Pro to finalise the movie, and add them to the files that I had already started to work on in the days prior. Some further changes were made, as per the request of the client, but for the most art they were editorial decisions that needed to be executed rather than having to animate much more work.

To briefly conclude, I think this project taught me the importance of having a long view of a project and being able to see any potential flaws or issues that crop up, and making the correct strides to address them.

I'd like to give special thanks to Ashley Jones and Maliha Basak for their advice during the process.

Now without further ado, here is the finished article.

Sundaes All Round

Just a quick one to mention that 'Sundae Afternoon' has had it's first festival screening.

It was shown at the Landed Festival, based in Wales, which is a 3 day festival of music, theatre, circus performance and art.
Picked for its "paper-like style and it's very mellow moral message", the film was shown in the festival's cinema tent.

Hopefully it's the first of many festival showings.
Back to work for me now,
Enjoy the rest of your sundae :)

Monday

A piece that I came up with on the bus, on my way to work. Completed over a few journeys on public transport. It was just the idea of the disillusioned commuter, that would be anywhere else but on the way to work on a Monday morning.

Beaconsfield's got Talent

"TALENT SHOW NEEDS YOU"

That was the subject line of the email I received on the 31st October. It was like a recruitment telegram from Uncle Sam. I had come from a student at the National Film and Television School, over in Buckinghamshire.
The film's producer, Emily Morgan had forwarded me an email from the director, Claire Winter. She'd got hold of my details from a mutual friend and NFTS graduate, Yousif Al-Khalifa, and it was made clear to me early on that this project ought to be a good fit for me.

The film was being produced in Photoshop, and had a very strong design element, and characters that stood out, aesthetically..

My initial involvement was inbetweening a dance sequence involving three characters, Magda, Eva and Lenni, better known in the film as 'The Pussy Cat Twinkies'. Each of the characters were designed very similarly, but with quite slight anatomical differences, and varied facial appearances. Being a 'girl group' their dance routine was naturally synchronised to perfection. Allied with the previous points about their design, this made the entire experience ultimately frustrating, as despite the character carrying out the same animated sequenced the job was not a simple task of 'copy and paste' due to the subtle changes in the way that each of them are drawn, though I only realised this after completing the first of the characters.  A bit of a lesson to myself about trying to take shortcuts ahead of evaluating the correct procedure.

Photoshop having a 'special moment'

I began working on 'Magda' around late November, and finished up on the 20th. It'd been a while since I'd done any prolonged animating, so its fair to say that was a tad rusty, but the work seemed to drag on for longer than I'd anticipated. The keyframes were very strong, so I started of trying to inbetween where I could, but I soon decided I'd be better off trying to act the scene first, and if you've seen the clip, on my showreel, of the finished action then I'm sure that you can imagine how embarrassing that was. I'm not quite sure what my response would have been, had someone caught me performing this dance at 2am in my bedroom, but there we are.

So, after nailing the choreography, like a boss, I started working on a rough set of frames, in order to prioritise the animation. I wanted to make sure that it was as fluid as it had been intended, and to save time in the long run. From my perspective it made more sense to learn from any mistakes in this rough stage, than replicate a good design, that might not move correctly.
Once I'd finished the rough animation, I went on to do the clean up, but I ran into some problems. The characters didn't have model sheets, so I was just going by eye. This was quite problematic especially with the amount of turning the character did. Not having a fixed reference meant a lot of time spent trying to figure out angles and spatial context, and having been working remotely at that stage, made for several long nights.

Pussy Cat Twinkies, and Darlene

Ultimately the design made the character quite tricky to animate, with elements like the eyelashes, hair and even the rakish physique. By the time I'd finished on 'Magda', I assumed the other two would be just a tad easier, and in fairness there were sections of the animation that were less demanding than others, but I was very wary of making the characters follow the key frames, laid out by director rather than the rough animation I had done already. 'Lenni' and 'Eva' took sixteen and eleven days respectively to finish off, and I was definitely glad to see the back of the 'Twinkies'. 

I even went as far as to put it to Claire, that she deliberately mad the characters difficult to animate, so that you have no sympathy for them in the film. 

She laughed, in partial agreement. 

I think.

By the start of the 2013, I'd had enough!
Enough, of my desk space that is.
I was getting cabin fever, and figured I ought to get out into the world, and attempt to reintegrate with society. In truth, I was still working on 'Eva', and hoped that by working in the studio I'd have more of a dialogue with the director, and other animators in the production team, as well as feeding off of the collective vibe that occurs in a grouped workspace.

Tweet, tweet: My thoughts after my first day in the studio

I'd been up to the NFTS in the past to work on another short, but this time the journeys seemed longer and more arduous somehow. It probably had something to do with the torrid weather we were having at the time.
Being January it was understandably cold, but the chill of Beaconsfield really takes you by surprise. Being somewhere without massive buildings, or air pollution probably meant the wind got to you much quicker, and made me yearn for the smog of London. If the wind and rain wasn't enough, then there was the snow.

Beaconsfield has it's own micro-climate

It's an awfully British thing to go on about but several of my friend will concur that once you're old enough to have a paying job then snow is a blinding eyesore. It's obviously ridiculously colder when there's snow. It delays trains blocks traffic, and if it gets on your jeans, it lies in wait like a time bomb, waiting to melt through onto your helpless leg.
Damn you, snow!

Went off on a bit of a tangent there.

^_^

So, I finally met my director on the 8th of January, and soon found that we were on a similar wavelength. She listens to Frank Ocean (as you all should), she'd heard of 'Superail!', and introduced me to the work of David Shrigley, in particular 'The Door', which had me in maniacal fits of laughter for days on end. All in all, she was easy to get along with.
Initially, I was pencilled in for three days, just to get the shot finished, but I was told there was more work going, to help get the film finished.
This wasn't what I'd planned. My sleep pattern was messed up, I wasn't eating properly, and I had no social life. I'm fairly sure I remember telling @jesskleslau that I was going cut and run after finishing the 'Twinkies', yet with freedom on the horizon I chose to stay.
I suppose that meeting people face-to-face gives you more of a connection, clearly on a personal level, but also with the project. Being able to see the bits of work from the development process, like the mood board which was steeped in references to 'Ren & Stimpy', the aforementioned 'SuperJail!' and of course, 'Spongebob Squarepants'. There was the storyboard that was scattered across the studio like wallpaper. Furthermore, being in the studio I able to watch the animatic, so I could see I saw how hilarious the story but also see it being continually updated with animation, or colour and lighting so the production process became much more real to me.

If I'd continued working remotely I probably wouldn't have stayed on, but despite the workload, I was enjoying myself over in Beaconsfield. The production team seemed to be growing by the day. I was soon introduced to our producer, Emily Morgan, and also some of the other animation assistants, and colourists. Maria Turska, and Emily Knight, became my regular studio buddies, each of us ploughing through the PSD files at our desks. Grooveshark became our coping mechanism for quickfire playlists to lift the mood, with this Disney mash-up being the most memorable. As well as, Maria and Emily, Ling Duong came up to the studio fairly often working as a colourist, so at some points we'd have the five of us crammed into the room, working away. It was cosy to say the least.

Fuel!

After a week or so, at the studio, I completed the my dancing shot and was able to move on to working on a short shot made up of short walking sequences, and mainly boiling. It was definitely a change of pace, and one that my mental well-being welcomed. Soon after, I was working on a new set of characters as the pace of production quickened. I was seemingly living on hot Ribena at this stage and got stuck into my final set of characters, named Shazam and Houtini. A pair of amateur magicians, who seemed questionable double act. It also meant that I'd be animating one of my favourite shots from the animatic, which was the close-up of Shazam as he raises his eyebrows to the audience. This turned out to be the easiest of the three to animate, but the difficulties were keeping the consistency of the facial features. Certain liberties that you might take with a more frantically animated scene, are possible with slower pieces, and with a close-up the volumes of what you're drawing need to be carefully watched.

Maria's favourite, Shazam

After finishing I began working on one of the remaining three shots, but soon found myself getting stuck, so decided to rotate through the scenes to avoid fatigue, and ,make sure that I wasn't constantly going over old ground. This approach kept my mind fresher, and meant that I had something to work on all of the time, but wasn't conducive to the production process, as having three files on the go meant that they took longer to get over to the colourists, so I soon switched my focus to work on one file at a time.
In the last week of my time at the studio things were getting tense. Deadlines were looming, and I was starting to feel worn down and I could feel that the travelling was definitely taking its toll. Luckily, I managed to relocate for a few days to High Wycombe, thanks to @filthypierre having a spare room at his place, which cut down my commute by at least an hour each way. I was able to come in earlier, leave later, but still get as much sleep as I was before. It was a rather fortuitous situation, it has to be said.
My last day at the studio was on the 16th of February, and I was still getting my head around a shot that had plagued me for most of the week. It was of 'Houtini' lifting up his cups to reveal doves flying away.  Sounds simple enough. I'd started on a flying cycle for the doves but realised that they could not be finished until the arm movements had been do. It was a case of one set of movements reacting to another, in terms of how the file was laid out. I wouldn't say that the animation was anywhere near as difficult as the girls I had done before, but I had to think about the timing much more than on the others.   There were some movements that I had fully animated, so that they moved smoothly but they had to be cut or sped up in places to allow the scene to fit into the allotted time frame. A lot the shot was case of trial and error. I finished off at around 11pm that evening, and after saying my goodbyes made my way back to High Wycombe, feeling well and truly knackered.

It wasn't until the day of the screening that I met up with the other members of the team again, which came on the 1st of March. I decided the occasion was worthy of a blazer and brogues combination, and I wasn't wrong. The NFTS students turned up suited and booted for the big day.The screening, held at the BFI, on Southbank showcased solely the films of the school's Animation department. Although, I'd been there for some weeks and met most of the other directors, I'd promised myself not to have any sneak previews before the screening. I was glad I waited. The quality of the films is the first thing that stood out. I'd been to screenings where films were unfinished in parts (my own included). There was also an interesting variety of techniques used. CGI, Stop-motion and hand-drawn, but too used differing approaches. Paper cut-outs, digitally animated puppetry, straight-ahead using charcoal to name but a few.

 NFTS Graduates 2013

After each film the team members, made of existing students, were invited to the stage, and then introduced and eulogised by either their director, or producer. I think it was then that audience truly got a glimpse of the several departments that work so diligently to collaborate in order to make films of this standard a success, never mind the countless amounts of talents assistants and freelancers that graced each of the films' credits.

After the showing there was a mixer in the bar where I mingled with some of the students, past and present, but it was really more of an opportunity for the soon-to-be graduates to network with the assembled industry professionals, on the hunt for the next big thing. After a few glasses of wine, I headed off for lunch with Emily and Maria but not before suggesting a group photo with the other assistants.

Team Talent Show
L to R: Ling Duong,  Qian Shi, Emily Morgan (Producer), Claire Winter (Director), Maria Turska, Emily Knight,
and myself.

Usually I do a little line as a summary of my experiences, and what I've learnt etc, but it's well past my bedtime, so I'll leave you with these words about the film.



"This slice-of-life comedy, set in a community church hall is about people and experiences we can all relate to. Matronly ex-dancer, Fay Adams, coaches a bunch of eccentric children for the local Talent Show. Her rigorous regime falls short on the strong-willed Darlene and the two clash immediately, resulting in Darlene's banishment from the show. Things are on tenterhooks when the local bishop and hordes of eager parents arrive. Fay has her hopes pinned on her prize act, The Pussy Cat Twinkies, but little does she know, Darlene is about to exact her revenge."


Until next time :)

Why not

Just a quick set of doodles, all football-related. 

I tried to draw Alex McLeish from a photo I saw in the Metro, on my way up to Beaconsfield. Here he reminds me of Cotton Hill from King of the Hill, but generally a withered testicle.

McLeish

Just a quick attempt at Marouane Fellaini, from memory.

Fellaini

More of a conceptual piece, that may be stuck on a wall somewhere at the Catford Bridge Tavern. I started off drawing a balloon, drifting off into the sky, then realised that the shape reminded me of Gervinho's forehead. The whole thing seemed apt, as he does drift off out of matches, like a balloon in the sky.

Gervinho

Still here

Er, how does this work again?

Yet again its been a while since I've properly blogged, so here's a bit of an update.

For the past few months I've been working with one of the talented students, from the Animation Directing course, that the NFTS seem to churn out. Work has been steady, and plentiful as I ought to be winding down in the next few days. Just finishied animating a shifty looking magician, by the name of Shazam.
I'm in the process of applying for jobs, so the showreel is getting a bit of a spruce, as well as the CV.

The tiger sees all!

I'm trying to up my doodling, and managed a few thus week, even prompting a doodle exchange on my way back to Hither Green, from Bucks.

One happy gorilla

Last but not least, I'm getting a few ideas for another short, based on regret. Will give it the big reveal in due course.
Until next time, goodnight (or whenever you read this)
Karl

Fan club

A ringing endorsement.

Especially for you,one of my favourite tees by my boy @krlawson the best illustrator ☆ twitter.com/patrice_stylis…
— P A T R I C E (@patrice_stylist) February 9, 2013