Shelved...again

I was involved in another project over the past few months that has unfortunately been put on hold while the client gets the funding for the project. It also has to be timed just right as it is music video and needs to be released at the right time so trying to balance the making of it and the time it needs to be released is quite a hard task.

Either way it was a cool project to work on and I am happy I can at least share some of my concept work for it.

I also keep promising to post up some photos of the head sculpt I'm doing at the moment but I keep getting side tracked when trying to finish it. All I need to do is decide whether I'm going to sculpt eyebrows on it, or when its finally cast in silicone, to punch hair in. I also needs a neck sculpting on it but that shouldn't take all of 30mins then it's on to making the mold!

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Robots

Here is a sneak peek at a future project that has been put on the shelf for the moment while I work on current and more important jobs.

I am looking forward to getting back to work on it as it should turn out to be super cool. The idea of making these designs for stop motion really gets me pumping plus it's robots, who doesn't love robots?

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supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

Well what a cool week its been so far! First off I get an email from my old tutor to tell me my film is being entered in to the national RTS awards as it one the midlands award. That's pretty damn cool. I'm really not bothered about winning but it would be super cool if the film gets shown to the audience as there will be quite a few big names there.
He also emailed me today to let me know that I have been featured on the university's news page

You can see it here

Secondly over the weekend I got a message from the awesome chap that is Marc Spess to let me know he had put up a wee post about me on animateclay which is pretty damn awesome! I was super stoked with that news. Many thanks Marc for putting a big smile on my face for the weekend!

 You can see it here

I will have some photos to post up in a few days of a head I'm sculpting at the moment so i can test out making some new head armatures.

Practice & tests

A couple of months ago I put together the set from 'till death do us part' and had a little practice with the puppet from it. The first shot I just did without anything in mind. For the 2nd shot I wanted to try some follow through on the hair as I didn't really get a chance to test it on the film. The 3rd shot I wanted to animate something elegant.
Another reason for doing this was to test my set up at home to see if there would be any problems shooting my own projects.I am also a portrait photographer and have recently acquired a 600w light it also has a 200w modeling light which I wanted to see if it was powerful enough to shoot stop mo with. The main problem I thought would arise was flicker and it did but I soon solved that by changing the shutter speed on my camera. So its pretty cool that I can use my light for photography and also stop motion. Another bonus is that it came with barn doors and a honeycomb grid so I can shape the light quite effectively.

Youtube link

I also wanted to test out my tripod head to see if I can do some manual camera moves.  I have a Manfrotto 128RC Micro fluid head.

It is very very sturdy for shooting film with so I wanted to see if it was up for the job of stop motion. I found that is is very suitable for the job the only thing I need to do is to make some plates with markers on so I can tell how far it I need to move it. Awesome!!!
These moves are quite fast as I only had a short time to do them.

Youtube link

Forgetful

I was having a look through my illustration files earlier and found a couple of drawings that I had forgotten about. I quite like them so I thought I would share them with you

Click the thumbnails to view large

Inspiring words

Compare your life to Pixar.

I found this video to be very inspiring. I think it applies to all in the creative field and not just animation. It will be a video to turn to when all feels lost.

2011

Well there goes another year. It had some very bad lows but also some very good highs. I wish you all the best for 2011 and hope you had a great Christmas and new year!

I haven't blogged in a while about my own work due to not really having much to talk about. First off is that me and my chum are trying to start a small animation/film studio. We are currently negotiating our first job which will be a stop motion music video for a band. If all goes well It will be a really great job but I'm not going to get my hopes up as over the past few months things haven't gone to plan.
With that in mind I am going to continue with a few personnel projects. One is a short film that I will talk about at a later date. The next is to explore and expand my skills in puppet making. I am going to work on head armatures and replacement facial features.

I also need to make a practice puppet so I can animate a few basic principles for a new showreel.
For this I have sculpted a head which is pretty much finished apart from needing surgery due to knocking it over resulting in a bludgeoned eyebrow and chunks of hair missing.

Luckily I took some photos of it before the accident.











I have gone for quite a stylized look for this chap and am quite happy with how he has turned out. I'm looking at doing replacement beards for lip sync and cast the rest of the head out of silicone to get nice subtle translucent skin with movable eyebrows.

The rest of the body will also be quite stylized. I still need to do some concept work for that as with the head I started out with the shape of the head in clay then did a super quick drawing of what was in my mind



So hopefully by the end of the week I will have the rest of the concept work done and perform surgery on the head. I will try and keep everyone up to date with the process.