Festive Treats for Y'all

First things first peeps, Merry Christmas to all, hope Santa's brought you some good shizzle presuming you've all been good boys and girls. My macbook is finally back in commission (thanks Mr Claus) after a rather long hiatus thanks to a busted charger and battery so I can finally have another go at doing some digital art work I've been meaning to get to.

Just spent a couple of hours scrounging around various places for some fresh inspiration and thought I would share. Got alot of this stuff from over at Yay!everyday, a brilliant website stuffed full of rather grand bits and pieces, I would definitely recommend you pop over and check it out.

Apologies for the crappy layout of this post btw, I spent about 2 hours trying to clear up the HTML and make the pictures and text do what they're told and this is the closest I got to something vaguely presentable.

Matt Cipov

Matt Cipov is doing some pretty interesting stuff. I really love his style, especially the bold line work and scratchy finish, gives his illustrations a really doodle-like quality. His website is pretty cool aswell, even if the text is super hard to read.

Jay Horinouchi

I'm really loving Jay Horinouchis work, his website describes him as a "bilingual Japanese American" and that mixing of two very different cultures really shows in his painting. I haven't seen anything quite like the level of contrast in styles that his illustration exhibits, the sheer amount of detail in the line work is astounding.

Lucia Holm

Photography might be a little off topic (what with this being an animation blog and all) but I can't help but adore Lucia Holms (pictured far left) portfolio. She covers a mixture of fashion photography and commissioned work for bands and the like but it's her self portraits that really stand out for me, they feel genuinely warm and are so full of life and colour, with just a little bit of sex appeal thrown in for good measure and a dusting of twee glamour to finish. Some of her work is quite clearly inspired by the always-enjoyable Sam Taylor-Wood, especially her Self Portait Suspended series (sorry, that's the best site I could find). For those unfamiliar with Sam Taylor-Wood I would recommend checking out her Crying Men photographs, one of the series of art that really speaks volumes to me. Steve Buscemi is a personal favourite.

Alberto Cerriteno

A Mexican Illustrator who moved to the US 4 years ago, his mixed background is clearly evident in his work. You can see his roots in traditional Mexican art in his patterns and small details, especially the two illustrations second from the bottom here, they really remind me of old dia de los muertos festival stuff by artists like José Guadalupe Posada. Alberto also mentions his love of designer toys (one I share) and that the whole sub-culture they represent has had a massive impact on his work since his migration. The majority of his art is digitally produced and it's got a real 2D looks to it, I imagine it would be perfect to throw in to After Affects and have a play with some paper cut out style animation.

MeindBender

This Swedish animation studio have got some really cool shorts on their website that are worth a look. The video below is from a short series of idents they did for Cartoon Network, this is my favourite by far though. I love the character design and the facial expressions are spot on, but it's the style that really appeals to me, you can tell from this video that their roots lie in claymation and I love the fact that they've kept that very 'real' look and even gone to the trouble of trying to emulate that in the computer generated work they've done. Check out the showreel on the website if you get the chance, there's a super creepy looking dude about 10 seconds in that scares the hell out of me and I just can't work out quite how he's been made, I'm thinking maybe a CG face comped onto live film?? Drop me a comment if you've got any ideas!

The Duplicators - Cartoon Network ID shortie from Meindbender on Vimeo.

Well that's all for now, I need to update on my college stuff ASAP but that's gonna have to wait for now. Have a great New Years!
Peace out!

HERAKUT

Just a quick bit of inspiration before I jet off for a Christmasy pint with Len. Stumbled across this German artist about 5 minutes ago and absolutely LOVE her stuff, looks fantastic and the style is just something else.

The monster at the bottom is obviously my favourite!!

The dark and eerie forest..

I've been looking for inspiration for the creepy forest scene in our paper boat animation, or at least something that resembles what I want to achieve, and this video pretty much sums it up. It's a clip from The Adventures of Prince Achmed which is actually the oldest surviving animated feature film. It was made in 1926 and uses Lotte Reiniger's own invented technique of silhouette puppets made from cardboard and thin sheets of lead. The story was taken from the collection of 1001 Arabian Nights.

Reflection and Looking Ahead

Considering my tutor has been off ill most of the week I've actually had a fairly productive session. Since the majority of my group for the Zeus animation had been awol, Len and I have just been beavering away on our live brief and we have a pretty decent idea of where we're going with it in terms of story and technique.

I think for next week we just need to sort out some concept work, most of which is already in the pipeline, and work on some kind of simple storyboard just to set some of our ideas in stone. I would also like to get out and track down some good locations for the live footage portions of the animation, just so we're ready to roll when we have the equipment.

There's still loads of work to be done for our Zeus animation, we desperately need to have a meeting and organize some kind of plan for who will be doing what. There's story boarding to be done, model making, set building and a final draft of the script needs to be written up. With any luck we will be able accomplish the majority of that next week, although it looks like my paper boat brief will just have to take a back seat for a few days.

Frogger

On a side not, in a frantic bid to become more organized Len and I built this rather fetching 'Frog Drop Box' yesterday to pop all our hand outs, briefs,module guides etc in. To be frank, I think Dave must be close to throttling us the amount of times we've had to go begging for re-prints of pretty vital information.

Life Brief

Well, the live brief is now officially well underway. Len and I have teamed up to bring 'The Story Of The Little Paper Boat' into the world, the plan is to produce a multi media animation following the adventure of an origami boat as it drifts from a little stream out into the great unknown. I think my illustrious partner puts it best when he say "There will be creepy crawlys, steam boats, sea monsters and strange beastys galore".

This map started out as a quick doodle but I ended up spending an entire afternoon working on it, it was meant to be a visualization of all the ideas we had been playing with as to where the little boat would actually travel to but as you can see it doubled up as a sort of basic time plan and simple story board guide as well. We started jotting down the thoughts we had for different scenes and animation techniques and it finished up looking pretty snazzy!

shoe country

We spent most of this morning making a quick pixelation video, needless to say, fun times were had by all.

McBess

I've been following this French, London based illustrator and animators work for ages now, but he's just released a clip from his bands music video (which he also animated) and I wanted to share it with you all!

He's also just released this rather beautiful print from his online store, A2, limited to 50 prints and only £60!! So if anyone is feeling generous this Christmas it can be found here...

http://www.mcbess.com/buy.html

peace out

I figured since I had already posted on the progress on my stop motion puppet I should really come back and show just who it is I'm actually making! Introducing.. Zeus! These are the character elevations for my college group project staring the once King of the Gods, The model has run into a few hiccups lately though and I'm having to scrap his y-fronts in favour of a pair of two-stripe tracky bottoms. The original plan was to have him wandering round his apartment in all his Godly glory, and only donning an old dressing gown when he did rarely leave the house. But his legs were just too thick and solid to bend, so he wouldn't of been able to walk, I've had to demote him to covering up a little.

I'll post some new pictures of the model first chance I get!

Step 3:

Making the mould

Step 2:

The sculpty head

Step 1:

The maquette

We're about halfway into our second project now and the stop motion models are coming along nicely. I pretty much finished my maquette, just using wire to build the armature then covering it in plasticine. I had some problems using the thinner wire to make the fingers and other details, it tends to fold rather than bend smoothly so I'll have to track down some better stuff for the hands on my actual puppet.

Instead of using wire for the thicker parts of my puppet I think I might use Loc-Line (http://www.modularhose.com/) it was originally developed to pump water down to industrial drill heads to cool them, but Dave recommended to use in my armature as it reduces the risk of breaks in the wire when the puppet is moved around alot.

In the last week I also modeled the prototype head for my character using super sculpty and painted it up. I think I will probably end up using interchangeable heads for the different expressions, as you can't really see much of his mouth anyway, but I do want to explore different options for the eyes as I want to be able to move them around ideally. I was thinking I could just use painted plasticine so I can peel them off or shift them round to show eye movement. I also need to make a set of templates for my heads so they all look the same when they're finished off.

I decided for the torso on my puppet I would cast it in papier mache so its nice and light, then mould the spine of my armature into place with more papier mache. Although this means it wont be very flexible, the amount of movement that will be needed in the spine is pretty negligible, and so long as he is moveable at the neck, shoulders and legs this shouldn't be noticeable on film.

So here's my plan for the next week of work:

• Cast the mould for the torso and build the torso into it
• Attach the armature into it
• Model a series of heads for various expressions
• Build up the arms and legs of the puppet with electrical tape and dip in latex
• Put it all together and paint it up
• Start line testing

Apologies for the huge post, pictures of my maquette and moulding process should follow shortly.

This short animation was for the final project of my first year on the course, I think it was definitely my most successful module and its certainly the work I'm most proud of. It took days and days of practically solid work to pull it together but this is the kind of high standard I really want to apply to all my work from now on.

The character was inspired by a British engineer called Richard Trevithick from the golden age of steam engine technology who became famous for his public exhibits of new designs and machines, especially his road locomotive "Puffing Devil", which he drove around London on Christmas Eve, astonishing onlookers. But in 1810 Trevithick caught typhoid and seemingly disappeared. This is where I came in with my side of the story, I decided that Trevithick, driven into desperation by the threat of his own death, perfected his steam engine technology and built his masterpiece "Puffing Devil MKII". This wildly ingenious mechanism would become his life raft as he transfered his brain and various other organs over and continued to live on, escaping his mortal coil...

Hope you like the video!

I started with an idea a few months ago for a live brief for E4, but me being me I never got round to finishing it, or even designing all the characters. It's still missing a scary (but a little bit cute) dinosaur to jump out and scare my gang of intrepid neanderthal explorers. But since we've recently been given a live brief to do as part of our course this year I think I might resurrect them and finally finish it off.

So I started on a new mini project the other day, not strictly speaking for college work but relevant non the less. I was playing about with a character I named 'Mr Moustash'; primarily because he's a mouse.. with a moustache, and, in a flash of genius, decided to create a jazz band made up purely of rather hairy rodents. I have christened them 'Moustashio!', and with any luck they will be playing your local jazz club in the near future, just keep an eye out for the little fellas!