BAFTA win at Plug-in Media

Big and Small wins the 2009 Children's BAFTA in the interactive category.

The folk at Plug-in Media are slightly shell-shocked, but there’s photographic evidence, so it must be real: have a look at the surprised Plug-inites taking it in turns to grip the face of gold. It’s been a great pleasure working on such an ambitious project with this talented bunch.

Production on Plug-in's next big, interactive adventure is well underway. I’m enjoying getting stuck into some 3D animation. It’s another one for the BBC - due for release next March.

Future Machine = been & gone

Last Saturday, Brighton entered the White Night. Night time in the city was given over entirely to experimental artistic capering. It was one impressive autumn evening.

The Future Machine projection event drew massive crowds, well into the wee hours. We've set up a Future Machine youtube group for videos of the event. The whole programme was filmed, so we'll post the bally lot up early next week. 42 animations in total.

There are also photos of the hilarious and chaotic, light animation workshop on the Future Machine website. We designed a workshop for ten people, around a hundred ended up wandering through. We were pretty relieved when we could step back and let artist Jake Spicer take up the reigns at 11pm, as he skillfully lead the assembled masses through a life drawing for animators workshop. Learnt an important lesson about whisky and my skill wielding a pencil: as one increases, the other decreaseth. Finally, after we had packed up the monster Projector and put it under lock and key, we got down to the Ocean Rooms. The Beatabet Collective had made it their own and Bunty definitively rocked out.

Had word from the council that they want more animation next year. Already excited.

FUTURE MACHINE Collaboration

The gems at Brighton Council have taken up a BANG collaboration project I took to them. FUTURE MACHINE is due to be unleashed on the streets of Brighton at this year’s White Night. BANG animators want to get all Nostradamus and look to the future. How do you begin to imagine what is to come?
During the night of Saturday 24th October, the animations created for the project will be projected directly onto the façade of Brighton's Unitarian Church. I love the idea of beaming a totally diverse collection of visions onto the walls of the city. A 30 second alien attack might be followed by a utopian 10 second loop, a grey dystopia, pixel madness, stopmotion spy-bots shimmying down the front of the building, abstract jangle- it’s going to be interesting.

Abbie Stanton’s made a little animation with the Future Machine mascot she built- it's on the BANG site. That there is Toc, he’s a little pod, who’s travelled a long way - and he’s going to be travelling all over the world in the next few months.

Off the Path // On the Web

Off the Path now has a little web presence over at Word Picture Studio.

There are a few videos posted up of the 2008 pilot I worked on.

Also, there is news on the Flickers project at ANTI festival in Finland.

Beautiful stuff.

Earl Grey Whistle Test

Another hour of improvised electronica to come out of the musical powerhouse that is our living room...

Earl Grey Whistle Test: Session 6

Gingerbread Man

Sneak peek at continuity shots taken on the shoot of Freya Elliot's "The Ginger Bread Man". I was Production Designer on this Brighton shoot and, my my, it was hectic!
The actress in the pictures, Teresa Mock, was an absolute trooper. Made me realise just how hard film stars had to work- it's not all about smoking cigarettes and throwing strops, no sir.

To draw, to film or to mix it all up?

Work on "Off the Path" continues. Trying to get the look of the key character down.
Not there yet, but getting nearer...

Weekend in the attic

test 1




test 2

Spent the bank holiday weekend experimenting with animation techniques in an attic. Got messy mixing traditional materials – charcoal, paint, crayon, tipp-ex (!) – with photographic material. I've posted up two of the tests.
I’m getting stuck back into working as the animator on an installation in the woods that tells a narrative through the use of early optical and animation devices- Zoetropes, Thaumatropes, Phenakistoscope- basically giving all the tropes and the scopes a ride. Working with these kinds of devices necessitates a lot of simple looping animations, like the Test 2 charcoal run cycle. I'm developing the look of the character at present and am working on an underground burrow structure for her to live in.

Happy accident: all the frames of the charcoal run cycle helpfully resolve themselves into a tree….

Paring down

I've always liked the 1 minute pose. As well as the obvious bonus that... well... it only takes one measly minute, I often find the result more interesting than a 20 minute pose that has been fussed over. There's no time for the brain to intervene and ask the dreaded question "is this good?"- you've just got to get on with it and capture the life and drama of a pose immediately.
Paring down - a good way to proceed.

Super 8 in the Woods

I want to get a really grainy, celluloid look for some new development work I'm doing on "Off the Path", so got out the ol’ Super 8 camera and shot a few cartridges in Stanmer Park, the site the project will be installed in. Just got the developed film back- love the colour.
If Michael Apted’s “Nell” had been set in the English countryside, it would have probably looked a bit like this. Chicka, chicka, chickabee...