Short

It’s been a very long time since I last put fingers to keyboard in an effort to write something for this blog, which admittedly is all my fault. Still trying to find work in a studio in the UK, been involved in a few freelance or volunteer projects in the meantime (mostly doing stuff for my brother, the irritatingly talented Jonny Elwn).

Most recently I’ve had some models back for a short film idea that I’ve been kicking around for a while, and which I’m now pushing forward; will put up some work in progress material before too long I’m sure. Thanks to Adam Dewhirst for getting the models knocked out in the midst of everything else that was going on.

So a short update, but more will be forthcoming. Working my way through Jason Schliefer’s Animator Friendly Rigging at the moment, as I do have very simple characters to rig and hopefully it won’t be massively complicated to do. I also picked up Ryan Woodward’s ‘Thought of You’ in high-definition and the ‘Conté Animated’ book that accompanied the film, which has just made me want to work on my drawing skills far more. Going to put at least an hour a day into that.

So yeah. 2012. Going to be an interesting year.

Life Drawing – Week Three

This gallery contains 4 photos.

Midway through the course and happy enough to be getting three hours to draw every Tuesday – pleas excuse the rather bad photographs of the sketches, but there’s not really any other way of getting them online. Drawing 12 (as I’ve called it anyway) is one that I’m quite pleased with – foreshortening is a [...]

Life Drawing – Week Two

This gallery contains 4 photos.

Back to the life drawing class – finding it extremely beneficial to have to go somewhere and focus on nothing but drawing for three hours. Wasn’t in a great position for a lot of these sketches, so thumbnailed quick five second studies of the other students to break up the time a bit.

Life Drawing – Week One

This gallery contains 4 photos.

So this evening I had my first life drawing class in about a decade, probably more – it’s a part of my skill set that I really want to work on and improve. For the first week we were doing long poses, maybe 15 to 20 minutes for each drawing of the model standing, expanding [...]

The Wedding Project

This was an animation project I got involved in after a call for animators on Twitter; great fun to work on, even if it did involve rather a lot of long days and late nights, not to mention there are a few things going on in there I wish I could fix. The deadline for getting it all rendered meant I had to rush it all, but it was a great experience working on something different for someone else with less-than-perfect rigs and still trying to give a little bit more to the performance than was expected.

I worked on two shots here, the introduction of the girl’s parents, and the car journey shot.

Musically addicted

Music is an enormous part of my life. Not the creation of it, but most definitely the appreciation of it. I love music. I especially love this:

I love the blending of different tracks, the creativity that goes above and beyond merely slamming two songs (or albums for that matter) together.

You can find him on SoundCloud and on Twitter; only seventeen, but I would expect to have a bright bright musical future in front of him.

I got plus’d

Friend invited me into Google’s new social networking service today – that company’s answer to Facebook, as it’s been touted. I already really like it, even in early beta stages. I think this might be because it’s core idea, Circles, seems to be the result of looking at how personal relationships actually work.

In the case of Facebook, it grew from just being about keeping in touch with people on a campus in Harvard into a worldwide social network. They made decisions like opening up all the APIs so everyone could create MafiaFarm or whatever the latest browser game of note is today (you can probably guess I don’t play that kind of game). It became over-whelming and complex and unwieldy to really manage who got to see what – and definitely made huge errors on the privacy front. Every other day now there seems to be another ‘Facebook has screwed with your security once again, here’s the convoluted nineteen step process to unbreak it’. It seems to be a victim of it’s own success in many ways, without a clear direction or indeed some clear ground rules that actually follow what friendships are actually like.

Which is probably why I love Circles quite as much as I do.

I am one of those people that makes friends with just about everyone I meet. At the moment I have close to four hundred friends on Facebook. Some of those people will be friends for life. Some of those people are animators, or went to the same animation school as me. Some of them are from teaching in Japan. Some are from working in various different jobs. Some are family. But they’re all lumped in together, and if I post something, everyone sees it.

Assuming for a moment that every single one of those people jumped across into Google+, I can divide them up into the various circles of my life incredibly easily – this person is a friend but also an animator; so they’re in two circles. I can share things to just one circle, or a group of circles together, or just throw it all out there into the public domain. I can filter my feeds by the various circles. I’m really looking forward to the iPhone app and seeing how well that integrates everything (with my fingers crossed that Apple, as much as I love them, won’t get the hump about any of the features).

As first impressions go, I’m sold. I really hope Google+ sticks, because if the majority of people I know make the jump, I’d probably close my Facebook account – or at least gut it beyond all recognition.

Some quick updates

Currently working on a short that some bloke on Twitter is putting together – one shot down, two in progress – but as I jumped into this very late after he put a tweet up asking for help, I’m working to hit quite tight deadlines. So that’s taking up my time at the moment.

Hoping to get at least one decent showreel shot out of it anyway; and it’s cartoony stuff, which isn’t a style that I’ve animated for before. So the rest of this week will be working out the kinks in those shots and then hopefully get back to my showreel.

And updating this blog more frequently too…

EDIT: For all those people who have ended up here looking for the guys that did this EL NINO video I’m sorry but it’s not me.

 

Good advice

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have.

We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

— Ira Glass

Inside The Actor’s Studio – Kevin Spacey

Got into watching these recently; bought the DVDs that are available here in the UK and also finding bits and pieces of stuff online. I find them quite fascinating from an animator-is-an-actor-with-a-puppet viewpoint. I don’t normally post just quotes or that kind of stuff on here but the final words of Kevin Spacey to the students struck a chord with me, and I thought I’d share them.

In response to a question about how to deal with and appreciate the journey to the ‘ultimate prize’:

“There is no prize, out there. The only prize is this one [pointing at his chest], and what you feel, and what you want to accomplish … I feel that I very often watch a lot of young people sort of meander around, without any idea about why they’re doing what they’re doing. I mean, to want, and to be ambitious, and to want to be successful, is not enough. That’s just desire.

To know what you want, to understand why you’re doing it, to dedicate every breath in your body to achieve… if you feel you have something to give, if you feel that your particular talent is worth developing, is worth caring for, then there’s nothing you can’t achieve.

You’re going to grow up with your colleagues. You’re going to watch them have success and watch them have failure, and watch how they deal with it. They can be as much a teacher to you as anybody here, or anyone that’s privileged enough to come here and speak to you.”

Right here is a link to a YouTube clip of the quote itself.