Psst! Sugar & Spice in HD

Now that I've stumped up some cash for a Plus account on the brilliant Vimeo, I can start posting some HD movies. Here's my segment from this years PSST! Pass it On animation/motion-graphics collaboration:



It's not actually HD in that embedded version, but you can see it in full WrapAroundPixelRama (tm) on my Vimeo page here.

It was a fun little film to make, I took the final frame of Bran Dougherty-Johnsons piece and continued the themes he started. But with more focus on Victoriana, sexual awakenings and, of course, snails.

As always I had a hundred ideas that I couldn't put into practice due to lack of time, but it turned out okay, and enjoyed animating something a little bit closer to my sketchbook style. Something I want to do more of.

And I was massively pleased with the musical score by David Kamp, who managed to make it feel like something far more professional!

Doodlebook Dump One

As I was saying in the last post, I've been scanning in my sketchbook for this months Computer Arts magazine feature. And I'll put them (and a few more) up here on The Internets for all to see. So here's the first batch of impenitable doodling, these examples are more about story development, I'll post some others soon thant show character development.




These all feature work for my Grip Wrench series for MTV. As you can probably see, most of my thought process happens on paper, and really consists mainly of doodling ideas until I get enough of a collection to edit down into something fit for human consumption...

Here's some close-ups:

Sketching in Computer Arts

There's a new issue of Computer Arts out, and once again, I've breached security and sneaked into the magazine, this time in a leading feature on designers and their sketchbooks. There's some great stuff in there, and it's always interesting to see how other artists think on paper, and formulate ideas before launching into the final piece. My bit has some character designs from the Disney pilot show I made a while back, and some development stuff for my Grip Wrench show.

I'll put some of the scans I took of my sketchbooks on here in the next week or two (including a load not seen in the article). In the meantime here's me, browsing the magazine just now:

Stand Up

I'm off to FMX in Stuttgart next week, with Kareem & Francis from MediaMolecule, to talk about how we made the wonky world of LittleBigPlanet. It looks like there's some interesting programmes on, I might have to sneak in and geek out on the various talks on the production design of Hellboy2 and Watchmen.

Talking of Watchmen, here's a portrait of The Commedian, it's not really finished but I'll have to leave it as it is for now..