Old Project Roundup: Mysteriously Sporty Characters

Next project from down-the-back-of-my-sofa: an early-stage pitch I did last year, for some sporty characters. I can't go into much detail about this project, or the client, but here are some preliminary roughs which never got to see the light of day...

I was hoping to see these characters animated with a mixture of gloopy/fizzy CG and jerky traditional animation (for the facial expressions) and running, jumping and hurdling around live-action filmed environments, leaving colour and animation in their wake.

Except they didn't, because they fell over at the first hurdle and some other much shinier characters sprinted past them. Ah well.

Old Project Roundup: Becoming Merlin

Next in the roundup of projects I forgot to blog: an interactive storybook I illustrated for the BBC with the production handled by my Preloaded pals. And this one is Bafta nominated. Shiny!

I've put some of the final artwork below, along with a couple initial sketches. As this interactive book employed a liquid-layout (where the layout expands and adapts to your screen size) I had to design the illustrations so they could be viewed on small monitors, where you only see a small fragment of the scene, right up to massive screens where you see all the surrounding scene.

So make sure you watch the book fullscreen when you try it out, otherwise you'll only see a small fragment!

Being Merlin

And lovely job by Preloaded on the story engine, animation and voiceover.

Old Project Roundup: LittleBigPlanet PSP

It's been a bit quiet round here lately (you'll find out why very soon) so I'm catching up on the blog with a few old projects that I have't featured on here before. First up: LittleBigPlanet LBP.

Hopefully you all know about LittleBigPlanet, the game I worked on the visual design of for my pals at Media Molecule. That game was originally for the Playstation3 so when Sony's Studio Cambridge set about making an original PSP version they asked me to continue one role I had on the original project: making the intro, so having assembled the original crew again here's what we made:




As the PSP version of LittleBigPlanet allows all the gameplay and creativity of the PS3 version, but on a portable system - I wanted the scenes to be less about sleeping and dreaming, and more focussed on daydreaming while still interacting with the world around us.

The live-action awesomeness was once again, thanks to director Matt Lossaso and Director of Photography Clive Norman. And wonderful Stephen Fry came back again to sprinkle some talky magic on it, combined with the classic LBP theme by Daniel Pemberton.

If you look closely you might spot me in there too.