Just love this video and song...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acay3S2PhSg Its a great piece of work, and a great collaboration between the musicians and the animators.
It also shows the workings of a simple stop frame animation which is very interesting indeed. I love it.

Backgrounds

These are some backgrounds i have done using different mediums. The top one i have used pencil and then scanned it into photoshop and then used gradients, layers and various selection techniques to get the feel of a desert at sun-up. The problem i had with the printing of the background was that the colour management chain from the macine t the key drive and then on to the printer made the image a lot darker.

The middle one is a 3-d mock up of a front room. I also had trouble with the lighting on this.

The last one is made using photoshop brushes and distorted rectangles only. Hence the roughness.

More artwork to follow.

Chew. And spit.

We have been asked to come up with an ident for an on-line t.v. station called Chew tv. The station has been running for a couple of years now and is looking to re-hash its image with the target audience moving from 11-19 year olds to 17-25's. The company has given us a breif and some printed material to hint at the kind of flavour that they want.
My initial reaction of having to do an ident aimed at this age group was to go out and drink some cider and get me 'teenage head' back on. Then i began thinking that i never really took it off and this realisation has given me the confidence to come up with some great ideas (well i think so anyway).
The pitch is on Thursday and by that time we have to decide which one of the ideas that we are going to go for. I am in a small team with Gabriel who is probably the nearest to my age in the group. This project is going to rock. We can not wait.

Thoughts provoked by ideology and realism readings.

Can't help thinking that the creative boundaries of western animation were stifled some time in the 1930's by none other than Mr Walt Disney. His industrialisation of animation and mass marketing of his product inserted a broomhandle up the back of the whole of the artform in western society and formatted animation in a new way. The free flowing unreal animations that were made before with their impossible characters and form were lost for this 'staged' type format. I can't help thinking that the driving force behind this change was the capitalist ideology and the need for a product. This is backed up with the emergence of Mickey mouse clubs throughout the USA and the introduction of branding. This not only made sure that Disney was a weekend thing but made it into the family home as well. All of Disney's animations follow his hyper-real formtting except for maybe fantasia (and this you could argue is a fore-runner of the modern pop video), and i am afraid that they stopped a lot of other animations making it to the surface of popular viewing.