Tim Allenby's "Grave Mistake"!

I recently volunteered to be an assistant animator on a third year student's final film: Grave Mistake, a funny and frantic story of Death trying to recover the soul of a girl he accidentally reaped before her time. You can see a ton of material relating to the film, including the animatic, on its website - my job is the seemingly small, but important task of animating background characters. Click Read More to see my design sketches, animation thumbnails and, of course, final animations!

Character Design: Pigs In Tutus

Our first official assignment as part of the Exploring Practice in Animation module was two design two characters, with complete free reign apart from one caveat: they have to be able to perform lip sync. My first thought was an ironic response to a comment our tutor made to drive home the point of an abstract animation assignment being, well, abstract: "I don't want no pigs in tutus, only stuff that moves." Well, thanks to that assignment I now have the raw animation skills to draw pigs in tutus to my heart's content!

I liked the humorous contrast of such heavy, clumsy creatures doing ballet - but as I noted at the time, I was worried my classmates would draw this connection and I wouldn't come off as very original, so I developed a few backup ideas...

...like this modern-day, all-female adaptation of The Country Mouse and the Town Mouse, but I wasn't quite as excited by the idea of adapting an old story as I was by the prospect of doing something completely my own.

I tossed more things at the wall to see what would stick: an elephant seal selkie (for fun more than the assignment), a Chihuahua and flea duo (again, inspired by a comment my tutor made: "the characters have to be able to interact with each other, so don't do a giant and a flea"), and a crocodile inspired by this Yahoo Answers question that gained memetic status. I thought all of them at least had potential, but then, a pun for the title of the ballerina pigs' story popped into my head...

...and I realised it would be a waste of that pun to develop any other idea, so I got stuck in like... well, a pig in muck.

Sadly for these two, we got another different assignment later in the semester: to storyboard a 15-20-second action sequence, and the physical comedy I had in mind for Swine Lake didn't fit the bill, so I decided to use a different set of characters for the storyboard assignment. The experience matched what I know about the development of animated features: that entire plot points, characters and even films can get canned before starting full-on production, and it was a good reminder not to invest too much time or energy into a project before settling on it for sure. At least with these sketches, I can always go back to these characters when I'm not so busy!

Two Characters, One Door

At the beginning of semester 2, we were given an assignment that won't be assessed (at least I don't think so), but which would get us thinking and ready to dive into exploring practice in animation: make a rough storyboard for a 15-second sequence, and the only requirement for the story was that it had to involve two characters with a door between them.

I came up with this semi-autobiographical scenario of an uptight university student who's absolutely going to pieces over the fact that he might be late and his laid-back lecturer who couldn't be more chilled out about student attendance. Here's the initial doodle of them and the door between them...

...and some more refined character designs.

After that, I defined the space they would inhabit in the film a little more clearly...

...and created some very rough story sketches, timed out to the first 15 seconds of Kevin McLeod's Stormfront in order to help me fit the actions into the time frame better. By this stage I'd added the additional conflict of the student having to juggle his briefcase, coffee cup and various papers before he can open the door (again, semi-autobiographical)... only to realise that the door is locked, ending the sequence on a darkly humorous cliffhanger.

Sadly, this was as far as I got with the slightly less rough storyboard before I got sidetracked by assignments I'm actually being assessed on and therefore have to prioritize - although I suppose that's not really getting sidetracked. I did have fun with this assignment, though, and I'd love to revisit it someday...

Action Analysis: Dance

During my first semester, my tutor Chris Webster said, when setting us an abstract animation exercise, "I don't want no pigs in tutus." Guess what I drew for my character design exercise for the sake of irony!

To make the pigs' movements and stances believable, I studied videos of ballet (of course, the ideal would be drawing them directly from life, but I didn't know of any ballet schools near the centre of Bristol), and particularly larger people doing ballet - as luck would have it, Channel 4's series "Big Ballet" is literally all about that, so I decided to watch it and sketch the most interesting poses and movements as I went.

One of my favourite examples of timing in the dances is at the 18:14 mark - the slight delay of the dancer on the right is just so funny to me, and that comedic timing is something I'd very much like to capture in my animation. As for serious examples, the 30:04 mark is a perfect example of the kind of movement I want to animate: visible weight to the dancer's body, but with a delicacy in the way she carries that weight. I think in my case, it also helps that these aren't professional dancers: my two pigs were a seasoned ballerina and her immature pupil, so it helps to look at all levels of expertise.

In the end, I decided to scrap the "pigs in tutus" idea for another sequence - but I feel my study of dance will still come in handy for my animation practice.

Click "Read More" to see the sketches I did while watching episode 1!

Critical Perspectives poster

I decided to write my essay on the 2009 film Mary and Max, since it's one of the few places I've seen my medium, animation, and an important part of my identity, Asperger's Syndrome, intersect, and I feel it would help my practice to analyse it in detail. The poster consists of a still from the film I captured myself using VLC Media Player, a wallpaper pattern from the film that I took from hdbitz.org and made as seamless as possible using a program called Paint Shop Pro 9, the film's logo (taken from the DVD cover on amazon.co.uk) and 314 words written in the voice of one of the title characters of the film, printed out and stuck onto the still/wallpaper combination. I chose to print the text onto ordinary printer paper and the logo onto Bristol board and physically stick them onto the poster (which is printed on fine grain artist paper) rather than compositing it digitally, since the film itself uses a very "hand-made" aesthetic. Click Read More to read the text if you're having trouble making it out.

Notes on my chosen cultural text: Adam Elliot's "Mary and Max" (2009)