Chemical Plant Zone

My newest illustration for the website, Zone Zero. I'm working through one image for each level in the 16BIT games. 

Just Chillin'

This was probably for something at one point. I dunno. I forget.

A Badly Animated Re-post

An image for the AIB jumble blog, the topic was GRAD FILMS. THIS IMAGE IS SO TOTALLY LOADED WITH MEANING! OH MY DAYS! See? See? Sally is trying to coax Wolf into improving himself via the ol' animation pencil, and Wolf is showing off, going for it, holding a wilting rose representing what he was and what he will become. OH MY STARS THAT IS SO DEEP.

Sonic CD fan art competition

The Sega Blog just ran a Sonic CD fan art comp. The rules were simple, depict a scene using the Mega CD game, Sonic CD, as a basis. Here's my entry which won me a copy of the game (which has just been re-released on XBOX XBLA) and a soundtrack CD.

NEARLY a pitch...

Whilst working with the wonderful team at Karrot, I thought it'd be a good idea to throw a pitch their way. It was an idea for an animated kids series.
It would've been a series with the same tone as The Animals of Farthing Wood in the way that main characters would actually die and it would be quite dark in places.
It wasn't a full blown pitch, it was more of an opportunity to see if they guys at Karrot liked the idea enough for me to develop it.
Then the movie Attack the Block happened...

My series would've focused on the adventures of a group of kids making their way across London under a full blown alien invasion. The similarities between my idea, dubbed SE15, and Attack the Block were pretty superficial. But they both feature teens against aliens and they're both in London.
I wanted mine to be a pretty real London, with council estates and everything, but UNLIKE attack the block, my characters were not assholes. They were just innocent kids trying to reach their parents on the other side of a semi destroyed London.
The main draw of my show, was that the kids were practically invisible to the aliens. The aliens saw pretty much as we do, i.e relatively poorly, but on top of normal vision they could "see" brain patterns. Brain patterns that only existed in adults, making them far easier to kill. Once night fell, the kids were basically invisible. The overall story would've depicted the kids being the ones responsible destroying the aliens.

In order to have enough images to show the guys at Karrot, I enlisted the help of Tegan (to design the girl and the kid), Rufus (to design their car and alien attackers), Marc (to paint a background of London) and Ibs (to creat a fox for me) (everything else I did on the weekend before). Everyone did a fantastic job, and I'd like to again thank everyone for their work, I really appreciate it.

Here's the pitch slides I used which you can click on to view. There's more after the break...

Making a graduation film...

My graduation film is now live in slightly higher res on youtube now too.

Instead of talking about the whole process of making this film, I thought it'd be easier if I just made our team blog public for all to see. From there you can go back in time to our first posts when the project was just a concept. I started the blog over the summer before term in order to get a head start. I knew we had a lot to do on the film so I wanted to invite the team to start early if they wanted to. I think everyone did. I wanted to get the storyboards and animatic done before term started, which I did. But as you'll see, the version I planned over the summer was almost entirely unused (mostly because it was utterly arse). SO we mostly went back to the version that I pitched in the 2nd year.
I haven't edited the blog in any way, and it was never meant for public consumption. As a result it's chock full of bad language and insults, and some pretty bad drawings (mostly from me). I hope you enjoy it!

My grad film; Badly Animated now live

Here's my grad film which I directed. I made it with a team at the AUCB, full credits in the video link.



You can read more about it here

More Storm

See previous post first.

This was it's standing on the first morning...

After only a few hours, I thought this was pretty amazing, but it went on to do much more.
There was a time when it was the #1 top favourited video in film and animation for the month, and at one point, it had over 50 honors (unfortunately I failed to get a screen grab at that point).
the film now stands at way over half a million views, with over 17,000 "likes" and over 3,000 comments. I think that's pretty good for a 10 minute long beat poem!

I still find it absolutely amazing that we are living at a point in time when you can make a respectable looking film at home. A few of the shots that you see in Storm I made on my crappy old PC, that threatened to choke and die every time I tried to preview what I'd done. The space shot and the one that precedes it for example.
DC asked me to make it look as appealing/beautiful as possible. As he asked this, I knew I wanted to include a penumbra, which also meant working out how to do it (luckily I'd already been thinking about it for a while and wanted an excuse to try it out)

Its actually really easy (create a duplicate of what ever you want to cast a shadow, make it black, then add a radial blur (on zoom). There. That's the only trick I've got up my sleeve. Now everyone knows how I did it. I guess I'll be unemployed now.)

I'm still working with director DC Turner at the moment on something new, which I'll be able to post about later in the year.

Until then, I'll try and post some blog posts that I plan to do for fun...

Storm the Movie, online in the morning!

For those that don't know, Tim Minchin is a comedian (a fantastic one in my opinion), and he recorded a beat poem called Storm. I've been working on the animated version of it for a few months now and it's finally on youtube (2014 EDIT: It is also now a graphic novel. You can read about my small involvement here)


 I was heavily involved in the making so it's hard to quantify what my actual job was, but there was some animation, compositing, storyboarding and a bit of character design.

T'was directed by DC Turner, and produced by Tracy King. Making it has been an absolute joy and I'm so happy that iot's finally going up for everyone to see. It was one of those projects where the end goal was never far from sight, but there was ALWAYS that one more badnik jumping up from that final bridge to prevent you making it. And yet, it was never anything less than a delight to work on. I am very grateful to have been a part of this project and I'd like to extend my thanks to DC and Tracy.

Clapham Life Drawing 2

A second helping of some of my life drawings from the Clapham sessions. It seems I can't seem to settle on a style...

UPDATE 22/8/2011: This class no longer runs.