My Anecdotl Animation

A couple of months ago, I was asked to make a small 30 second promo for a new American start-up called anecdotl.com. I agreed, primarily because they had a great concept and they seemed like solid citizens. And so it proved. The process of making what eventually became a 90 second animation was one of the most enjoyable times I’ve ever spent working on a project and I put that down to the people in charge. They we supportive, didn’t micromanage me, encouraged me to do something beyond the initial proposal, and, I hope, create something a little different. They also had a good sense of humour and I always feel that counts for so much. Needless to say, people like this deserve success.

I had such fun creating this video, I know I’ll feel its absence in my life. I’ll miss listening to this tune, which has been rattling around in my brain for well over a month. Speaking of which: I should do the stand-up thing and point you all in the direction of the fantastic Josh Woodward who released this great piece of music into the public domain. One thing that continually astonishes and delights me as I make these animations is being able to use music made by such outstanding talents producing work so much better than the majority of the mainstream. Sticking my mongrel animations against such great music really doesn't do the music justice.

Most of all, I’ll miss working on this because it taught me so many things about animating my drawings. Of course, I look on it now and see the things I could have done better and places where I would have improved the source graphics but that’s always the case. No work is ever really finished but to carry on would have probably involved starting again with new drawings and a new approach.

So, here is six weeks work (minus the endless hours I had to spend doing other less stimulating things). Also be sure to check out the Anecdotl website which I’m told will be going live in the near future.

To Protect or Sever: The New American Politics in its Teenage Years

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And the animated gif version if you've not got Flash.

These teenage angst-ridden years of the twenty first century should go down as the decade when mistakes were made and hard lessons learned. ‘Stand up tall, son’ would be his words if the century had a keen-eyed father cut from the Henry Fonda cloth. ‘You’ve made an ass of yourself but you’ll be stronger for it.’ Cue a gnarled hand slapping a young shoulder before the father retreats to his makeshift mound and throws another pitch in this idealised tableau of the American rural homestead.

Except politics being politics, it’s hard to believe that any lesson will be learned from the current groundball fuckaround emanating from the White House. A secret spying programme collecting the phone records of millions of American citizens run by the National Security Agency, the phone phreaking, geekier and downright spookier cousins of the CIA: well, there sure isn’t a hell of a lot about that you’d want to emblazon on a t-shirt and wear to a wedding.

It seems that politics in America have suddenly been split into two camps: those that firmly believe that national security must come before individual liberties and those that firmly believe that national security must come before individual liberties. And for those of you not paying much attention at the back: yes, that’s right. Both Republicans and Democrats are slowly running their fingers down the same script and muttering identical lines.

The fact that President Obama is beginning to look as boot-on-your-throat authoritarian as any Republican comes as a surprise only to those of us naïve enough to think we were about to enjoy a four-year long dinner party served from the best china. We thought everything would be so much more civilised with a liberal sitting in the Big Chair at the head of the table. Except it’s usually at this point that History excuses itself and loudly breaks wind as if to remind us that Jimmy Carter’s presidency floundered playing GI Joe in the Iranian desert and Bill Clinton struggled to find and exert the right degree of muscle to supress the threat posed by Bin Laden. Before them, it was Lyndon Johnson who escalated the Vietnam War and John F. Kennedy who walked us to the edge of the nuclear cock pit with the Soviets. Fate rarely presents Presidents with an easy path forward or even allows them to stand on some ideologically firm footing and sometimes that means the facts don’t make easy reading for those partisan to either side.

We expect our Republican presidents to be as carpet-chewing crazy as a dog tied to a hot radiator. When they then unleash hell on some sabre-rattling on the other side of the world, they are merely conforming to the stereotype and Noam Chomsky gets another 1500 good words out of it. The notion of the Republican firebrand looks familiar when written down but the reality is that (rightly or wrongly) Reagan’s doctrine of ‘peace through strength’ is credited for ending the Cold War and (rightly or wrongly) it is said that Nixon’s realpolitiking with China eventually brought the troops back from Vietnam.

Alternatively, we think our Democrats are going to be so mortified by Liberal angst that they couldn’t nail a jelly to a pauper’s door and that every state in the world will soon be outmuscling America. Bill O’Reilly subsequently gets another sixty minutes of prolix and a book in the best sellers. Yet as Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and even Clinton proved, Democrats might not be happy to dance the military two-step but, like Roosevelt before them, that doesn’t mean they don’t know the moves.

Which brings us to the current incumbent in the White House, who should consider having the place repainted grey as he learns that there’s very little presidents do that can ever be considered whiter than white.

The elephant in the room since 11th September 2001 has, of course, been the three thousand lives lost to nineteen individuals who the authorities had failed to identify as radicalised goons in the pay of a psychotic villain. Most days, the elephant stands docile in the corner and Presidents can talk about doing the right thing such as closing Guantanamo Bay and ensuring ‘strong oversight’ over future drone strikes. But then there’s always that one day when the beast’s adrenal gland gets pumping so hard that you better be ready with something more than a handful of peanuts because he’s going to charge. Those are the days that would break the idealism of any President.

And you can sure it will break them because as much as America is a country self-consciously proud of its President, there are still greater forces in the darker places of the American psyche. One powerful force is the paranoid fear of government. Liberty is the biggest concept in the American consciousness and although it is often portrayed as an issue that obsesses the defenders of civil rights on the left, the right are even more paranoid. It’s not the placard wavers on the left who build fortified compounds in the woods and fill them with slavering tattoo-brained neo-Nazis looking forward to unifying the nation under the flag of gang rape and motorcycles.

Against this obsessive wish to be live free from government, the American public expect their government to protect them, making it an impossible covenant that any President signs when they enter office. ‘Love us but don’t look at us’ is what the citizens seem to demand. It accounts for the familiar cliché of retired Presidents speaking about the hard decisions they had to make during their time in office. Yet it’s also a cliché that shouldn’t invalidate the sense of relief, sadness, and profound regrets that most presidents ultimately feel. It is one thing to swear your life and loyalty to a belief or an ideal but it’s quite another to expect others to die for what you feel is morally right.

And that is the message brazenly tattooed on this foolish youth of a century and it might well still be there in its old age: Presidents will now accept the blame for any sin other than the one that left the country at the mercy to another attack like 9/11.

It is the nature of terrorism that they move among us. There is no high level satellite which can mark their convoy driving through a war zone. Governments have to find other ways to tackle the menace and no solutions is ideal. If the collection of metadata is the best way to identify the threats, then should the government collect the data or look the other way? To protect or sever? It’s both a no brainer and a ball squeezer. There is no right decision, just two different degrees of wrong.

Obama has been forced to make a hellish decision, placing his own reputation on the line rather than the lives of American citizens at some point in the future. Both the left and right will accuse him of cowardice, of spying on the American people, of breaking his promise to be a different kind of leader, but you can be also sure that will have regretted this decision even as he thought it the right thing to do.

Welcome to adulthood in the twenty first century. Leave your moral absolutes at the door, though you do retain the right to feel outraged.

_________________________________________

Another piece the died an inglorious death in The Guardian's 'Comment is Free' inbox.

Cheap Steven Seagal Related Humour

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If your machine can't play Flash, click here for an animated GIF of the above movie, though I apologise in advance for the quality. That's why I use Flash.

The physical effort of trying to blog properly every day means that I’m forced to look for the occasional shortcut. A good article might take a day to write and I can only write those perhaps two or three days a week. Cartoons I can produce in relatively good quantities. I pencilled six last night but it will take me the rest of today to ink them and then I need to have them rejected by ‘Private Eye’ before I publish them here. That means there are days when I often have nothing to post other than top-of-the-head observations which are probably not worth reading. There not much I can observe about the top of my head other than 'balding' and 'prone to dandruff'.

One shortcut you might have noticed me using is going back to Photoshopping. My high moral ideals seem increasingly dumb given that every website uses Photoshopped images. This Steven Seagal movie was nothing more than a quick attempt to reacquaint myself with Adobe Flash. I might do more in the future if there’s a subject worth animating.

The Art of Dressage with Mitt Romney

By posting this today I hope I’ll stop tinkering with it and move on to something better. As you’ll see, it’s hardly well directed satire and is really nothing more than a prolonged test bed for my first attempts at using dynamically generated cloth. Those experiments began with the reigns to the horse and then the form of a flag. The old man’s coat came last and was a nightmare to figure out. Word to the wise: pre-cache your dynamic materials and turn them off completely when animating. Needless to say, I’m probably doing everything wrong but these two rules seemed to work for me.

The ending isn't quite what I wanted but I haven't yet figured out how to make liquids create a reasonable spurt of blood. On reflection, it's probably best without it.

Parts of this were rendered in software, others on the graphics card. iRay (the renderer I’ve grown to love in the past due to it using my CUDA card) doesn't allow you to tile textures. Seems like one the dumbest features to leave out of a rendering engine but what do I know? The whole thing just doesn't work (or doesn't work for me). Hence, I had to render all the city scenes in software, making the whole job more laborious than it should really have been and making for a noticeable difference in the look of the two parts.

As for the film itself, it’s a rambling mess poking fun at a target which is now probably beyond satire. Saying that, he’ll probably win the Presidency and throw us into a new Ice Age where fundamentalist types force us all to wear nylon pantaloons and quote randomly from the Bible.

Next up, I’m thinking of spending some time improving the quality of my models and texturing by rendering a still image. I can only render low detail animations on my machine but might be able to do something of more quality if I restrict myself to a single image. I really want to figure out subsurface scattering and realistic human skin.

The Mitt Romney Puppet

After my previous attempt at doing David Cameron's voice (see below), I wanted a break from the voice acting. Besides, this was just meant to be a simple test of some rigging techniques that I had hoped would speed up my workflow. The main problem I have is with rigging a puppet once it’s been modeled and painted. One of the shortcuts I’m trying is to reuse hands – always the trickiest part to rebuild. I’ve now created some hands with controls that I can easily manipulate to move individual fingers. I’ve used them on about three animations with increasing success. The only problem is that I had no idea how to connect them to the rest of the model when, in this instance, the character has his sleeves rolled up. I tried hand with attached forearms but that didn’t work despite numerous attempts over the weekend. In the end, I’ve created separate forearms and stuck the hands on the end of the arm, leaving an unsightly join. I think I’ll have to think of a better way – perhaps making the whole arm separate putting the join at the shoulder where it’s less noticeable.

I’m also getting to the point where I think I should try something a little more ambitious and make a proper short animation. The only problem is that I’m completely at a loss as to what I should try. My main interest is satire but anything I make with a satirical edge will probably be out of date by the time it’s made…

Door to Door...

One 25 hour render later and the result is in. Fewer mistakes this time, though the voice acting still hasn’t improved. I also need to start spending more time on the script rather than recording the first words I scribble down. The main motivation for this cartoon was to see if I could get frosted glass to work in an animation. The rest sort of just followed on, using whatever models and textures I had lying around.

The next animation I intend to make about George Osbourne, though I haven’t done a jot of work towards that other than a rough caricature of the men and his nose in my notebook.

I Predict A Riot... A Pussy Riot

I have an hour before a render finishes so I thought I’d struggle to update this blog on a machine that’s crying out in agony as it tries to render keyframes and keep up with my keystrokes.

I’ve been quiet but busy. Perhaps too busy. Here is my latest effort from the teach-myself computer animation course I’ve been struggling with for the past few months. All I can say is that it doesn’t look like the product of three week’s work. There are still countless mistakes and problems with it – a hand passing through a microphone at one point, some spelling mistakes, the poor quality voice acting, the writing… However, this was another exercise in making mistakes and learning new tricks. Plus I got to mock Putin and his cronies for their criminal attitude towards dissent and their treatment of Pussy Riot.

I’ve nearly solved the problem I had with animated clothing layers. The simpler way might have been to actually use a simulated cloth but that’s far too advanced and I doubt if my computer could handle it. As it stands, Putin is wearing a very thick jacket and trousers and there are few problems with his body protruding through his clothes. I am however making improvements as I go along and I’m learning short cuts to make the whole process less elaborate. In fact, time permitting, my next effort might make it to this blog within the week.

It’s beginning to feel like many of the technical aspects of animating are solved. I know how to model a mesh, retopologise it, texture it, rig it, produce decent lip sync, and get it all rendered. My next task is to get to grips with the techniques of animating. I need to learn how to use f-curves to make movements feel more realistic, perhaps try some of the techniques outlined in animation manuals such as ‘squeeze and stretch’ method which is probably only half as less filthy as it sounds.

Robin van Persie... The Animated Tale

A new week and what better way than starting it than with the product of the old... In the end, the render time was probably closer to 40 hours than it was to 20 for the two shots in this oh-so-short animation. I’d already made many mistakes along the way before I felt the finished film could do with an opening shot to establish… well, not sure what I thought it needed to establish other than something to lead into the ‘action’.

I really need to rethink the way I’m going about this. Not just the rushed animation (I wanted this finished ahead of United's first match of the season) but also the quality of the render. The problem with these so called ‘unbiased’ renderers is that they don’t take any shortcuts when creating the image. They throw light around the scene in all directions and map the results. Eventually, after the light has finished pinging around, a few of these virtual photons hit the virtual lens of the camera you set up and a pixel is recorded. After enough time, enough pixels are recorded to form an image. However, you need an unreasonably long time to completely fill in the black holes. It’s the reason why the above animation has a slightly speckled quality.

The solution is to move to one of the less accurate but speedy rendering systems out there but, for those, I need a new graphics card. I hear the GTX580 with 3GB of memory is ideal but they're astronomically pricey. Perhaps I might get away with something more reasonably cheap. The way it’s going at the moment, I’m struggling to learn the basics of how to animate characters because the actual process of testing the finished renders make it impossible to learn from my mistakes and the longer animation I’ve been working on for about a week now has not moved forward since the PC has been taken up with rendering this.

Anyway, it's done and I can move on, though I really don't feel too inspired to do much work. This morning's sad news of Tony Scott's death is utterly shocking, especially given the manner of it. Of course, the papers will be full of the usual blather about Ridley being the more acclaimed director but if Tony made fewer films loved by the critics, he definitely made more films loved by audiences and contributed more to my everyday happiness. 'Enemy of the State', 'Spy Game', 'Crimson Tide', 'Deja Vu'... It's strange but, looking back, I suppose there was a time, somewhere around 2001, when I started to look forward to Tony Scott films more than I did Ridley Scott films. Tony Scott's work improved as he got older, which made his death at such a relatively young age for a director so shocking and makes us feel like we've been robbed of something vital and important.

Friday Night Fergie

My previous lip-syncing technique was proving useless so after a bit of research I've changed my workflow. I think this works better, or, at least, I think I've found a suitable trade-off between result and effort. The more I learn, the longer and slightly less amateur I hope these animations will become, though this one is suffering from more than a few problems, such as the label of the whiskey bottle being reversed and some ugly patches on the model, which is itself not the best. They say that a bad workman blames his tools so I won't blame a slow PC. I'll instead just confess that I'm still struggling to master the basics...

The First Short...

Well, okay. It wasn’t exactly designed to be 'a short' and it hardly amounts to much. I just fiddled with the footage from an exercise in using normal maps.

The footage is the first animation I’ve done with the new Miliband body after I ditched the previous effort yesterday afternoon. It’s been another hard lesson learned: you can’t simply design a character and expect it to rig well without careful planning. I begin to see why animations often have such stylised characters with thin arms and legs, far bodies... This time, I created a body whose arms and legs aren't going to get tangled and are separated from the main body by a good amount. It’s probably a good thing. I should start to think about the style of these animated characters and stop giving them typical human proportions. I’ve also gone back to using a single mesh for the body. I read on the web that other people have trouble with clothes overlapping and there’s no simple solution except to try to make everything a single mesh where possible. So bang goes my hope to have one body I could keep reusing, simply layering clothes over it.

Now the Miliband is finished, I really want to get back to work on the longer animation I’ve been working on for weeks. My second big lesson is to get animations right before I render them. The above has too many little problems caused because I didn’t do a quick test before I rendered. I’m beginning to learn that there’s a limit to how much stuff you can fix with video editing software. I just wish my PC wasn’t struggling so much…

The Silly Walk

I’m still finding the technical side of animating in Blender a very steep slope to climb for the first time. This weekend saw very few successes. I’m having real difficultly taking the figures I’m modeling outside Blender and importing them in a way that makes it an easy process to then connect them to the armature (the bones) that will give them character movement.

I’ve also changed my approach. Here, I’ve modeled separate the clothes – jacket, trousers, shirt, tie – from the body. It’s probably the way I need to work but, as you can see, I’m struggling to stop the underlying meshes from poking through when the figure is walking. I’ve made the jacket red so I can see problems with the surface mesh, particular on the right where I’ve not distributed the influence (or weight) that each bone has as it deforms the overlying surface. It’s precisely the sort of problem that keeps cropping up and are making it hard for me to produce anything of particular merit.

Ed's 'Ed

Just a quick preview render of a mesh I'm currently working on. Not sure about the topology on this one -- the polygons follow the mouth but the rest of the head isn't particular economical. It's packed with far too much detail. However, I really don't want to spend too much time on the modelling whilst I'm trying to learn Blender. I'll just have to see if it's workable when I attach it to a body and try to animate the face.

Now He Waves... And There Is A Point To All This...

Only after I'd rendered this brief walk cycle did I realise that there's a problem with his left arm not returning to the walk pattern after the wave. It's a small thing but exactly the kind of detail that annoys me. I'll probably be stuck the rest of the afternoon trying to fix this.

However, I'm beginning to get to the point where I can begin to animate the second scene for the animation. The first is done but I won't post it until it's part of the completed 'thing'. It sounds pretentious to call it a 'film' and equally arrogant to assume it's an 'animated short'. I think of it as just the thing I'm doing as a way of learning these new skills. My ultimate goal is to have the facilities to drop skins onto animated skeletons which I can then quickly turn into finished films... Oops. I said 'films'. I mean 'things'.

I also said quickly though I would expect each one to take at least a week but, again, perhaps I'm being naive in my estimations. At the moment, it's hard to know how long any of this will take. The above animation took this morning to make, including about an hour of rendering time. However, the time it took me to create the rig (the skin, the bones that move the skin) runs into hundred of hours. I just hope it won't be wasted hours and that I can realise the finished script I see in my mind's eye.

Banana Test

Too much specularity and there's a seam showing on the banana. However, it is my first walk cycle and I'm moderately pleased that an IK rig is beginning to show what it can do.

Fifty Shades of Funk

Yes, a dancing David Cameron. The result of all this work is a dancing David Cameron... What can I say? It's hardly the heights of satire but in my defence, I only put the dance together to see how the rig is working. So far, it’s not bad, though I'm suffering from the slow render times. I haven't time today to fix the obvious glitches in the above video. However, some things are working well. The various constraints I've set on how joints move seem to be doing what they need to be doing but there are still a few problems, mainly to do with ‘weight painting’, which is the process by which you literally paint onto model some colours that represent how much influence the underlying bones should have on the mesh.

Not that I suppose anybody is interested in this stuff. Perhaps I should talk about ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ instead. Actually, I won’t, though the audiobook read by Gilbert Goffried remains my internet pick of the year thus far.

What I was going to talk about was fifty shades of brown. Or a light creamy brown, to be precise.

I was shopping this morning for paint. Not much paint but just enough to fix some marks where some woodwork had got damaged due to my clumsiness with a stepladder and a claw hammer. I’d previous sent for a Dulux colour card, which arrived with the morning most. I used it per instructions, photographed it next to the wall, uploaded the image and was told the exact shade of paint I needed. ‘Jungle Fever 2’ is the name. It’s basically an off green.

So off I peddled, up town, to see if I could find it among the variety of test pots stocked at the local DIY store. Naturally, they didn’t have it. In fact, they had very few shades of green, which confirmed my suspicions that shops have things too well organized. They know which colours sell and sell only the colours that sell. For instance, judging from the shelves this morning, creamy shades of brown are popular. But, their popularity means than everybody tends to buy the same creamy shades of brown on offer, which causes the shops to stock more creamy shades of brown and limit the availability of every other colour that isn’t a creamy shade of brown.  The process continues, stock levels are refined, and in time, we find ourselves living in a world dominated by creamy shades of brown, patio decking, solar lamps in the garden, and wind chimes all tuned to exactly the same note of annoying.

The same processes are at work in the bookshops, where we’re now going to be fed a constant diet of greyness. TV is dominated by grotesquely pink talent shows and the mantra ‘give them what they want’ has never been so slavishly adhered to. The world becomes increasingly homogenious and diversity and personal individuality frowned upon. I go into a shop and ask for anything out of the ordinary and I’m looked upon as a freak. And I don’t mean that I’ve walked in and asked for hats to suit a troupe of nanuses bound for the orient. I mean things as ridiculously mundane as lead for a propelling pencil, a handle for a dip pen, or even, as happened a month or so ago, a length of wood to make a birdbox.

Diversity in anything is important but tastes are so heavily fashioned by a dominant media that, really, it feels like our options are narrowing all the time. The more choice we are told that we have, the more in truth we are limited in what we can or cannot do. Or perhaps it was ever thus. As Henry Ford once said of the Model T: any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.

The Sound of One Hand Clapping

Absent from the blog this weekend but back to work bright and early this morning to find over 100 emails waiting to be trashed. Most were eager to tell me that there are now ways to make me ‘smell from fragrant below the belt’, though what’s wrong with my habit of keeping a car freshener shaped like a pine tree down there, I really don’t know. The rest were the usual admonitions about the dangers of not giving a woman satisfaction, which doesn’t so much take the romance out of sex as make it sound like an Asda price promise. Hidden among the SPAM, there was one invitation for Richard & Judy to attend at TV-themed quiz night in a Cornish pub. Naturally, I must reply with my list of demands before we attend, including a barrel of ale for Judy and an ermine lined throne for Richard.

I will spare you the boring details of my animation work, except to say that I’ve hit a ceiling where my PC specifications run out. I quickly made this David
Cameron animation to test a hand rig I’d set up overnight. It took about an hour to render on my PC which is suffering from having a very old graphics card. I really need one of those lovely Nvidia cards with CUDA which add 300+ processing threads and produce almost real time rendering for this level of detail. However, after the expense of my new hard drive, I think I’m going to have to work around this problem, perhaps only rendering the finished animations overnight. Though, if it takes an hour to render a few seconds of a simple scene, I hate to think how long it will need for what I have planned.

Other than that: this animation has convinced me that I need to take more time on my modeling. The body looks horrible and the head doesn’t work (though I haven’t yet rigged the eyes). When I move beyond these tests, I might adopt a simplified cartoon style, rather than a more photorealistic effect I’ve taken here.

This Is Probably How Disney Started...

Okay, it’s not the new ‘Monsters Inc.’ or even the new ‘Up’, unless the new up is ‘Down’, in which case I might it might be able to help them. Whatever it is, it’s my first animated face in 3D and it took many hours for every second it’s on screen, especially since I cheated here and play the same clip twice, once backwards.

Most of yesterday was wiped out because of a problem with my PC. A new firewall had effectively crippled my machine. Now that problem’s resolved, I’m hoping to make more progress today. The problem I’m facing is learning a technique to animate lips which I can then lip sync to dialogue. The method I’ve used here of animating between morph maps might not be the answer. It feels too unwieldy. I’m beginning to think I might have to create a rig, an easy to deform model which I can pose in the 3D animation software… I don’t know. I might not have the software to do this. It might not be the right method.

On a totally different subject, I had an email this morning from ‘a fan’. It really cheered me up. ‘I laughed so hard at your book… Please write more’ she wrote. She then started to complement me for having my mother’s eyes. I thought it strange but touching. How could she know what I look like? I have never had my photo taken for a book. I don’t put my photo online. Did she know my mother? Then she told me I had to stick with my brother because he’ll always look out for me. I don’t have a brother. I then realized she was responding to the small ebook I’d stuck on Amazon called ‘Prince Harry’s Guide to the Royal Wedding’. She thought I was Prince Harry. It’s so depressing. I’ve written one moderately successful blog for which Richard Madeley gets all the credit, Twittered once quite successfully for which Richard Madeley gets all the credit, had a book published under the name of Stan Madeley, for which Richard Madeley probably gets all the credit (if there was any credit to be had), and stuck a book on eBay ostensibly written by the Red Tuft, for which Prince Harry now gets all the credit. I know it’s my own stupid fault but I can’t help but feeling a little aggrieved. I’m just glad that it’s Smooch Papandreas who gets most of the vitriol directed towards him for my ‘Damn United: 101 Reasons Not To Support Manchester United’.

Okay. Back to the coal face, though I have no idea what I’m going to do next except I have to give my poor animated old bugger a body and some clothes.

More Finger

It’s never a good start to the day waking up singing ‘choo choo choo doo doo doo The Trainline choo choo choo etc…’ However, I’ve managed to cut through the nauseating feeling of chipperness that this jingle induces to upload the results of yesterday’s work. It’s nothing impressive and anybody with experience of this sort of thing will recognize its sheer amateurishness, but I’m happy to have finally figured out a workflow that can take me from idea, to model creation, rigging, animation and then video editing. Now the hard work start trying to create some 3D models of humans I might be able to use…

In Bruges: An Animated Scenesteal

This is my entry for Film 4’s Scenestealers competition. The aim of the competition is to remake two minutes of a Film 4 movie, though based on the judging criteria, I realise I now have no chance of winning. They want a film that matches Film 4’s ethos, which probably means that they don’t want a broad comic take on ‘In Bruges’, transposing two of the characters for those that the leads played in Harry Potter. Some sombrely lit neo-realism piece is probably going to win. However, here it is my entry in its glory...



Humour is always a difficult thing to sell. It looks easy to the point that everybody might claim to be, at the very least, an amateur of the art. Everybody can be funny and, unless you have the context of a live audience and the reality of laughter or silence, there’s very little to differentiate one person’s attempts at humour from the rest. Then, of course, there are so many types of humour, that you can always be sure that if you play something broad, they wanted witty. If you give them dry and witty, they want you falling on your arse with a bucket of manure over your head.

I think I'm going to go do some cartoons. I've done so many drawings recently, too many of them rushed, meant to hide in the shadows, that I might as well post the one decent drawing I think I've done in the past two weeks. It took me an absolute eternity to get anything like a likeness, but knowing my luck recently, you're not thinking Colin Farrell...

So here it is. My caricature of Graham Norton/Ed Norton/Aung San Suu Kyi, or whoever you wish. I'm knackered...

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Wallpaper

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I have an hour before my video finishes rendering, so I look up at the world after days of constant drawing (the above was another rushed doodle for this blog, so apologises for the quality). I also see that nothing has changed. Spain are still European Champions, rain is disrupting Wimbledon, and the banks are after our money with a sharp knife clamped between the salivating lips.

I’m beginning to have serious reservations about the amount of time I’m putting into learning the software required to create my opening scene. I’m hoping it will be a fly-through of a small town rendered in 3D I've created, a bit Tim Burtonesque if I pull it off right, though without the right music and artwork, that’s looking increasingly unlikely. The idea was a good one and the early renderings have looked quite good. Only, to get the town looking how I want it to look, I have to decorate the place. Hence the reason I spent Sunday drawing houses, fountains, statues, walls, bushes, trees, streetlamps, pedestrians, bikes, old men... The list goes on and I still find myself with gaps that need filling and require something more than yet another shrub or badly drawn house.

So, that’s what I’m about to do: go search the web for interesting pictures of things to stick in the centre of a town. Suggests that don’t include vomiting teenagers and urinating tramps are most welcome… Actually, the urinating tramp actually sounds quite good. I’ll go and start with that.