Bradford Animation Festival and Kerry Drumm have laid on a special tribute to the work of the late, great, stop motion animator/director Paul Berry.
Paul's phenomenal work inspired many now working within the industry to pursue a career in animation.
I have so much to personally thank Paul for, as he helped and mentored me in my own career.
If your going to be BAF make sure you don't miss this event. Paul Berry Tribute - Thursday, November 16 - 12:30
Spent most of last week in a wood shooting my new live action short: TREE. As there was no time to blog while we were filming I'm going to recount the days in flashback over the next week.
Feel free to follow along at www.tree.gb.com
Went to the premiere of Suzie Templeton's Peter and the Wolf last night. It was a fantastic evening of music by the Philharmonia Orchestra, with the screening of Suzie's stop motion film rounding off the event to rapturous applause.
There was understandably a large family audience present at the Royal Albert Hall who really enjoyed this animated film, especially the antics of a very comical Magpie. (pictured below) It must have been a great reward to hear the laughter, after 5 years of hard work.
Like some of Suzie's previouse characters, her Peter is a tormented soul, living as he does with an old drunken relative. (Is it his Grandfather?) Suzie has a great knack of embuing her characters with a very deep sense of past, and like "DOG" you get the feeling that the past in question is shrouded in painful memories.
But don't let me give you the wrong idea, this is not like her other films. Suzie crafts a film that is funny, charming, visually stunning, and complements PROKOFIEV'S music perfectly.
From an animation point of view, the film has moments of pure brilliance, mixed with animation that is by comparison perfunctory, but that didn't seem to bother the rest of the audience one bit, and is testament I think to the visual strength of the characters, that they could on looks alone carry these technically weaker moments.
To be fair, Se-ma-for, the production company charged with producing the animation had a tight schedule to meet, and did a great job in just completing the film. Then there was a huge amount of post work that needed to be done to get the film ready for this premier, so hats off to everyone that made that happen.
I'm sure with more time the film will have a few of the untidy edges removed for subsequent outings.
one thing is certian, this film will open even more exciting opportunities for Suzie, and I look forward to seeing what she comes up with next.
If you get a chance to see this film with the live orchestra, take it, it makes for a wonderful evening.
The DVD is out in November. Keep an eye on Breakthru Films for more info.
Automata's and clockwork toys have always fascinated me, and they play a big part in the story of Henry and Martha. In fact an alternative title for the film might be The clockwork clone. Anyway just saw this piece on automata maker Ernie Fosselius at Rocketboom and thought I'd share. Watch Here
image from http://www.automatashop.co.uk/default.asp
There has been a lamentable lack of forward movement with fundmyshort these past weeks, which is partly down to the fact that I have been really busy with other work.
Between animating a pink elephant for a German shoe company, I am also directing a CG commercial for the music retailer HMV, as well as being heavily into Pre Production on another personal project TREE a short live action film that I'll be shooting this autumn. So apologies for my lack of FMS updates.
Things are creeping very slowly forward with Henry and Martha, but not at the speed I would have hoped. Again, this is largely down to my other work commitments.
I hope this will change soon.
Animating a pink elephant in Maya for Liquid-Image
Been busy of late creating a little title sequence for a chat show called World Cuppa. (ITV4)
We only had just over two weeks to produce the 20 second piece, plus a handful of stings too, and just four days to animate everything, so there were plenty of late nights. The World Cuppa production team were great, they showed a lot of trust and just let us get on and make it.
A cut-out animation technique was employed to animate the titles and stings, with the semi sculpted characters animated on a piece of glass. This technique does have its limitations, but it also has bags of charm.
My Fuji S2 Pro was rigged from the ceiling and connected up to a laptop from where we triggered and captured the frames.
The brief was to create a raw, hand made animated introduction to the show, with a sort of a grungy Cabaret feel, and featuring some of the key players from the World Cup teams.
We shot in a small studio owned by photographer Paul Tucker
The jobs DOP was Malcolm Hadley. Pictured above setting up a shot at around 1:30 am in the morning.
I'll try and pop up a clip in the next few days.
A few people have asked about the animation talk I gave recently at the Science Museum, so I though it would be good to share a bit of it here.
One of the areas I covered in the talk was the use of digital SLR stills cameras as a means of capturing stop motion animation , and specifically what to do with those captured RAW files once you have taken them.
To start, here is a very simple image that shows the work-flow.
Due to the fact a stop motion film is in effect just a series of single frame shots strung together sequentially, you only need a camera that can take one frame at a time.
In this respect Digital Stills cameras are ideal because thats exactly what they are designed for.
On Corpse Bride we captured very high resolution RAW images. RAW image files differ somewhat from say a JPEG image. To put it in to laymans terms, when you take a Jpg photo on your digital camera, the camera more or less tells the image these are your parameters, when you (the picture) are viewed or printed you are going to look like this! The camera then compresses that information and locks it as a .Jpeg image.
That isn't the case with a RAW image file. No information is locked. When the camera takes a photo in RAW it saves all the avalable information the bamera's sensor sees, and saves a suggestion of that image based on the cameras present settings.
But because this is only a suggestion, it means that there is a lot more latitude in the image to change the exposure, tone, and colour setting after the image has been taken.
You still have to expose that image correctly of course, but there is room afterward to compensate much like you can with 35mm film negative.
The exciting thing about this method of capturing animation is that is available to everyone. All you need is a digital camera and some software such as Adobe Photoshop CS and After Effects, then it's away you go. You too can make a stop motion movie.
For the talk, I animated my little mummy character and captured the animation as RAW files straight from my camera to a folder on my laptops hard drive.
Be sure to make a new folder on your hard drive for each new shot you animate, and please be aware that RAW images are large files, so plenty of hard disc space will be needed to animate this way!
Once I had finished animating I then opened a program called Adobe Bridge that comes with Photoshop CS2. (if you use a mac, try Adobe Light Room)
This image shows Adobe Bridge, its a great tool that can be used to batch manage your RAW files.
Highlight all the images that make up your shot then double click to open the files. Bridge will ask do you want to open all files? Yes you do.
Photoshops Raw converter panel should now open which looks like the image below.
All the images in your animated shot are now displayed down the left had side of the screen.
You can go to any image in the sequence and click on it and that image will be displayed in the center window. Press the select all button on the top left corner of the program.
Now when you make any adjustments to the image it will apply those changes to all the images.
So perhaps you would like to play with the exposure settings, or alter the colour temperature the images where taken at. Maybe you want to lift the shadow area of the image to see more into the blacks, or do the opposite and crush the blacks down.
You can add more sharpening, contrast, or tint the images and even batch crop them. All this can be done here.
Now if your happy you can save them...
So now you can save out your tweaked files to a new folder, and change the images to Tiff's, Jpg's or .PSD's
From there you open up After Effects, Premiere Pro or Quicktime Pro and import your converted files as an image sequence, and make them into a viewable .avi or .mov file.
A very short clip I animated for the Science Museum talk I gave.
Sorry for a lack of posts of late, but I have been busy working on other peoples jobs, pitching on commercials with Slinky, and generally not finding much time to blog.
However, I have been temporarily reunited with an old friend.
The Periwig-Maker
Mackinnon & Saunders have been kind enough to lend me him for a talk I'm giving this week.
Its nice to see him again, and he hasn't aged a day!
