Stockport College [live brief] | 5 | Construction begins here from April 20th till 23rd

I build the college...well the new building...well, a bit of the new building. Going with this Johnny Kelly Style

house to my self, so I migrated downstairs

Rough sketch of the net of the building...trying to figure out how it would all fix into shape

Measured out net on A4 paper (i had no bigger pieces, so i had to make do!)

Cut out net, with tabs to stick together

Top half done!

Top and middle bit done!

All done (in rough...stuck together with sellotape because I had no glue, so its bigger than it actually should be!)

Picked out the right colours from hobbycraft to do a neat one.

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 **UPDATE** 

Me putting together the colour version...

This is the top half

 Another picture of the top half, which has more bits stuck down

Skipped a few steps/ forgot to take pictures...now the middle section is done

Forgot to take even more pictures...now I've finished everything, but I need to let the last bit of glue set, so I put a coaster, a can of strongbow, some sellotape and a copy of the 1985 live aid concert on top of it to help the glue set

This is a picture taken after realizing that I put too much weight on the box whilst the glue was setting

This is me looking intensely at the creation

Ralph Bakshi

The video below is one of the most truthful and inspiring speeches I've seen and heard in a while.

 Its true that we all moan about getting jobs in the industry (I do it too!) but he's saying that there's alternatives, get a group of people together and make an animation! sounds so simple and it is really, but like he said, were all brain washed into thinking that we need to get a job. He's very blunt in how he speaks, saying he has no respect for us because of this lack of independent thinking, but I totally agree with the harshness of his words.

He sum up why we dont do these things in three words..."lethargic. uninspired...Terrified"

Watch the video, I will open your eyes.  

Stockport College [live brief] | 4 | More Style Frames Ideas

Going with the block colour idea/ vision we have...I didn't know how to integrate it into the stop motion piece, but i think I've had an idea (theres hope for us all yet)

We went to look around Nexus in london at the start of March...nice place, already talked about them in another post, so I won't bore you all...but whilst there we were talking to Johnny Kelly who work in the roof of their building as an art director.

His work uses lots of block colour and looking at this piece (below), I think is really stylistic and fits with whats in our brains...its a lot (style wise) like Jacks popup book, with the paper cut out etc

The Seed from Johnny Kelly on Vimeo.

This (below) is the making of...if we were to get loads of coloured card and make our models to put in the book I think it would look really nice


Making of 'The Seed' from Johnny Kelly on Vimeo.

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 ***UPDATE***

These are the style frames I did for the popup. I made them off the sketches which were made by Ashleigh Butterworth, Jack Maguire, John Hind, Sarah Brewster and David Baguley

There not amazing, but they have some good ideas within them which came from the initial sketches...like; showing the sponsorship of coca cola, having a map on the floor of somewhere for travel and tourism and so on.

Portfolio Visit | Kilogramme

Just quickly I'll explain how i got to go to visit them...

The first place I contacted about having a portfolio visit was a company called firestep, the guy there called Gwyn Roberts always got back to me in the past so i thought its a good place to start...at least I'd get an answer either way!
The good news was that he got back to me, the even better news was that he'd passed on the email to the people at firestep and also kilogramme (because there work in the same building as them). I was familiar with kilogramme and were on my list to contact, so i was surprised and happy then Gwyn had forwarded the email onto them!
To cut a long story short Kilogramme's Co-Director, Claire Grey, contacted me to say that they would be happy for me to come see them.

I asked if Monday was ok...they said that cool...so at 12.30 on Monday 18th April I went to show them my work!

I forgot to mention that Clair grey had seen two of my pieces on youtube after Gwyn Roberts asked if I could send them some work...but the other Co-Director, Jon Turner, hadn't seen anything so this is what I showed them...

Show Reel
Eden
Eden - Making of
Malc the Milkman
Sway
Chuck
Walk Cycles

They enjoyed my stuff, particularly liked how I'm still doing hand drawn 2D animation! I explained how I wanted to keep working on Malc the Milkman, bringing colour to the 30 second piece. Jon Turner said that the charm of the animation is that he is hand done and rough... keep at that for the rest of the animation. This is totally true, the eden brief has shown i can bring colour in, and i'll keep practicing with colour over the summer and in the 3rd year, but Malc maybe visually more pleasing if he stays rough for now.
They thought the timing was good on the malc animation as well and picked out some of the sketches from that brief with they liked...

They liked the stretch in the yawn

Think it was the pose in this one...also Jon mentioned that he liked the innocence of my drawings

Jon pointed at this one as well...

They like the fact that I had skills in these different programs and was able to animate on the computer as well as just be hand.
I was telling them about how I kept a notebook for the character design brief so i had loads of character ideas to choose from an narrow it down to a final character etc...they told me they keep all their notebooks filed away for future reference...they never know when a scraped idea may come in handy! 


In terms of the studio, it was nice and intimate. You had firestep and Kilogramme in the same room, so you can imagin that there always helping each other out and bouncing back and fourth ideas etc...This is a piece which they collaborated on, reading from the paragraph on Vimeo it tells you who did what, Steve Maher (who i met at the studio) from firestep directed it, Jon Turner did the modeling (from Kilogramme) and so on  


Goliath from Kilogramme on Vimeo.

They were all really friendly people; the kilogramme people, the firestep people and anyone else I met whilst there!
firestep were really busy but still found time to have a talk about what they were up to, sounded really interesting...working on something (don't know if I can say) but its being made in Singapore and also some of its being done in Ireland...so there having to communicate to all these people! they looked stressed, but they kept smiling through it!

They said to keep in touch and to tell them whenever I have a free week during the summer so I can go in for a few days and maybe work on some stuff with them, or just watch over them and learn some stuff! Really appreciated that and will be defiantly taking up that offer!

Below is Kilogramme's showreel...


Kilogramme Showreel from Kilogramme on Vimeo.


And this is new...its their Easter card!


Easter card '11 from Kilogramme on Vimeo.

I got a lot out of this visit, getting some creative feedback on my work whilst also learning more about how the industry works.....oh, and also that James Corazzo works in the same space as Kilogramme and firestep!

Monday Morning

Woke up to the sun coming through the kitchen blind

...well I didn't literally wake up to it, I don't sleep in the kitchen.

29 ways to stay creative

Found this on a blog called 'The Curious brain'

I do quite a lot of the things on this list, but I never seem to do the last on (number 29), I find it so hard to fini...

Stockport College [live brief] | 2 | Style Frames

I'm looking at a style for this pop up book idea. This is how i originally thought it would look...

Sanna Annukka did this for the band Keane (below)...its the idea of no outline that I liked about it.

Same here with Dylan Forman. I think colour it vital in everything we do...it gives the piece a much more professional look. I think sometimes we over look colour, so thats something we need to think about.

I liked the flatness of these screen grabs taken from an animation called 'Thursday' by Matthias Hoegg...also the colour again

Here's a test I did. To be honest, i dont know how it fits in with the stop motion pop up book idea yet...maybe its just the idea of using block colour for the building and camera etc...

Tell me if I'm wheeeeey off guys!

 ***UPDATE***

Darts In The Snow - Alexei Kharitidi

This animation is by Alexei Kharitidi. He was nominated for an oscar in 1996 for for one of his films called 'Gagarin'. I haven't watched 'Gagarin' yet, but this animation is really nice.




Stuff like this really interests me, you know, the actual look of this piece doesn't excite me, but the message is fantastic, It makes a statement in less than one minuet! thats very impressive. Make what you want of the animation, I think it can be seen if different ways.

Thinking of simple ways to convey something is something I like to think about, and with this neighborhood brief offering that sort of approach, I can see my self enjoying coming up with ideas for it.

Stockport College [live brief] | 1 | Statistics and Pop Ups

We have a good idea for this brief, but one of the problems is how we will show the statistics within the piece. So its my job to look into this.

The way I saw it at first was having the text appear in the same style as the rest of it, for example, its going to be in a book, so it would appear out of paper (not the book) just another piece of paper like this...

yer, these...but reversed

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Or maybe cater the text to a specific coarse, for example if the book opens on the chemistry page have some sort of chemical reaction which reveals the statistics.

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Or...thinking about the tabs on popup books which makes things move and appear etc, have them reveal the statistics

the videos above arn't done by tabs, but it gives the sence of the reveal of statistics.

Video's with the pop up...