Birthday thing and Monkeys thing

It was recently my friend Blanca's birthday so I drew her a card with some of her favourite characters on it! At least the ones I know. Clockwise from top left is Rarity from My Little Pony, Batrider, Puck, and Bane from Dota 2, and the Pokémon Nidoking. Alot of them are purple. I could also have added Luna from Dota and Lulu from League of Legends and that would've been even more purple. This was the first time in years I'd broken out my old coloured pencils (I've had the same box for about a decade). I'd forgotten how hard I find working in any sort of natural medium. You can't even erase or patch up mistakes with coloured pencils. And there's always the temptation to add just one more layer of colour. Also my browns were all really short so doing a chocolate cake was taxing. Overall I'm a little ashamed of how naive my technique feels, but it was rewarding to do again, and she liked it! She is lovely and extremely talented, so if you haven't already, make sure you check out Dungeons & Drawings, the blog she co-runs with her partner Joe Sparrow. They just got done with a really good elementals week.

I also recently finished working on a music video for the Arctic Monkeys' new single Do I Wanna Know, once again directed by David Wilson.



I was "head of design", though I feel my role would be better described as a layout artist. I drew most of the key compositions for the animators to work to (the "storytelling" images, a bit less than what you'd call full keyframes), and animated on a segment or two. It was an insanely fast turnaround, but somehow we produced the whole thing in about three weeks thanks to a huge team of unbelievably talented people. Blanca was one of them. I haven't seen a full credits list anywhere, so here's what I can remember of what all the animators did.

• Alex Grigg/Jasper Trenfield/Simone Tartaglia - All of the oscilloscope (which was done in Maya).
• Sean Weston - Smoking lady to tyre running over two ladies (a monster of a section!) and the mushroom cloud just before the buck-toothed mechanic lady I think.
• Joe Sparrow - Strutting girl stomping on oscilloscope and subsequent procession of girls setting down tyres.
• James Lancett - Girl stopping rolling tyre (he got stolen from us to work on a different project).
• Nicos Livesy - Various transitions, including the crossing legs, the zip, the AM lady that eventually got used for the iTunes album artwork, I think the lady sitting on the car, and finishing off the girl that James Lancett started on.
• Sean Buckelew - Booty lady, flag-waving lady, drivers leaping over oscilloscope hills, everything from the buck-toothed mechanic lady holding the tyre to the diving lady. Yes, all of that! He was the hero of this project, it seemed like he basically animated half the video.
• Mak Ying Ping - Closeup engine blowing out smoke.
• Me! - Large lady getting blasted out of a pipe to James Dean man in a cartoon car leaping over bumps on the wing of an eagle.
• Frankie Swan - The eagle and everything else up to the mushroom cloud (I can't remember if he or Sean did the mushroom cloud itself).
• Tom Bunker - Little fish flying into the mouth of the mouth-car (I think).
• Blanca Martinez - Car driving into the giant fish's mouth up to the kissing couple, and the burning man in the ending sequence.
• Linda (I'm sorry I can't remember your surname ;_;) - The entire ending sequence minus the burning man.

If there's anything I've misattributed or anyone I've forgotten hopefully somebody with a better memory will be reading this and will correct me. There were also lots of random little bits that had to be attended to by different people towards the end, but these are the things that people were largely responsible for. Everyone really owned their sections and added something to the video!

Compositing was done by Thomas Ormonde (who also did the same on the Tame Impala video), and Monica Domanska was our heroic producer, coming blind into the project about a week and a half in and taking excellent control of everything.

Special thanks to all the interns, including Duncan, Elisa, and Morgan for massive help with cleanup and colouring.

And massive kudos of course to David Wilson himself for coming up with a visuals pitch that the band liked so much they decided to make it a full video, working up that pitch into something even more amazing in less than a week, and constantly coming up with awesome and fun ideas and working harder than anybody else right up to the end!

And finally props to the Arctic Monkeys for making such a great song!

Sort your bloody life out, Jonno.

I had to get a post in before 2013.

I have been very busy since my last post. I went on two holidays, one to Portugal (to see my dad) and one to Berlin (to see my friend Robin Bushell), which also served to get me away from the Olympics. Here are some doodles I did in Berlin.

Since I came back from those I've been working basically non-stop (I worked yesterday and I will be missing two weekends in total for this current job *sob*). I worked on the animated section of this Ikea video for David Wilson.

IKEA - Bright Shiny Colours from David Wilson on Vimeo.

I worked on a music video for She & Him.



I'm currently working on another music video for a band I don't think I'm meant to disclose.

My house is a complete fucking mess right now as I have bedbugs, a leak, a mouldy bathroom, and I can't really do anything about any of them. Oh well, such is life. Hopefully 2013 will be better. I might find a way to be satisfied with any work I do for myself and actually finish some personal projects. And I might even write in this blog a bit more. Either way, much love to all this year.

Two-Way Mirror video: scaling scene

I recently helped out on a music video directed by Matt Layzell.



I'd like to spotlight a scene that I thought was rather nicely done, the "scaling" part where the universe seems to be shrinking to sub-atomic size around the girl character.

I got to see the rough animation for this scene, which Matt did, and when I saw the final version done by Joe Sparrow I thought he'd finished it really nicely.



He added lots of nice touches like the slickly animated pigtails, and plenty of little cushions and extra in-betweens to smooth out the actions, but there's also lots of specific little "Joe" touches that really add life to it.

Joe really likes to use smears in his animation. At first (at least, the first time I saw him doing it) he kind of overused it, but here he just adds it subtley in the eyes.

He makes use of those funny duck-lips for a couple of little elastic bounces. You only really see them subconsciously, but they're pretty funny. They're also a nice timing contrast with the slower-moving pigtails.

 
There's even a very subtle bounce on her pupils at one point.

The way he changes their shape is really clever, too. It implies she's paying a bit more attention to what she's looking at. Reminds me of a part in Eva where Shinji's in a cinema, watching with lifeless eyes, then when he sees a couple making out in the front row the highlights come back in.

 It's also nice how the ducklips are sometimes drawn in and sometimes not. In some cases Joe was just interpreting the mouth shapes of the rough drawings literally, but he makes good decisions to keep the expressions varied and cute.

And isn't the way he interprets the arms on this bit appealing?

He also does something very neat with the pigtails here.

He allows them to float on 3s, 4s, and even a 5 at one point. It's an aspect of timing that I think I've mentioned before and that doesn't get used enough. Having movements on slower in-betweens makes them feel slower than they actually are, compared to if they were completely on 2s or 1s. Anime tends to have alot of stuff in-betweened on 3s, and sometimes this results in a nice, sedate feel, but mostly it's just because anime production is dirt cheap. These pigtails may or may not have been intentional on Joe's part, but I like them so I'm including them anyway!

(also why did I make 3 gifs before figuring out I could get a cleaner result by just using the image sequence out of Flash instead of the shit Quicktime? Oh well, I'm not remaking them)

This whole scene is also a testament to how great it is to just get extra help when you're really struggling for time on a job. This video was done at a very bad time and went way past deadline, and Matt was pulling his hair out about getting it done. He really hated the idea of bothering other people to help, but in the end he got Joe to do this and a few other scenes. Apart from the obvious alleviation of some of the workload, the fact that Joe was coming into the project fresh, rather than bleary-eyed after seven consecutive all-nighters, just let him do better stuff than I think the rest of us were (that and the fact that he's talented and hard-working). In fact, Matt was so pleased that he used Joe's style as the model for everything else afterwards!

The result is that a good bit of animation got the chance to be turned into a great bit of animation.

Here's some more treats I thieved from Flash files foolishly given to me by genius man Matt Layzell.

"I like this frame" - Matt while drawing this frame.

I hope Matt and Joe don't mind me posting all this stuff. Guess I'll find out soon enough if they don't.

Here's something that I actually did.

This one moves too but it's too wide so you'll have to click it.

I used one of those kaleidoscope paint flash things. Not to do the gifs, though, that was just plain-old obsessive copy-pasting in Photoshop and After Effects until 5 in the morning for no reason other than that I wanted to solve this problem I'd given myself. Yeah.

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I recently saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Super 8. Apes was serviceable but not much more. Super 8 was pretty good, as long as you can accept the fact that it is literally E.T. crossed with Cloverfield. The child actors were actually good, which I feel is a rarity these days.