My graduation film and blog just got a very pleasing (for me, because he said nice things) write up on Iam Lumsden's cleverly named Animation Blog. It seems Ian takes it upon himself to expose any and all animation work that interests and intrigues him, alot of it by lesser known small-fry such as myself, which I think is a wonderful thing to do. Go read what he has to say about me, and look through the rest of his postings too, he's covered alot of stuff across a huge variety of styles and you might find something new to enjoy.

Maybe a proper post this evening or tomorrow, I've got some thoughts swimming about.
[EDIT] Okay make that Thursday or Friday evening. There's something I want to "test" first.

New studies mass posting

Yo, I just made two posts on the studies blog. Go see. Also, a bonus old drawing, from a newspaper, I think.
I got a call from a "Lindsey" from Barclays Fraud Prevention while doing this. As I remember they just thought my big purchase on ebuyer for computer parts wasn't real. That would only be the first of my problems related to ebuyer.

Now I wish I were as good as Art Lozzi.

I mentioned both 5 cm Per Second and My Neighbours the Yamadas in my last post, in the context of "I might talk about one or the other next time". Then I thought, "Well, they're practically polar opposites visually so why not talk about both?"

In brief: Yamadas is about visual spareness.5 cm is the opposite: it's about visual indulgence.
Personally I find Yamadas so visually pleasing it's one of the few examples of japanese animation which I prefer watching dubbed in English: it's just too appealing for me to want to spend lots of time reading subtitles (and I can read subtitles pretty quickly!)

While watching 5cm, though, I kind of felt overwhelmed. It gets jokingly called 5 Wallpapers Per Second, since you can do a frame-grab at pretty much any time and use the resulting image as a desktop wallpaper. But it kind of felt too...self-consciously pretty to me.

Everything is painted in lavish, slavish detail. The pacing is fairly slow, which I suppose makes sense, as you'd want to spend time looking at stuff like this. On the other hand, though, this much details feels kind of...oppressive, even aggressive, to me, so I can't really relax while watching it.

Matsuko Yamada knows how to enjoy the view. That's kind of how Yamadas makes me feel: like I can just take time out, sit back, and enjoy the natural peacefulness of life as it passes by.
Why not eat a banana while I'm at it?
Maybe I'm being a bit harsh on 5cm. Despite the mass of detail, the colours are almost always nice (as you'd expect from the Japanese), and, at least most of the time, the images still read reasonably well.
You do get the odd shot like this, though.
Gah!

It's also not helped by the fact that the character animation really isn't up to the standard of the backgrounds.
Can't really show it in stills, of course, but, well, they're pretty wobbly. I don't mind the ultra-plain designs all that much, but the animators can't keep their faces (or hands, or limbs, or any other part) straight, which distracts a fair bit. That said, there's lots of very still shots so it's not always a problem.
Conversely, I find the animation in Yamadas as enjoyable as every other aspect of the film.
Even the most detailed and concentrated bits, such as the spectacular "journey of life" sequence at the beginning, are handled with a real control and lightness of touch so that they don't feel out of place with the rest of the film.Bonus random inbetween! This was a lucky frame-grab, I didn't even notice until I looked at the file.

5cm does have some really nice atmosphere...
...but so does Yamadas.
5cm was also painted entirely digitally, which makes it feel pretty artificial. There's no real texture (you can occasionally see those dodgy sorts of digital-painting-marks in the clouds, too). While the characters in Yamadas were drawn and coloured digitally, I'm pretty sure the backgrounds were actually painted with watercolours. Bonus points for that.

Here's a little bit I really like. Takashi pulls his head back in through the car window...
...then winds it back up.You don't see any of the window or the door or the handle, but you know exactly what's going on. And the look of the film is so well thought-out and believable you completely buy it! Cleverness like this drives me bonkers!

I'm kind of just mouthing off here. My Neighbours the Yamadas is my second favourite Ghibli-movie-nobody's-ever-bloody-heard-of (Only Yesterday is my favourite, and you're all big losers for not knowing Isao Takahata's name). While getting frame-grabs for this I got 66 images, and spent a good while just watching random bits of it. I could only be bothered with 17 from 5 cm Per Second. I don't really dislike it or anything, I guess I just expected more (or maybe less) since it'd been hyped a fair bit before I got round to watching it (then again it's partly my own fault as I was very slow doing that and I let the hype build up). I did like some aspects of the story, though it didn't involve me emotionally like I expected (lots of people claim it's the greatest tearjerker ever), and it kind of fell apart at the end. I could watch Yamadas again and again, though, and talk about it forever.

Maybe I'll watch Only Yesterday again. Now THERE'S a film that makes me cry! Hey, maybe I'll talk about it some time! Then again I don't know if I'd be able to do anything other than reiterate the words of my former-tutor-now-employer Damian, who introduced me to it.
Also I'd need to find a better program to watch/take framegrabs from DVDs, since VLC is horeshit.
Go eat a pineapple!

I wish I were as good as Ed Benedict.. Or Carlo Vinci

Been quiet on here lately. Here's an update.

Work has been very thin for me as of late. Without things to do my mind rots so I've taken up some unpaid freelance work on the side. I don't know if the guy I'm doing it for would want me posting the work up on here but I've been doing lots of studies of old Hanna-Barbera cartoons for reference, since I'm using that sort of style (justifiably! I don't want people thinking I'm a rip-off merchant), so those'll go up on the Studies Blog in due time. Actually I'm well overdue to post up the Preston Blair studies I did while I had no scanner, aren't I? Those'll be included too.

My new computer's hard-drive died after just under a month of use (thanks, Samsung). It took me over a week and-a-half to get a replacement (which I ordered for next day delivery...actually I technically still haven't got it, as I just ended up ordering it from somewhere else and getting it next day). I spent most of that time climbing the walls and chewing my toes. At least I think I did, my memory of that time is rather hazy.

I'm going to the Kingston University animation/illustration degree show in Shoreditch in a minute. Hopefully some of my friends will actually be there, as I've been a bit of a recluse lately.

The desktop background slideshow feature of Windows 7 is the shit.

Might do a movie review on here tomorrow as I recently watched Makoto Shinkai's 2007 film 5 Centimetres Per Second. Then again it wasn't actually as interesting as I expected so maybe I won't. I did rewatch My Neighbours the Yamadas, though, and I like that alot more so maybe I'll talk about that instead.

Since I hate to make a post without any pretty pictures, here's a postcard my friend Yoshimi sent us from the Rumiko Takahashi exhibition in Japan.I love the colours in this. Also Urusei Yatsura is awesome. So is Ranma 1/2. I ought to pick them up again (when I have money), it's been years since I read either of them properly.

Because I can't really put it off any longer

International Anifest

Now, let's get the slightly ugly bit out of the way first: I really didn't enjoy this one. Teplice is a lovely town and would probably be a decent place to retire to but don't ever go there if you want to have a party. Unless you're bringing lots of loud friends and intend to start one yourself. I didn't have lots of loud friends, though, and given my complete inability to speak Czech I didn't really have many people to talk to. There were english speakers there, of course, and there were a couple of people I saw repeatedly over the course of my stay who I could have conversations with, but they tended to have other commitments or groups of non-English-speaking friends, and I couldn't really introduce myself to anybody as I'm pretty certain I was the only British film-maker there.

So, socially, a bit duff, but oh well, that's not everything. I got into all the screenings free (one up on onedotzero, hoho), and in fact I didn't even have to pay for my hotel, so I shan't begrudge the organisers. Maybe the Trebon part of the festival was better. Onto some film reviews.

Planet A (trailer link partway down) by Momoko Seto was an extremely strange but very beautiful piece, which seemed to consist largely of footage of salt crystals forming. I think that's what it was anyway. Slow, but I was captivated for all of its 7 minutes and 40 seconds. The feeling of a barren, alien world was really convincing.

Sur le Fil (Razor Edge) by Benjamin Dupouy (they spelt the poor guy's name three different ways in the festival materials). My favourite. Unfortunately I can't find it online, but it's real graphic genius, the screenshot above is really only a vague hint of some of the clever games this film plays with lines and fills. You'll just have to take my word for it, of course!

Le Couvre Chef (Headgear) by Marie Delmas. Very, very witty, and I love the timing of the animation. It's very varied and tailored to each individual scene, but each method used is distinctive and attractive in its own right. The colour design is pretty nice, too.

Volgens de Vogel (According to Birds) by Linde Faas. Another extremely slow, exquisitely atmospheric piece. There are some really meticulous bits of animation in this. Also, major kudos to Linde for doing the whole thing in pencil and somehow completely avoiding the nasty white fringe it tends to cause (as a result of cutting things out with the magic wand tool in Photoshop).

Traverser (Crossing Water) by Hugo Frassetto, an unbelievably slick sand animation. Damn Frenchmen. I don't know where they get it from.

Nice Day For A Picnic by Monica Gallab (no vide link, sorry). Very strange. Won the Prize for Best Student Film.

I also caught a couple of features.

Tokyo Marble Chocolate (Naoyoshi Shiotani). A rather sappy love story, and while I'm not one to go out of my way to watch romance stuff, it was pretty nice. Amusingly, most of the audience left after the first part not knowing it consisted of two parts, har har.
Also it was fun to watch with both Czech and English subtitles.

I also decided to watch Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind...in French, with English and Czech subtitles. It's far from my favourite Ghibli movie (though still leagues ahead of Howl's Moving Castle, which I hated) but I still enjoyed it.

And that's that, really.

I'm not very good at this "blogging" thing, am I?

So what have I been doing for the past month?

I had a bit of work with my good mates at Treat Studios but other than that I've found that the age of "getting work for no effort" has passed and I must actually go looking, thus I have been putting my showreel together. I've now got 10 delicious DVDs which I will be passing out to London studios on Monday, hopefully (if I can get my act together and do covering letters for all of them today). My efforts were hampered a little by my long-suffering laptop finally dying, but I've at least got a spare computer so I'm not completely sunk.

I also haven't done any construction studies for the past few weeks as, if I'm honest, after the ones I posted last I actually started getting worse, and got so depressed I gave up. I finally started doing more again today, but sadly can't post any for now as I can't get this computer to work with my scanner (but it'll print fine, oddly).

In other news: I saw The Boat That Rocked (it was okay); watched the first disc of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection (there seem to be an awful lot of okay-but-not-amazing Friz Freling cartoons on that one); watched Lolita (Stanley Kubrick version, was awesome, very funny in a dark way); read all of Death Note (incredibly awesome, can't decide if I should bother with the anime, though); and have been watching Hidamari Sketch (maybe not the sort of thing I should admit to, but there's so many lovely games played with colour, graphic design, and editing that I might actually make a post about it, if I can summon up the courage to speak publicly about a moe high-school slice-of-life anime series).

Don't know if I'll have anything to report until after my trip to the Czech Republic on the 7th. Czech is a really goddamn difficult language, by the way.

Also check this out.

I saw Persepolis yesterday.

I've been wanting to see Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis for ages, and yesterday the roulette of my Lovefilm rental queue finally allowed me to. I have to say, I liked it! Much better than Waltz With Bashir, that's for sure.
I won't say too much, since the films 2 years old by now and people have probably heard most things that could be said about it already. I'm not always sure about drawings like this, since figures and movements can tend to look stiff and mechanical, especially when the thing takes itself too seriously (hello Waltz), but there was a sense of humour and whimsy about the whole thing that carried through to the animation, and I thought it worked very well. Occasionally I felt some accents could be stronger or faster, but overall I thoroughly enjoyed it. Also I find young Marjanne to be infectiously cute (I never quite understand why, but sparse styles like this make young characters really appealing for me). I also felt it was graphically stronger than Waltz, at all levels of the hierarchy (that is, from the whole image right down to individual characters).

Also, I've belatedly started another blog for constructions studies and other such hoo-ha here. Maybe I will post some more soon. Who can tell?

exposures

For this I was required to venture into the forsaken wasteland of the north once again, as it was held in Manchester. I had passed through on my way to Bacup, but now I could truly take the city in. Turns out it's cold and the streets are really badly signposted. At one point I spent about two hours trying to find one of the venues only to realise that I was one street down from where I thought I was. Amazing. I was also propositioned by a prostitute on my first evening (though not on any subesequent evening, interestingly).

To be honest this was kind of my least favourite festival. The selection was rather weak and there wasn't really anything going on socially until the last evening. However, there were still highlights.

There were a few feature previews. The first I saw was Duane Hopkins' Better Things, focusing on three parties, a schoolgirl tormented by her jealous ex, an elerly couple struggling with a past infidelity, and, would you believe it, a hikikomori girl, whose main human contact is her dying grandmother. I felt it was enjoyable enough but not massively memorable.

The second feature was Phil Hawkins' The Butterfly Tattoo, based on the Philip Pullman novel of the same name. It's not the kind of film I'd usually go out of my way to watch, but I did rather enjoy it. This may have been helped by the fact that at least half the audience consisted of the cast and crew, which provided a great atmosphere, and the Q&A session afterwards was great fun, too.
The last I saw was Lindy Heymann's Kicks, about two girls who are so obsessed with star footballer Lee Cassidy they end up kidnapping him, but things swiftly go very pearshaped. This was, again, not something I would normally have gone to see, but was in fact very entertaining.
The shorts were divided up into categories. Rather than running through all of those, however, I'll just pick out the films I felt most noteworthy. As I mentioned, though, I felt this selection particular was a bit weak so there may not be that many.

Camille e Mariuccia (Samuel Romano) (sorry, link has no subtitles): About a young man, Elio, and an old man, Piero, both of whom are missing their other halves. Piero bugs Elio to drive him to the nearest police station to identify a body that may belong to his senile, wandering wife, while Elio is still coping with his breakup with his girlfriend. Like so many of my favourite films at this festival, this was a simple but poignant character study, and really enjoyable.

Hair (Stewart Comrie): It's about hair. You never would've guessed, would you? I'm good like that. It's all done in stop-motion with real hair, and it's actually quit impressive, to be honset I'm at a loss as to how he actually managed to pull alot of it off.

What Lies Behind Smiling Eyes (Robert Brandon): I'm not gonna spoil it as the twist is too good. A genuine surprise, I loved the hell out of this (enough to heckle the director when he got up on stage at some point, I don't remember why, as this apparently wasn't up for a prize or anything).

I think that's all, really.

A bunch of mates also had films showing here, including Andrea Malaskova and Danny Boyle, who I studied with, and Matt Marsh, who also studied at Kingston in the year before me. I also bumped into Mike Please, whom I sort of knew through contacts at Picasso Pictures, and Flynn, who I met at Bacup! It was kind of amusing to see him at both the first and last festival on my rounds. I also, to my great amusement, met Blaire Mowat, whom I knew through a rather ill-fated project I did with some colleagues, again, at Kingston. We all had a jolly drink up on the last night.

And that's that, I believe. At least, until I go to more festivals. I've got into the International Anifest in the Czech Republic (which is where Andrea hails from, coincidentally). I plan to go, as long as I can get my lazy ass round to actually booking the travel! It's a spa town, apparently, so I hope the weather's good. I will, of course, write a really boring account of that, too, only it won't be as belated as all these. I hope you enjoyed them, by the way.

Please Say Something

David O' Reilly, who I mentioned before, recently released his 10-minute short series Please Say Something publicly, having shown it at the 59th Berlinale festival and won the Golden Bear for best short film. He says spread it around, so I'm spreading it!



It's touching, experimental, honest, funny, sad, beautiful, ugly, intense, serene, and many other things. You may not like it. That's fine. But I love it and think you should watch it.

There's also a very brief interview with the man on BoingBoing, in which he reveals that he cut out the rendering process entirely by using only viewport previews. THIS MAN IS A GENIUS.

Today I just finished a fairly big job so I'll give you the long-promised exposures festival entry very soon. And more construction studies over the weekend and next week.

I'm drunk

Just had a belated birthday drink up and felt like I owed the world an entry as thoughts are in my head.

Me and my friend and infinitely respected peer Matt Layzell exchanged words in the lower floor of Bar Kick, and got our paired heads buzzing with thoughts on what we're gonna do with our careers. We both feel a general dissatisfaction with the animation industry as it is now, but it became apparent that we have some very conflicting views (he overall liked Waltz with Bashir and feels animation should be able to be more like just a different lens on a camera or something, I dunno, shit I'm still drunk) but this makes me excited. I hope that in five or ten years our different views will have led us to make advances in completely different directions in the field. Maybe we won't but shit we're gonna start something. It's gonna be really interesting.

I'm gonna study like hell and really improve my construction drawing. I got the Preston Blair book for my birthday, and just did my first studies from it, even though I'm drunk. Here's the picture proof.

Yeah, starting at the very beginning. Once I'm happy with my Preston Blair studies (HOWEVER LONG IT TAKES) I'll start drawing from actual Looney Tunes cartoons, as well as some of the fantastic comic book covers John K posts on his blog from time-to-time. I might post some of them on here, or I might start a seperate blog for them if I deem it worth it. We'll see.

I actually only have one more festival to make an entry on: exposures. That's coming. Soon.