Yawn

As I haven’t posted anything in a while, here’s a random doodle to keep the old blog going!

Plot-Lines

Happy New Year! For anyone interested, I have started a new blog. I’m not going to say too much about it here.

plot-lines.tumblr.com

It’s not going to be a replacement for this blog of course, so please stick around!

I have also started to guest-post on OnAnimation.com, so why not stop by there?

Here’s to 2012!

Lessons from the Bathroom

You never know where your next lesson is going to come from. A recent one of mine came from a hand dryer.

At Traveller’s Tales last week we got some new dryers in the toilets. Besides being powerful enough to show more bone than an X-ray, they have the curious property of shining a bright blue shaft of light on your hands while you’re drying them.

After posing a query as to the purpose of this light to a colleague, he asked me, with wisdom perhaps beyond his years, “would you rather the light was not there?”

And the strange truth is that while I know the light does not impact on the function or performance of the machine, I really wouldn’t want it to not be there!

Sometimes things are just right or wrong, regardless of the presence or absence of logic. In writing my short film I have wrestled again and again with the inclusion of a particular secondary character. All I really needed to ask myself was, “would I rather the character was not there?” The answer, it turns out, is no.

Frame by Frame

I don’t know how many of you follow the ‘Frame by Frame’ blog, but it’s fantastic and today’s addition really stood out to me. It illustrates something that I find fascinating in animation – an invisible focus, for want of a better term. All the elements in the scene lead your eye in a lovely sweeping curve, first to the left, and then curling around back to the right, leaving you looking at the piece of cheese Remy is holding. It does this so well that it feels very much like you’re watching an invisible object traversing through the scene.

Brilliant!

Animation Showreel 2011

With the release of Lego Harry Potter: Years 5-7 in the shops, I can finally unlock my 2011 showreel that I put together a couple of months ago. So if you’re interested, please have a look :)

Pencil Full of Lead? Paulo Nutini, I Am Not!

I thought I’d just mark the fact that I have drawn the first pass of all the extreme drawings in the first scene of my mime film……and this is how much of my pencil is left after all the furious scribbling!

Film Study 1: Guns at Batasi

Last week I happened to catch a few minutes of a film on TV that I had never heard of, Guns at Batasi, starring Richard Attenborough. I didn’t see enough to be able to judge the story, but I thought the compositions in the scene I saw were really quite striking, in part owed to the dance-like choreography of the actors. Have a look at this scene from the film:

I’m going to concentrate on the first two shots.

Look at how in the first shot the men are arranged in a sweep that ends on the bug on the bar. That bug is really quite small on-screen and not particularly high in contrast, and yet it’s unmistakable what the focus of the scene is at this point.

In the second shot where the men turn around to see Attenborough’s character enter, they arrange themselves to frame him and direct our attention to nowhere other than him.

Then as he walks over, the camera moves in and the officers subtly arrange themselves again to not only direct attention to Attenborough, but to also create a pleasing diagonal sweep across the screen.

The next bit is particularly interesting as the man second from screen-right moves around the group, and the others all rearrange themselves accordingly to never allow an unpleasant composition to be seen.

Then notice the man on the far left:

As the camera pulls right to reveal Attenborough, the man on the left moves himself over to add to the oppressive feel of the composition.

Study the rest of the clip, there’s load more lovely choreography like this. I really need to watch the rest of the film!

The Man Who Planted Trees

On Friday I saw an animated film that came recommended in Hayao Miyazaki’s book Starting Point, that is probably the best piece of animated film-making I have seen in a long time. So good in fact that I thought I’d share it here. It’s on YouTube in two parts, so here they are!

By the way, the book is really quite excellent too, I recommend it highly!