Brand New Everything...

Greetings fellow bloggers (Bloggerteers??) As well as the new look company website i've created a new blog to run alongside it. I've ditched blogger in favour of wordpress (just seems like you have more control) Some of you may be interested to know that i have already linked your blogs from my new one.

New projects mentioned on the blog include a short film for Ridley Scott (kinda) about a goat who has ate his own legs. The christmas commercial i made for Robson Brown and the Metro Centre and lots of news about Twilight Avenger which is currently being shown at the Sundance Film Festival. Future news soon the be added includes the next music video i'm making for New York based band Camphor. So if you would like to read more about all of this the new blog is over at www.quaystudios.com/blog

A newsletter with the option to subscribe to an RSS feed will follow shortly (once i've figured out how to do it (with help))

Finally, if this is to be the last comment i make on this blog it seems some what poetic given the name of this blog that i am about to become a Dad. Our son is actually due today, not sure if he's going to be on time....but in a season ending cliff hanger stylee you'll have to start reading the other blog to find out what happened next...

Quay Animation Studios website up, well kinda

Quay Animation Studios has a new grown up looking website and i've finally learnt enough about dreamweaver to make regular updates to the news section. So more than likely i'll be putting less posts on this blog.

I will of course be making regular checks back to see what Glazy has come up with next!

And see how Farmageddon is getting on.

And look at Uli Meyer's latest lunchtime doodles.

And...who am i kidding, in between this and facebook it's a miracle i get any work done, but somehow i do and if you'd like to see examples check out www.quaystudios.com

Tentaclaus online

Here's some stills from the final film. Learnt loads that i want to build on with future projects so it's been a good learning experience even if this film is a bit rough round the edges. It's online on NFM's website www.northeastmovies.co.uk

Sketch and Toon

These stills from a quick render test are the most faithful to the original drawings. I'm going to have a go at really going for a hand drawn feel to the model next but if all else fails i'm pretty pleased to fall back on this...

Adventures in 3D land

so after several trips back and forth to my new best friend, the C4D manual i'm starting to get somewhere with this modelling malarky. Style wise it most likely will go towards something similar to the original drawings with a cell shader but at the moment i'm just happy choosing colours and not having to do the shading by hand!

Tentaclaus

This project was first mentioned on the blog over a year ago. I dusted the cobwebs off the original storyboard and started to work on it in my spare time but once work started to build up it got shelved. Jump forward to now and Northern Film & Media put out a call for submissions for 60 second scripts with a christmas feel. I gave the script a bit of a polish, got shortlisted and was one of five lucky enough to be commissioned. Funnily enough forgot to mention on the application that it was going to be an animation. I was wondering why they were looking a bit skeptical in the interview until they realised i wasn't really intending to hire a gaint octopus for a 3 day shoot.

I'm dabbling with the idea of doing the whole thing in 3D. I was planning on building the parents in 3D anyway to pre-vis (yes i watch a lot of special features) and then rotoscoping the footage. But now i'm thinking about just sticking with the 3D. I'll keep the character animation fairly basic. I'm not quite ready to learn how to rig and all that mumbo jumbo and i'm thinking one step at a time. i'm fairly confident using the camera and all the stuff i needed to learn for Theory and then LTW so now it's time to learn how to model i reckon (it's mostly just pouting anyway isn't it?)

Examples from Sally the Sat Nav

Since Shoofly were putting the project together in Flash and i would need to supply them with swf files i was introduced to the voodoo vectorizing skills of a brilliant free piece of software called inkscape. The artwork was then coloured up in Flash which proved to be a really quick neat way of working and something i intend to do more of...

Love the World stillz

Sally the Sat Nav

The learning resource was designed by Toby Quibell of the Learning Challenge (is that just made up french like Bouquet and his real name is quibble??i think so) Toby was the researcher on board for the Glendene project and my work from the Reading Challenge basically got me the job. Shoofly Publishing came on board to do the Flash based stuff and the branding. Hopefully will ge tto work with them again some day as they are a really great bunch of people.

Both stories were split into ten chapters to coincide with the 10 week learning resource with three illustrations per chapter.

The Lemming Family

Earlier on this year also illustrated two children's stories to be used as part of an interactive DVD whiteboard learning resource. These illustrations are from the Lemming story aimed at the younger age range. I did this one last since i thought the older one would take up more time. But in fact this story turned out to be harder to illustrate. I think deep down i just wasn't into it as much as the other story. I think i was so happay with the way the character designs turned out for the other one that i found this one a bit dull. Which if anything isn't the fault of the story, i should have found something in there to really motivate me. Anyway, everybody was very happy with them

oooh shiny!

It's not a midlife crisis i tell you! it's just really pretty and very, very fast...

Karoshi Bros promo Love/F**k the World

The Burt Bros formerly known as Letrix have been developing Karoshi Bros as a side project and asked us to animate a promo for the first track to be released next month. Karoshi ironically in Japanese means work to death!

The track itself is basically a rant at everything thats wrong with the world from the state of music, America's involvement in the war to, well you get the picture, it's a rant. Sung by a manipulated voice to sound like a young girl. Our interpretation of the track was to look at the impact of putting an opinion out there and showing a visual representation of that. Oh yeah and we managed to put some skulls in there again!

David Hails foolishly came back for more, this time bringing on board his partner Sarah Jayne Claydon/SJ/Clayders to supply us with a never ending supply of crazy characters to animate.

The photos in this post show the incredibly high-tech setup i built for some dolly shots. All those years of watching MaGyver finally paid off. I'm particularly proud of the elastic bands holding the camera onto the train. I used the increments of the train track to measure out the moves. It kinda works and is something i think we'll implement more on a future project.