Monday, November 13, 2006

The Simpsons Movie

I can't wait to see this film. Check out the trailer. Fantastic as always.

Friday, November 10, 2006

The Raggy Dolls


I trawled through all my really old reels a few weeks ago for the presentation I gave at the co-op young peoples film festival. On one old VHS tape I found a couple of episodes of "The Raggy Dolls" which I actually did camera work on. At 16, I blagged a couple weeks at Orchid Productions and persuaded them to let me loose doing sound breakdown and working in the camera room, on top of animation and drawing tuition from the brilliant Mark Mason. No computer lip-sync systems. And of course all the animation drawings were transferred to cells and filmed under pressure class onto 16mm film. It's so amazing how much animation production has changed and really exciting. A lot of the tedium which cost studies a lot of money is now being redirected into richer animation and more elaborate set-ups. Mark Mason redesigned the Raggy Dolls to what you see above. He taught me an incredible amount about drawing and dared me to push my skills. A real inspiration. Thanks Mark.

Posters

I'm love good film posters, so I thought it would be fun to show some posters from films I've worked on.

I got a big kick out of animating some of the show stopping effects in this opening sequence at Nexus Productions. Some of my effects appear on this poster, designed by Nexus directors, Smith & Foulkes.

A truly iconic poster from the film that got me a break into the effects animation world in London at Tandem Films. I had the time of my life learning under some of the best in the business and animating many of the effects for "Tiggers Family Tree" song sequence.

What is it with DVD airbrushed covers? Sadly, this looks better than any of the film posters I saw, which is a real shame. I saw some really great conceptual work on this film, and it was a shame that the studios involved were unable to bring that vision to the screen. I only did a few shots on this film and I'm still proud to say I nearly killed Tiny Tim with a the bucket of ice cold water!