Want to be a star?

OK, well following on nicely from the last post, we start the long awaited Goole Silent Movie Project STARTS THIS SUNDAY 25 FEB!

We are still looking forActors, Film-makers, Writers, Animators, Prop set and Costume Designers, Researchers and Musicians aged 13 -20 to join this exciting project. We have an team of film-makers to work with you to help develop your skills and ideas in the form of myself, Writer/Director Peter M Kershaw of Duchy Parade Films, Theatre director and actor Madeleine Frost. We sat around last night, cunningly planning the day, and endulging ourselves with a night of classic Silent Films.

The project is FREE and will involve regular weekly sessions Join us from 2pm at The Gate Theatre. So if you are interested and would like to find out more, come and join us this Goole this Sunday. or check out the blog.

He a star! (...well he was a day ago)

I love surprises.

Well I'm looking forward to working with Dave Flemming and the guys and gals at York Hospitals and Arts Action York on an exciting project soon but what I never realised is Dave has a double life and is secretly an indie rock star! To quote Dave, "At Last! I did it! I have a number 1!" His Band, 'The Erratics' have gone crashing in at number 1 in Channel 4s 'Unsigned' Charts. Well, they had. I've just got round to checking it out. At the time of writing they have vanished, such is the fickle and fast changing world of the unsigned charts. However I rather feel Dave 'Lennie Lazerbeam' Flemming has been around long enough not let stardom, however fleeting, get to him! So check them out and vote them back to no1!

Dave says "Keep and old rocker smiling in his old muso days... Still Got it.... well got something... actually I think it might be arthritis..." Nice one Dave.

Half term fun!

Well, I'm off this morning to one of my favourite places - the brilliant Animation Station in Barbary, with two workshops for 8-13 year olds, "Wild Wonders" and "Destination Imagination". I went to the Animation Station for the first time last Summer and it's great to be going back. I'm touring with these workshop this year and if anyone wants further details, just drop me a line. Then I'm sprinting over to Goole on Friday for the Goole Silent Movie open day. Sounds like a packed half term!

I'm back!

Sorry for the long silence. I've had some problems getting into my blog since moving over to the new blogger. But I'm in now! Way to much to update on a sinlgle posting, so I'll do that over the next few days.

Lots of exciting things around the corner - but none more exciting that The Goole Silent Movie Project. I've teamed up with Goole Town Council, Producer/Director Peter M Kershaw of Duchy Parade Films and theatre practitioner Madeliene Frost to offer young people aged 13-20 in Yorkshire the change to make a silent film based in Goole.

Goole Silent Movie will empower young people with researching, writing, acting, directing, animation, filming and editing skills to create a silent movie. We are running a drop in day over Feb half term on Friday 17th Feb at Goole Museum. We launch the project at the Gate Theatre on 25th Feburary. For more information check out the Goole Silent Movie blog.

Wishing you an animated Christmas!

Christmas came early this year for as I was busy helping year 10 and 11 pupils at Sydney Smith School in Hull create animated backdrops for the school pantomime. As fas as I know, this is the first time a school has used large scale back projection for animation as part of a theatre production. Here are some stills from behind the scenes. The set design is by the student director. Merry Christmas!

Perfect for your Christmas stocking!

Just what you've always wanted! Yes, the photo-graphic novel "The Last Coiner" is avaibale on line and in specialist stores, and my fine features grace the pages as the nortorious John the Informant!

See Duchy Parade Films for more details.

Christmas shopping with Riffs of Rage!

Yeah, it's been ages. So much going on right now, that what with preparing for Christmas, (Ho, ho, ho) blogging has rather suffered. If you've been Christmas shopping in Newcastle, you might have seen Riffs of Rage in all its cartoon glory on entering the train station! It's playing to thousands of happy shoppers on a big screen there. Hurrah!

The Simpsons Movie

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

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!

International Animation Day

Well, it's animation day on Saturday (hurrah!) and I'll be in Hull premiering animated films made by local people for SPARC (Social Participation in Actively Rebuilding Communities) produced by Terrapin Productions for a government regeneration project.

I've been spending the last two weekends in Hull running an animation club for members of the local community, which has been amazing, and a lot of fun. Two 13 year old girls told me doing my workshops is more fun than playing computer games!!! My life is complete! The whole world has been invited to Preston Road on Saturday afternoon, which is a little nerve wracking as we still have complete a lot of work.

Preston Road is part of the New Deal for Communities (NDC) which is a key programme in the Government's National Strategy foneighborhoodod Renewal. We are using animation for initial consultation and planning, producing a series of short animated films exploring Preston Road. I'll try and get a link up to some of the films soon.

Innovative Yorkshire Folk

Duchy Parade Films project "The Last Cointer" has made BBC news. Check it out!

Co-operative Young Film Makers

I'm thrilled to be giving a talk and animation workshop at the Co-operative Young Film-makers Festival in Bradford this Friday. During 'Animated Adventures', I'll be talking about some of the films I've worked on over the years, as well as my work using animation with young people in education and community arts. It will be followed by a flipbook workshop later in the afternoon.

In case anyone is interested in coming, the seminar starts at 12.30 in the Cubby Broccoli cinema. I'm told that booking is essential!

The Co-operative Young-filmmakers Festival has provided young people with the opportunity to air their films on the big screen since 1966.
It runs from 13 - 14 October and, in the words of the organizers, features 100 short films, over 20 fantastic film workshops and masterclasses and everything you want to know about the film industry with advice from our friendly film experts.

Well done to "It's a Boy!"

I'm delighted to hear that the book, "It's a Boy!", has won the children's book of the year award at the UK Christian Book Awards. Congratulations to Alexa Tewkesbury and Steve Legg who worked so hard on this imaginative re-telling of the Christmas Story. It has been widely distributed to primary schools, and was prompted by Legg’s discovery that many children thought Jesus was named after a swearword. I did a small amount of work on the animated film as a storyboard artist.

Renaissance

I finally had the chance to see Christian Volkmans much talked about 3D computer hybrid feature film, "Renaissance". As a fan of Blade Runner, Akira, Sin City and French graphic art, I was needless to say, eager to see this film. Sadly the film doesn't quite match the giddy heights of either film, but what it does represent is a continuing experimentation in bringing the world of graphic novels, and other sylized worlds to a cinema currently obsessed with hyper-realism.

Renaissance looks stunning in stills, with the kind of beautifully executed environments the genre demands. And in the cinema, the higly detailed set-pieces bring you into this world with breathtaking cinematography. But the animation, created using motion capture, left me much mess impressed. While non-photorealistic rendering worked wonders with environments and props, a 3D model rendered with 2D shaders can never hope to replicate the graphic style of an illustrator who uses flat lines and shapes to create aesthetic style and beauty. And just like rotoscoping made drawn animation look wooden, the same is true in motion capture for non-photorealistic rendering.

While I am excited about the possibilities opening up to animation with the aid of the computer as most people, am I the only person who thinks the characters in this film would have been better hand animated? And the tell tale 3D smoke replaced with graphical hand drawn smoke as respectful to the style of graphic art novels as the sets and characters? I'm hard pressed to think of a film more obvious for such a treatment.

High end-technology may sound more sexy than light-boxes, pencil and paper, but isn't it the end result that's the important thing? In this case, I think both would have worked together to achieve a richer film. But maybe I'm just old fashioned.


See the film French website more more about Renaissance.

The Last Coiner

I've had the pleasure to be involved with what is promising to be an incredibly exciting project - The Last Coiner. Peter Kershaws production company, Duchy Parade Films are developing a graphic novel inspired by a true story of coiners, counterfeiters of gold and silver coins, that took place in Yorkshire in the late 1700's.

What makes The Last Coiner particularly exciting is not just the great story, but the exciting way it's being made availble. There's a ground breaking MySpace site highlighting the making of the film with beutiful costume designs by Charlotte Aspin. There's also an evolving website which promises an interesting way to see the evolving art of storytelling in action.

I spent a couple of days acting alongside some wonderfully accomplished actors in my first experience in film work. To create the look of a graphic novel, all sets are being drawn or created in 3D, with the acting against blue screen, which was an interesting challenge – although very similar to studio theatre which traditionally uses minimal to no scenery, which I’m much more familiar with. I play John the Informant, so I'll be keeping in character over the coming months informing you of developments on this blog!

Development of the Last Coiner screenplay has now attracted support from the UK Film Council through Screen Yorkshire and a production ready script is expected by the end of 2006. Be sure to check out the website and this short film with an interview from yours truly.

Camping

I finally got the chance to enjoy the amazing heat wave by going camping for the weekend with some friends in Scarborough. I have a ridiculously romantic notion of camping which is probably entirely myth as I haven't been camping for years. Apart from the shock of trying to sleep through outrageously loud snoring and waking up to outrageously loud bird-song, we enjoyed it so much we are making plans tocamp some more later in the summer. I may just have to get ear plugs.

Susan is a graphic designer and drew this quick sketch of me as a romantic camper, which I thought was so funny I should share it with you. Susan and Graham are a wonderful couple who have the enviable position of being able to work and live together. They just returned from their honeymoon in Italy.

Animating the Zidane way

Well, I was working at St Mary’s college last week with artists from Creative Partnerships on a scheme funded by Arts Council England. I was mainly teaching year 10 pupil’s animation for their websites. There are lots of good methods to introduce animation principles, but I couldn’t resist using the Zinedine Zidane head butt as an illustration. In fact it’s amazing when you study the motion, how many principles it shows - Newton’s laws of motion, anticipation, action and reaction, weight – all of that. It always amazes me how well students apply these principles when they are taught well. We even got a couple of Zidane animations!

What a week!

Hi. This is a flying post, as it's all so incredibly busy at the moment with so much great stuff going on. On Tuesday I started my first job with Creative Partnerships at St Mary school in Hull, taking a cartoon illustration class for the students web sites. I'm just about to get the train up to Hull to spend a week with them doing storyboarding and animation. Can't wait!On Thursday I was back at Bricknell School doing voice recording for "The very Hungry Caterpillar". The girl who recorded the French track was just five! I've got so many nice comments from people about how the Hungry Caterpillar is shaping up and I’m looking forward to delivering it tomorrow.

Saturday was an awesome day. I had my own tent at the Northalerton Youth Festival, running a flipbook workshop. We had everyone from children to adults come along and try their hand at animation. As well as everyone being able to take their flipbooks away, we managed to film most of them and build it up into a little film. The festival catered for 4000 young people and had everything from live bands, painting, music and film tents, to skateboarding, rock-climbing etc. It must be the summer! Brilliant to be part of. Big respect to CYC for organising it all. Hopefully, I'll get the chance to do some more good work with them before long.

The very bad blogger

OK, I don't want to make excuses, but I have been very busy this month with lots of projects that I really couldn't talk about until now.

Anyhow, I've just got back from Hull last night after spending a fantastic week working with the BBC and Bicknell Primary School helping year 4 pupils animate Eric Carle's wonderful book, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar", and record dialogue tracks in several languages.

It's been wonderful working with BBC learnXpress over the last year and in many ways this project feels like the result of a growing realization of how successfully we can use animation as a fun aid to learning. Being able to use such a classic piece of modern children’s literature has been, of course, amazing. We screened the first few language versions to the children yesterday and I hope to be able to give more good news and links to the creation of this project very soon, so stay tuned for developments! In the meantime, here's the official link to Eric Carle's web site, a legendy hero of mine and children everywhere.