New Designers going well! Photos!

Exhibiting at New Designers has been pretty sweet I must say. We set up on Monday, the opening private preview night was Wednesday and I also popped in for the day on Friday (and we'll all be up there Sunday to pack up). Here's some photos I've taken over the days.

There isn't really that many Uni's showing off animation here, I think about 5 in all. Most of the show is, as the name of it suggests, Design work like crazy inventions, car designs, and even the odd game design like a game of Pong you play with your mind (couldn't get it to work, I must be brainless!). There was a lot of excellent illustrators too: I was pleasantly surprised to see Steven Coffils showing his wares off here from Cambridge, as I'm a big fan of his art and have helped him out with something we should be getting online soon. It was great to meet him and have a good chat. :)

Unlike the illustration courses, the animation lot were sort of dotted about rather than next to each other, and we were in a sort of corridor area that is a walk through to a few other rooms. At first we thought this meant we'd get ignored but it's actually drawn quite a bit of attention to us as people walk through they often stop to have a look.

We have three Macs set up (one playing our individual showreels, the other two playing the full films) and a plasma TV running a over all showreel (with a Power Rangers instrumental!). Each one of us has two boards up about our final major project, and we our portfolios out for people to flick through.

I honestly thought I had made too many showreel DVDs, but it looks as though I may of made too little as they're pretty much all gone (even after adding a further 20 yesterday)! Same with the group DVD with all our films on it, they were all gone by the end of Thursday, and there was over 100 of those! Safe to say it's gone rather well!

Ready to sell myself like a whore!

Setting up for the New Designers show in London tomorrow, so this week I've been working on all the promotional stuff that hopefully a whole bunch of industry types will see and maybe even pick up a copy of!

An all-new A3 portfolio (my old A2 is far too big, heavy and out of date to take):

Hundreds of Business cards:

..and finally 80 copies of an updated showreel DVD (complete with a brand new showreel, which will be online in a month or so):

Did I say DVD? I meant DVC: Digital Video Crumpet!

Every showreel picked up also has a unique piece of artwork on the back! Will you get a zombie, or a baby with a chainsaw, or a kid with a ghost on a leash?

There will also be display boards of Lucy Lolly's development, with that film available on the collage DVD in full. More photos of the actual display when it's er...actually up.

Gonna be @ New Designers 2009!

Well this is a nice surprise! I've been invited to join in with the just-about-to-graduate 3rd year animation group (one year from me graduating last year) on displaying my work at the New Designers exhibit in London. Our year looked into doing a showing at this place last year (it's a huuuge place, with hundreds of Universities showing off their stuff over 2 weeks) but unfortunately it fell through so we didn't have a show. I gotta get planning for it right away though as we need to set up next week! Still, it's a opportunity I'm not going to let slip by a second time. Seeing as everyone else is showing their final films they finished this year, I'll be showing my final major film Lucy Lolly.

Links to work from the others here: Gemma, Tom, Becca , Hayley, Dan, Andrew, Amber, Laura, Martin, Cresta (can't find your link!). They all had a show at the collage down here in Southend a few weeks ago and it was ace, with a Power Rangers theme (complete with the music)! I also have to thank Martin and Dan who over the last few weeks have helped me out on the film I've been working on, which is now more or less complete. :)

More details about this exhibit as soon as I get it. EDIT: Turns out the location on the website was wrong. Fixed!

RabRab @ Glastonbury!

Wow, this was a nice surprise! ChewTV just e-mailed me to tell me that they screened RabRab on a big screen owned by the BBC during the Glastonbury Festival! I would have loved to have seen people's reaction to it, but at least I can hope they kept the credits in so my web address could be sunk into all those people's brains! Either way thanks again ChewTV for getting my films out there! :D

Kittens in the house! :O

Things haven't been the same in my household since we lost Tigger last year. While you can never replace the Baggy Cat (tm), we now have two kittens that we bought from someone in the Echo. Both ginger toms and just six weeks old, yet already perfectly litter trained. You can tell them apart mainly by their feet, as one has white feet like it's wearing socks while the other doesn't. When they arrived in the house they were very shy and hid under a sofa for a good hour or two, but now they're starting to settle and have popped out for food, a poop or two in the litter tray we bought them and a play about with some toys.

I got to choose the name of one and my parents will be naming the other (they haven't come up with one just yet). The cat that popped out from the sofa and started to explore first is very much a fighter, punching the living snot out of the mouse toys we gave him, so in the end I named him Rocky.

The other cat is far more timid and runs away from the toys, yet does like to smack Rocky in the tail when he's not looking and get in a fun scuffle. I've got some better photos of him now. His lighter and slightly fluffier than Rocky, with more blob like stripes. Dad was thinking of the name Tibbles for him, maybe.

FIIIIGHT!

Michael Jackson 1958-2009

I was watching BBC News last night about midnight when the news of MJ in Hospital was broke, and rumors about what exactly was going on were jumping around the net at rapid speed. Once it was 100% confirmed that he passed away it took ages to sink in, to be honest.

Michael's music was a BIG part of my childhood. I had a friend in school who could do the dance routines pretty well, due to watching his videos daily for months on end. I had the music video collection on VHS as well as the movie Moonwalker (which was pretty much a feature length music vid too) and loved the imagination that went into them, Thriller espcially., though I'm not a big fan of Earth Song.

In recent years I found out that he had been un-credited for collaborating on the 'Do the Bartman' Simpsons single and supposedly the soundtrack to Sonic 3 on the Mega Drive too, and listening to them now it's obvious. On a Simpsons DVD with the Bartman song on it they reveal that he literally just phoned them and said he wanted to give Bart a number one single. How cool is that?

News is spreading that apparently he has over 100 un released songs that may get released now, and his Neverland ranch might be opened to the public ala Graceland. hell, I'd visit Neverland just to check out his incredible arcade game collection which was almost sold off in an auction a few months back.

For now though I'm listening to his music again (still have the HIStory album lying about) for probably the first time in years and remembering just how awesome he was back in the day, and I managed to order the DVD with all his music videos on it just before every MJ related out sold EVERYWHERE, so the nostalgia can come flooding back. His music has made him immortal, afterall. Still, I'd like to think he's up in the clouds have a good old sing song with Freddy Mercury and Elvis.

I'm on IMDB!

I'm in the movies now! Ahem, sort of.

Ok, so anyone can just sign up and add themselves to the site but I was added to the site by I presume Belinda (director of Lost in the K Hole) and I have my first credit as animator on that film, so thanks Belinda! I'm actually Aaron Foster number two because this guy got there first.

I've found you FAKER! Oh wow, he was in Slient Witness.

Hopefully in time I can build that credited list up from just one. Probably best I don't put a picture of myself on there, haha!

Nostalgia leads to great discoveries (sometimes)

Nostalgia can be a cruel ship to sail. You have these fond memories of something, only for them to be completely destroyed when you see it again only to discover, well...it wasn't as great as you remember. Sometimes though, you see something again that has been hidden away in the back of your mind for years that you barely remember, and you can't help but love it all over again. Case in point, the following videos.

This is only a chunk (about one third) of the whole film, but I loved this video as a wee lad. I believe I also had the record. The song has recently cropped up out of no where in a Thomas Cook commercial on telly, but seeing the animation again as linked to by Cartoon Brew recently is even better. It's all rather cutesy but whatever, the abstract bit is brilliant and I recall that owl creeping me out back in the day (well it was in the ending which isn't in this clip). Rupert always was a bit of a wuss of a character: if he lived in toon town he would probably get the snot kicked out of him by Dennis the Menace, but he beats the modern Winnie the Pooh knock off they use now. Not that he has much importance in this film anyway, it's all about the frogs. You can actually get the whole thing on this DVD.

The stuff that follows that I found in the related videos is even better still. I remember these being at the end of the video Rupert and the Frog Song was on, and boy what a departure it was! First up: Seaside Woman, which was apparently made around 1980.

Wow! Just look at it, it's beautiful! I haven't found out who animated this yet, but it's some pretty ahead of it's time stuff. The angular look of everything, with a little hint of 1930's cartoons in there, I especially love the black and white sequence with the inverted half's of the screen, and I adore the design of that cat! Oh, and look at the waves! That part suggest to me that thsi and the Frog Song's abstract part are by the same people, but i could be wrong.

Finally there was this, 'The Oriental Nightfish'. How did this end up on the same video as the cute frogs? Blimey, I watched some crazy shit as a tike but I feel it was stuff like this that put it in my head to become an animator one day (though I didn't attempt to make things move on film until I was about 10). This film dates back to about 1977-78 and is by Ian Emes, who's something of a legend in British animation (how I didn't know of him until now is a mystery, I don't do enough research I guess) who also did animation for Pink Floyd's dark Side of the Moon tour.

Not content with dragging all these memories flooding back, Cartoon Brew have also informed me that a Ian Emes event is happening in London next Thursday, where he will be there for a chat, his films will be screened and artwork from the films will be displayed. It starts at 7pm in Bloomsbury and the tickets are £10 to buy from here. I may just well go to this!

Now why didn't I think of this before?

So my parents have an old Dell PC that's most likely going to be sold off/destroyed in a bonfire, but they've let me take the monitor to see if I could set up one of those double screen set ups all the crazy PC guys have, and sure I just about squeezed it into my space..

It's hardly a slick lay out but it does the job nicely. Not sure if this will prove to help at multi tasking or just distract me a whole lot more, though! I put together the wallpaper from this rather brilliant piece by Orioto. It's pretty awesome for stuff like this..

I do like me a bit of the ol' Outrunners.

Speaking of gaming on the PC, I tried out that Street Fighter IV benchmark to see if my PC was up to the task of running that amazing looking game, and sure enough...it can only run it at 60fps on the minimum settings at 800X600 and with all the blur effects, lighting and even the background turned off. This computer was never intended as a gaming rig but still! Maybe I should upgrade my graphics card...even just a little.