After farting about sorting out the dope sheet over the last week, I finally started doing some actual animation at last, about a month later than I planned, doh! I mainly started doing the lollipop's reaction shots, as they['re some of the simplest bits to do, along with a couple simple Lucy shots and the title animation. I'm maninly doing key frames on paper and leaving the in betweens to when I take the drawings into Flash, but I've ended up drawing a lot of the inbetweens as well. Here are a couple frames of the lollipop I did:
If I keep this kind of pace going daily, I could get all the rough animation done within the next three or four weeks. Hooray!
Been feeling a bit rough today which a newly required cold so this blog post has been written on and off the whole day, bah. Yesterday was great fun though, I met a lot of great indie comic artists but also spent quite a bit of money! I took some photos but most of them turned out pretty wobbly. Oh well!
The convention was located within a University Theater, and was constantly busy, at least from when I got there about midday, as you can see from the photo above of a whole load of people squeezing past each other to get about. The theme of this years convention was Giraffe's, so you would spot them all over the place, especially in the Anthology book. At one point a panel of web comic artists got together and talked about the benefits of online comics, but to be honest even with their microphones you couldn't hear them at all. I spent most of the time I was there walking around chatting to people and spending money.
Here's Tuke's set up for his series Psyomaster Ryuken, and here he is drawing me a rather brilliant rendering of Lucy Lolly below! Tuke tells me he plans to set up store again next year, and I think after seeing what it was like, I think I may be willing to join in too, especially if you book early it's only £40.
The Dr. McNinja table was immensely popular, with it's content selling out mighty quick. I believe the author went out for a bit to grab some more copies of his book which were selling like hot cakes. I would of had his ape-high-fiving-with-a-shark-in-front-of-an-explosion T-shirt had there been more than just one small girl's size left when I got there. =(
Weebl's Stuff were selling a bunch of T-shirts and some of their ace Badger plushes while screening some Weebl and Bob on a laptop, but they weren't really making quite the song and dance I thought they would. I was hoping for fireworks, and free pie. Never mind!
Here's me with Liz Greenfield, creator of the comic Stuff Sucks, and wearer of an magnificent head of hair. She was selling her comics in neat CD case shaped sleeves, along with a very slick ipod cover with her lovely artwork all over it. Would have fit my ipod perfect if my ipod was an ipod and not an Archos AV 500..
This nutter wearing a fez hat is a bloke who goes by the name of Doctor Simpo, who's animations I had seen just a few weeks ago at Uni on a DVD my tutor brought in, so his art immediately stood out even though I didn't know he was going to be here (mainly because he's not on the website list!). One of these said films, 'Space Dork in Trouble', was done much like those narrated old children's shows like Capitan Pugwash. Here he was selling the comic it was based on in a glorious HUGE print, amongst a bunch of smaller comics he made, to which I grabbed the lot. To say his art is a bit bonkers is an understatement.
Some of the peeps set up store here had flash animated series' on show rather than printed comics, like Eddie Bowley with his series Edd Egg. He had an episode on show that has not debuted online yet, and was asking people to add to his audience scene in an upcoming episode by grabbing people's voices right there on his laptop, so when that ep is out, you may just hear me saying "Boooo! You suck". One of the most amusing things on his table was a Edd Egg Wii game case with his character planted into Smash Bros screenshots (I did take a photo of that but it came out a blurry mess).
Here is a miss Jess Bradley and friend (didn't catch your name other lady, sorry!) who were selling these brilliant little canvas paintings called the "50 thingies" that were 2 for £12, so I bought meself a little geezer farting out a ghost and a grinning bomb. They are ace and shall be hanging on my wall soon!
Here's the table set up for Beaver and Steve, a webcomic I have heard about before but haven't got around to checking out. Looks fun, though! There was also a comic called Ninja Bunny of which i bought a funky "A to Z of Ninja Zoo animal;s" poster from for a measly quid. They also had these great hand sculptured statues of their ninja bunny characters. As I said: so many temptations for the torture of my poor wallet!
Here's a snap of all the loot I brought back from there. Spent about £50 in total, and that was from resisting a lot of things! I bought the Perry Bible Fellowship book from a table representing a comic shop called Gosh! that I has previously never found in my London treks, who were also selling Sam & Max and Scott Pilgrim books, amongst other things. The paper plate face mask was a free gift for voice acting for Edd Egg. There's also the Thing 2008 T-shirt because I'm a sucker for taking a T-shirt away from every event I go to!
There were many other great artist there I forgot to mention or snap photos of, check out the Thing 2008 website to get links to them all!
I did say I wasn't going to show more of these off, but I particularly like how this one turned out, so here it is. Inside Lucy's gob.
I really to pull my finger out and start on the rough animation, but I keep getting distracted. I've been doing a little bit of work experience on the side (more about that another time) and wasting far too much time on Ebay, selling stuff and losing out on stuff (people on Ebay always seem to be much more willing to waste money than me).
A few copies of the latest issue of 'Dave' the collage magazine were lying around in class the other day, so I picked one up and had a flick through it. To my surprise there was a photo of me in it! Here's a scan of the section.
I remember this photo being taken, it was quite a while ago back when I was animating The Fuji's at the start of the Animation course I'm on. Some guys came in as asked for a photo of me working and made me sign my signature agreeing for them to use it in a publication, and thought nothing of it as it didn't pop up anywhere; until now that is. The photo is being used to advertise some new media course and doesn't name me at all, it's just there, with me putting on a dumb smile because they wanted me to look like I was enjoying myself (which I was, but you don't generally smile much while animating, or at least I don't.) That's twice I've been in print yet not mentioned! Oh well!
3 days of pencil animation and already I've done close to 40 scenes (out of a total of around 100) so I could be on to the computer based animation much quicker than I expected. The drawing above is one from what is now probably my favorite shot I have done so far; I got really loose with my sketching for it and it looks great moving. In the day I have been drawing and at night I have been scanning the drawings in and slapping them in flash to see how they move, and a lot of them have turned out really well.
