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.

What have I been up to then?

Wow, this place is dead! Sorry! If you haven't completely given up on this blog by now, I'm back. So what have I been doing for the last three months? Take at look..


All that paper, about 850 drawings in all, equals to about 2 minutes of animation that I have been working on. To say I got a little carried away with this project and have taken far too long on it would be a complete and utter understatement. Still, it's my first proper paid job for a client rather than a live project so I wanted to make it as good as I could, but let's just say I'm never inking every frame of an animation again, or least not for films any longer than 30 seconds. XD

The editing is done now and the film needs background art and colour yet before it's complete, so I won't be able to show you it for a little while yet but I can show you this seeing as it has no context to the story..

IT CAME FROM BELOW. An alien that was inspired from some chatter on DeviantArt and led to this picture. That was almost three years ago? Bloody hell.

Speaking of tons of paper (INCOMING RANT): why are A5 sketch pads so elusive? A5 is my preferred size for animation drawing. A4 would be ridiculous, and I can just take off a few cm from the top to get a 16:9 ratio. But other than once every one or two years for a limited time in the pound shops this size is nigh on impossible to get a hold of, whereas stupid sizes barely anyone uses like A1 are always in stock. At one point I ran out completely and had to wait for the collage shop to get any, of which they cost 4 times the price there. Bah!

In other news, I went up to London last Monday to see a Screening of that 'Lost in the K Hole' documentary I did a bit of animation for. Nice to see my scenes with sound now, and some quality voice acting. My bits opened up each of the three chapters of the film, so that was neat. Really pleased with the result considering it was all done in one (non-stop, sleepless) week. :)