2009......So far so good.

2009 has been a pretty god year so far. Our second son was born in July and he's a cracker, and I'd forgotten how flamin tiring new born babies were....man alive I don't do sleep deprivation!

Then on the job front, I'm still at Aardman Animation and it looks like I'll be here for a good while again. This is a cool place to work with a lot of seriously talented people. During my time here I've also been lucky enough to get a tour of some Wallace and Gromit sets as well as hold the little blighters (Wallace anyway. I would have made a break for it with one of the models, but the security is pretty tight and the thought of getting beaten with rubber hoses round the back of the bike sheds made me think again. I also had a tour of the stop-motion features modelmaking workshop, I saw some maquettes for the new "Pirates!" feature which looked amazing.

More recently I've had the chance to work on another personal shot which you can watch below. I wanted to try a pantomime shot this time for a change and tried something with an obvious emotional change. As you can see I have an extremely intellectual sense of humour......

Update...

I might have to knock this blog on the head because the frequency of my posting is shocking!!

Anyways, the reason being I've been very busy working since last year.

For a few months over Christmas I was working remotely on some game cinematics for a new game thats coming out called Squeeballs. Yesterday I came across the trailer for the game (there's a link to it below). I pretty much animated the whole thing apart from some changes that were done in-house and I reckon it looks cool. I think it's the first game for a new XBox 360 handheld type controller jobby similar to the Wii one.

SQUEEBALLS TRAILER

And at the moment I'm working at Aardman's CGI commercials department. This is a cool place to work, especially in their shiny new building!! I'm going to be here for a few months and as always I'm really enjoying it.

Oh, one more thing. I recently entered the Spline Doctors Christian Bale animation challenge and got an honourary mention for my efforts!! Happy days. You can watch it below, but be warned........that Bale fella swears like an effing trooper!!

About time I said something...

The frequency I'm posting on this thing is awesome! I reckon I'll have the next installment up here by 2010.

Anyway, below is a link to a commercial I did a while ago now. It's the only thing I've got to show at present. When you study animation, the first thing they teach you is to animate bouncing balls, once that's done you figure you'll never need to do that again. How wrong could I have been.T his particular job was all bouncing balls, and pretty much every other thing I've animated has needed what I learn't bouncing those balls applied to it. Anyway I digress....

I will have a load more stuff to show soon enough though. I've started working on a new personal acting shot and I'll also put some stuff up from a BBC children's series I worked on last year called "Grandpa in My Pocket".

Again, sorry mam for not posting anything in a while, I've been flat out busy and spending my free time getting jumped on by my 3 year old son.....

You can watch the commercial HERE if you fancy it.

Synchrolux animation blog

I came across this blog a few weeks ago, it's by Kevin Koch who's worked as an animator mainly at Dreamworks. It's loaded with amazing information and I've learnt a hell of a lot just by reading through his posts.

The man knows what he's talking about........FACT!

http://www.synchrolux.com/

Animation masterclass!

I haven't updated this badboy in a while because I've been busy working and doing family stuff. But I have signed on to go to an animation masterclass in London next month run by Andrew Gordon from Pixar.

Should be good, and I'm looking forward to learning more stuff and also meeting up with an old mate of mine for a few drinky poo's.

It'll also be nice to get to where the action is animation wise, because after a while you can feel sort of "on the ouside looking in", (well I do anyway) if you're not working in London at one of the big VFX places. Anyways, there's a link to the course by clicking on the title of this post if anyone wants more info about it.

Finished shot.

After having a few comments back from "The King", I made some changes and rendered the thing out. The final version is below. His main comment was that the first robot felt really light when it got shoulder barged, so I've hopefully fixed that problem.

Smash 'n' Grab!!!

After saying I'd take a break and not start another personal shot, I only went and saw a cool rig online and decided to do something with it. The rig is of a....how you say "gentleman of large stature", and I thought i't be a different challenge to animating my usual skinny fellas.

I've got some time off between jobs anyway so its either watch Loose Women on ITV or animate something (and then go down and watch Loose Women while having dinner). Thats called multi-tasking that is.....

Anyway thanks to Anders Fray for making the rig, you can get it from his site below.

http://www.andersfray.com/

And thanks to Jessica Lauren Spence and Joe treu for the robot rig. You can get that from the link below.

http://www.3dfiggins.com/gallery.php?id=38&item=67#67

As for the animation, after doing acting shots recently I wanted to do something a bit more dynamic and physical. I also wanted to mess about with animating the camera in a steady-cam type of way. This is just the playblast and I still need to animate the bloke's face but its more or less there now. Once that's done I'll render it out nice and purdy like too.....



I'm definately taking a break from doing my personal stuff now. Summer is coming and its time to spend my time doing barbeque's and drinking beer.

As always all comments are more than welcome.