Short exercise, following a Jason Ryan tutorial, trying my hand at animating speech for the first time. Unfortunately, the sound quality is as good as it gets…I even reassembled it in After Effects because Flash does even weirder things to sound.

First half-decent drawing since submitting my student film. Pastel pencil on bond paper. It felt good to get my hands dirty after spending 2 months drawing with a slick plastic nib on a slick plastic surface (even with a piece of paper taped to the Wacom). I need to get my drawing mojo back….

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One year ago tomorrow, I met Glen Keane, very briefly, at a book signing. He asked if I was involved in animation (I had a sketchbook in hand), and I said I would love to be. So here I am, the day after the end of year screening, with a film under my belt….and the GlenArt award for character animation.

More later, when I’m a little more coherent.

(caught in a cafe)

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Sitting in a cafe with a friend, both of us procrastinating. I made a tiny ink sketch (roughly 3 by 2 inches), came home, chucked it in Photoshop and noodled it half to death.

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Just saw this tonight, as part of a triple bill. Drawing fanart past midnight, hopped up on coffee and unearthly beauty.

Choreography by Christopher Wheeldon, music “Spiegel im spiegel” by Arvo Part, dancers Robyn Hendricks and Robert Curran of the Australian Ballet (although my drawing doesn’t resemble them in the slightest!).

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Zipping on by! The advantage of working to music is that things are timed out, removing a lot of the guesswork. The disadvantage of working to music is sometimes having to cram a lot of information into not enough time, resulting in the audience going “huh?” and possibly getting seasick. That and having too much time to kill in other scenes. But this is a matter of playing the piece slower, and doing some reshuffling and/or restaging.

Major Project in progress! I’d wanted to do a beautiful lyrical mood piece with a dancer or dancers in it, but spent most of the mid-year break trying to come up with ideas and hitting dead ends. And then while free-associating words and ideas, “petit rat” popped into my head, and so here we are. (Little ballet students at the Ballet l’Opera Paris are apparently known as petits rats, because they run around and nibble food in the manner of their rodent counterparts)

So. Some animatic/storyboard panels from a roughly 5-metre-long strip of bits of paper taped together:

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Animated shorts for an utterly miserable Melbourne Sunday arvo in the dead of winter…

Disney’s retelling of The Little Match Girl, which always makes me cry:

Rain Town - incredibly beautiful and evocative. It’s hard to believe this is a graduation film: