Illo Friday: Poem

This week's topic made me think of spoken word.
Allen Ginsberg has to be my favourite poet, and there are plenty of recordings of his crazy spoken performances floating around.
But here's a link to the poem in this guy's mouth, A Supermarket in California

character development

More character designs for the animation. I've been changing styles every two days.
It's like being unable to choose between the many options on a menu... they all seem so tasty!

In development..

Here's a sneak peek into my next animation project. This will be the main character.
I'm still at development stage, and I keep changing my mind about what style of animation to go for - hand-drawn or flash. Both have their advantages and disadvantages.

Hand drawing means you have to draw all the in-betweens yourself. That means almost every frame, and with 25 frames per second, that's a lot of repetitive drawing!

Flash cuts out some of the in-between drawings. However, it can look quite flat and.. well.. 'flashy' at times. So even if I used it, I'd be tempted to animate frame by frame, mirroring the hand-drawn process.

decisions decisions!

Hedgehog in the Fog

A beautiful 1975 animation by Yuri Norstein.
I recently saw it for the first time and it just blew me away.

Hedgehog and his friend bear cub have a nightly ritual where they drink tea, count the stars and have conversations. On his way to bear cub's house, hedgehog sees a white horse, and wonders whether she will choke if she lies down in the fog. He decides to investigate and delves into the fog, becoming hopelessly lost.

can it get much better than this?
yes! watch it!

Crooked

Here are a couple of stills from my animation Crooked. It is finally finished - yay!
It was a great learning experience drawing the whole thing by hand. Something I'd never done before. (ahh, how quickly one forgets the pain)
I got a great soundtrack by the excellent Matt Lewin, a mixture of accordion and tremolo guitar.
I won't be posting it on the interweb, so no previews, sorry!

Illo Friday: twist