As my wedding is now out of the way now, I've been able to find the time to jump back onto the bloggy wagon. I thought I'd tell you about something I briefly mentioned in a previous post... I've been working with my very first animation tutor, Alex Williams, with his online school, Animation Apprentice.
For a couple of years now, I've been working with him to create the school's newsletters and update our twitter account with the latest news and updates from Alex, but more recently I've joined the school as an online tutor too.
When Alex approached me to help him in the Facebook classrooms, I wasn't sure if I was ready. Had I been animating long enough to help others? After I thought about it, and taking Alex's own advice into consideration*, I took the opportunity. What the heck! I know the animation fundamentals, so let's see how it goes (...it was also really lovely to have a fellow professional and someone I look up to, believe in me so much to invite me into their business).
I was surprised at how easily I was able to offer insight. I could spot improvements in the work of the students quite easily. It's really rewarding too; being able to offer suggestions and support on other people's shots. I feel like my eye is developing an extra level of critique, which can only be a good thing to help me if ever I become a Lead Animator, or Senior within a team. It can be challenging when you see someone's shot, and you know it's not very good, to deliver the feedback in a caring and supportive way to help them, and not make them feel belittled or foolish. I feel I'm pretty good at that, but you never know, some of the students might disagree...?!
If you're keen to learn animation, come aboard. It's where I started, so who knows where you might end up.
Cheers
Marc x
*Something along the lines of: "Take every opportunity that comes your way"
The past weeks have been bonkers! Not only have I had my birthday, bachelor party, played through the Crystal Maze (I won 3 crystals, just sayin')...but I've also been planning my wedding (4 weeks to go!). In the middle of all that, I managed to update my reel.
I created my new reel for 2017 a couple of months back, but I've added some different shots and changed some bits around...so here it is...
I've been playing around with a new animation reel to start the year off...and here it is. It includes some of the work I've been doing on the new Cbeebies series Numberblocks, as well as some of my Tree Fu Tom work.
Good news! The new show I've been working on with Blue Zoo, Numberblocks, is going to be shown on Cbeebies. It's part of the Alphablocks family, so if your kids liked that, they should like this too.
12K Views! Impressive, right?
It's cool that Cbeebies used an image from one of my shots as the holding screen for their Facebook video.
The series starts on Monday 23rd January, twice a day, 10:20 and 14:00. So tune in, to learn how to count, and helps little ones understand their numbers a bit better.
Tweet me @AnimatorMarc and let me know what you think.
...and whilst browsing through the comments section of Cbeebies Facebook page, couldn't help but raise a smile at this one...
Thanks to my fellow animators for pointing it out to me. Ha!
As every animator knows, every year, brings with it a new showreel! But technically, I don't really classify this as my actual showreel, it's more of a show case of my best shots from working on the Cbeebies series, Tree Fu Tom.
More Stuffwas the Short that we created at Blue Zoo, that sent the internet into a melt down of animational delight. I worked on a small section of the short and I thought I'd mark the almost-a-year-anniversary by sharing my experience.
Around October 2015, staff at Blue Zoo were invited to pitch an idea for the BZ Christmas
short. We were all given a song, and a concept and we had to provide the
rest. The song and theme was about consumerism, and all we had to work out our idea from, was that the song,
More Stuff.
Vimeo sent us these funky stickers/coasters/frizbees
Four
people were chosen to pitch to the studio, me being one of them (...bloomin 'eck). After we pitched to the whole studio, the company voted. Simone and Joe's pitch won the vote, and so work began on creating models from their brilliant concept art and the animatic development continued.
As a thank you for pitching, the studio took me off my project (Tree Fu Tom) and was I allocated time to animate on the short itself. Quite a privilege really, as this only happens with a select few from the studio, if additional people wanted to animate on it, they had to do so in their own time!
I
was given two shots and had to create a selection of
dance cycles. In the early stages of development, there were a couple of shots of all the elves
dancing, but this got scrapped (or at least made small and not very noticeable) - and in the end, the studio used our
dances for promo videos on social media, in the run up to the short's release.
Our awesome More Stuff Advent Calendars!
More Stuff was received very well, better than any of us could have hoped
for, really. We've won a couple of awards at festivals across the world and were chosen as a staff pick
on Vimeo - a very honorable accolade, indeed!
I
really enjoyed working on the project, especially working on a
Christmas themed short in the run up to Christmas itself, was really fun.
The studio had lots of fun promoting it too- from filling the studio with various elves to giving out specially designed advent calendars.
Who knows what Blue Zoo has in store for this Christmas (wink)
Last summer, I worked on my first short with Blue Zoo. Commuter Glitch was a super fun concept. We created a piece of animation with a "pass
the pose" mindset, or I believe the technical term for it is ‘Cadavre Exquis’.
(one of my poses from the end of the film)
Animators
signed up, and created poses of the lead character, an old man listening to his walkman. We all used the same locked
off camera, then took it in turns to animate a few short
frames making the character move between a start pose and end pose, and
of course, due to the virtue of the whole piece, no one knew what anyone
else was doing.
(one of my poses from the end of the film)
It worked kinda like that
drawing game, where you draw a head, fold over the paper, and pass it to
someone else to draw the body, then pass to someone else to finish
off. To add a layer of
complexity, each shot created was given to different lighters, to light
however they wanted.
I
didn't actually animate on the shots, but I created a series of poses
with the character, that you can see flicker on screen at the end of the
shot.
(one of my poses from the end of the film)
Joe, our director, wanted everyone who worked on
the piece to be as creative and out there as we could.
It was a really fun project to work on, as there was so much
freedom to do with the character whatever we wanted. It was also really
exciting waiting to see what the finish short was going to look like!
The result, a crazy and surreal animated adventure telling the tale of an old guy on a journey through public transport!
P.s. by the way, incase you can't click on the Vimeo link to check out COMMUTER GLITCH, you can watch it here on youtube...but if you can, go to Vimeo as the quality will be much better ;)
In February 2015, I started an Animation Internship at Blue Zoo (famous for producing shows such as Tree Fu Tom, Miffy, Alphablocks and Digby Dragon, to name a few). The internship started by working on my own simple shots using some of the Tree Fu Tom characters, which was really good fun, as previously to this, I hadn't worked on such (comparatively) complicated rigs. As well as this, I also helped by fixing some of the other animator's shots. At the end of my internship, Blue Zoo offered me a contract (yasssssssss) as a Junior Animator, through to March 2016, continuing my work on Tree Fu Tom.
As well as being a Junior, I also carried on with fixing the shots from my team. Animators on Tree Fu Tom typically animate 2 minutes over 5 weeks, and the number of shots and characters involved can vary a lot from episode to episode. With such a fast turnaround, animators have to work at a very quick pace. What this means, is that there can be all manner of tiny errors that crop up from shot to shot, and invariably these only show up once a shot goes through lighting. As a fixer, I liaised very closely with the lighting and comp department, so they would send me the updates with what work needed to be done. The fixes could vary from intersections (such as a character's costume going through their body) or there might be instances where the characters were not touching the ground plane, which would result in their shadows not working properly. Basically, anything that looked weird or messed up, came back to me to resolve.
A lot of people asked me if I liked fixing. On the surface, I guess it could seem boring, but I actually loved it. As someone who still quite new to animation, it gave me the opportunity to work on other, more experienced animator's shots, and understand how they made their animation work. It was a big learning experience, and I'm very grateful that I got to do it. I kept a folder on my desktop of animation clips that inspired me, so I could reference any movements that I might need throughout my work on the episode. I love that folder, it's full of amazing work!
I worked on series 5, of Tree Fu Tom, where a new character, Muru was introduced, with a whole new brand of magic, Red Magic. Muru was the new teacher in Treetopolis, and to make him stand out from the other characters, his way of moving was different to many of the others. His movement was very pose to pose and zippy. When his acting style was being developed, reference was taken from Aladdin's Genie, and Bruce Lee's martial arts. A fun melange of style, if ever there was one.
With the new brand of magic, came a whole new range of magic spells, that were inspired from the animals found in Muru's Spell Stone. I had the honour of animating the very first red magic spell, which was in the Elephant Spell. You can see it in this Spell School clip from Cbeebies youtube channel (I just animated the actual spell itself, not Tom's talking before and after).
Not only is Blue Zoo a great studio to work for, but I felt a real sense of honour and pride working on Tree Fu Tom. I think we made a great series. A lot of my friends with kids watch it, and it was a strange feeling having so many of them text me with photos of them watching and enjoying the show. I felt a huge sense of pride as well, seeing my name in the credits...on television.
