Not really breaking the law of course. I’m a good boy. More sneaking a wee bottle of vodka out last night in a money saving move. Unfortunately this has backfired his morning as I think I broke brain by drinking it all. Was a fun night mind, I haven’t been out and seen real life people in ages*.
Things this week; some pitches, updated c.v, redid my ancient cover letter – little bit late for that one. I think that’s about it.
Drawing. I’m trying to get into the habit of taking my pocket book out with me more often again. It’s neglected in favour of digital stuff at the moment and I miss pencil lines. So hopefully I’ll have a flourish of shading and smudges in the drawing bit of my site soon.
Speaking of which, two new pictures in the gallery. Digital.

Look at all these little updates of late. Amazing. Right, I’ve just added to the gallery on the site. There are four images from pitches and then there is a poster we did for a mate of mines radio show’s live show. The radio show is called One Life Left. Go check it out, it’s about vidjo games and won a broadcast award this year in the UK.

It’s been updated! The music is by Dan Pugsley.

More things on my home page .

You should all go to this… If you’re in Nottingham… And like games and stuff…

Well, the longer the gap between these posts, the more that needs to go into them. Which of course results in longer to write it. Well, here we go. It’ll be a bit brief, too dense for musing.
Ian Gouldston came to Newport to take part in the University here’s Artist In Residence scheme. Or maybe it’s Animator In Residence. Well either way I spent a few weeks being as helpful as possible to him as a sounding board and animation assistant I guess. Was a good time and the work produced was really interesting. Developing an idea for a short-short film to put in the showreel and to test the animation pipe-line for the teeth short is now turning in to a potential collaboration with a musician we have worked with a few times. Dan Pugsley of Skindred fame is the musician in question, his name might be familiar as he did the music for our showreel and a little animated birthday card which I shall talk about in a minute. The stage we’re at is basically swopping visual and musical references and hopefully roughing together some sounds so I can start to storyboard it up. He’s off on tour soon so that’s all going to slow down annoyingly. I’m collecting it together as we go so I can put it into a pitch document for potential presentation for funding, forward thinking that is.
We’ve had few pitches of late. One failed one that we worked really hard on and looked really pretty. We did a little cute job with Iain Gillespie freelancing for us, that was for Blacklist. And, just in case you’re interested, I got rotovirus from my doctor sister. Great way to lose weight that is.
Animated birthday card! Well seeing as we have a horrific amount of free time as Holbrooks House at the moment, and there was an up-coming birthday of Blacklist’s premiere baby, we animated a super saccharin birthday card for her. This can be see here, http://vimeo.com/6727666
Here is a shot from the failed pitch:

There are a couple of pictures added in the pencil lines section. Just a few dolops from pitches we’ve been doing over the months. I will do a proper blog post too at some stage. I keep writting it and not posting it then having to add more because it’s not been posted. I’ll endevore to have it done by the end of the week. I’ll put up some non-pitch drawings too.

It’s by here: www.daninski.com

RANT EDIT: Dear little girly wrist boy racers of newport, next time you try to push me off my bike as I ride home please have the decency to stop to check if you’ve managed the deed. I would very much like to evaluate how well you have done with said push and maybe offer some of my own input to your technique.

This week has been a sunny week, it wasn’t meant to be but it has. We’ve actually been having a few pitches come in recently but they’ve been slow ones. Animation isn’t just about patience in craft but also patience in career. Do I mean patience at all? I guess patience has a goal at the end, a trajectory of varying somewhere. The way things seem to be is that you are blindly moving along until goals are dropped into view. Illuminating a path like a dot-to-dot illustration. Illustrating a path that has no straight ahead or line of sight, no single vector. I think that because there is no rhythm to these points of focus it can make thing difficult, but not to discount the variety and unpredictability being a good thing.

Of course that is only comment on the commercial side of what we do. I really do love that side of things and especially the people we work with on that side of things. But of course that isn’t the only thing we do.

The short is still slowly forming. Really slowly at the moment, but it is still definitely there. It weighs down the flesh slightly just about the eyebrows.

Lovely.

Also, my relationship was five years old yesterday

So motionographer have now put the film online! Huzzah! Here’s the page it’s on, feel free to write something nice about specifically our film because we worked stupid hard on it. And here’s a direct link to the video. Well wasn’t this an informal post with little to no rambling! Oh… Um. Here’s a picture of my daps, I’ve managed to wear a peddle mark into the bottom. Also, t.o.m. is now avaiable to view in the ‘eye looks’ section of the site. I’ll put Bren Hystlen up there too at some point. I really need to swop out the quicktimes for youtube links as it really slows down the page as it is. It shalt be done.

We just watched a thing about Henry the VIII, he loved to ride horses and fell off one and got fat. This steered the doodle I was doing, as I watched the programme, into someone being haunted by dreams of horses. Obviously.

Hurray! We have a pitch! Which is of course excellent, but a little frustrating because the ‘team’ is divided by vast distances and limited technology. This makes creative conversation a little slow and unsparkly. Sparkle tends to last as long as the warmth from an exhaled breath in the coldest of school mornings. Sparkle doesn’t lend itself to long distant travel. But saying that we had a conference call with each other which came up with some cool stuff. Tomorrow holbrooks will be reunited, then a dense period of work. Then we’re done.
The holbrooks’ site is still there, nothing has gone wrong yet, I swoped in some nicer images for the lo-res ones that were there so it’s a little nicer on the eyes now.
Uuum, what else… Oh, Bren Hystlen still isn’t up on the motionographer site, so isn’t up on our site concequently. It can’t be long now can it? It’s all uploaded and primed on vimeo, I just need a sign.
Another plus is it’s been sunny for ages so lots of peddling has been done. Although my bike chain keeps slipping now when I’m going up hill. Why does that happen now? Google will tell me. Google or Dan Cresswell.
Here’s a doodle of someone waiting…