Reminder

You can find me over at http://graymation.co.uk

Cheers!

Animated Carr-nage

So, the two animated sketches at long last!


Jimmy Carr 'In Concert' - Will You Marry Me? from David Gray on Vimeo.


Jimmy Carr 'In Concert' - Racist from David Gray on Vimeo.

I don't think I did too badly for six weeks of evening and weekend work. Kept the animation key to key mostly, with lots of smear frames to smooth the movements out and add a bit of 'bite'. Had to leave out lots of little things, like eyes blinks, just as way of making time to spend on other things. Many gripes, naturally.

The colours of the characters and the props became less saturated when I imported them from Illustrator into Flash (something to do with colour profiles or some such bollocks), so I ended up losing that sharp contrast between the characters and the background. I was never happy with the design of the bride character either - the face, mostly. Those eyes just don't read very well and the nose sort of disappears into the flesh colour of the face. She did the job though.

One problem that I didn't have time to sort out was the way that the arms/hands of Carr (and the other characters) melded into eachother and got lost when they overlapped -some clarity lost there, and it looked messy.

The lipsync (which was a complete BITCH to do) kind of falls apart near the end of the Racist skit and I put that down to sheer bloody exhaustion and fatigue. I got it to a point where it was passable. Just. There's actually a bit of lipsync missing right hear the beginning too, but I never registered that particlular line of dialogue on my copy of the audio. Weren't me guv.

Still, I was pleased with my little racist bloke (even though the design doesn't really match the voice). He was definitely more tied-down design-wise than the bride, but he certainly wasn't as malleable. The props in this one were lots of fun to do - I even managed to squeeze in a little homage to Duck Dodgers. The Racist sketch was my favourite, I think and definitely the most fun to do.

So there we go. Fun project, that.

Jimmy Carr

Around May time, I took on some freelance animation work. I had to design, direct, draw and animate little under four minutes of animation in Flash, based around some recorded dialogue from Jimmy Carr's new stand-up show. The whole project took around 6/7 weeks, working only at evenings, weekends and even using up a weeks holiday to get it done. It was exhausting, but very fulfilling and enjoyable work. The above image is the original drawing I 'pitched' to the producer. I hope to post the animation up at a later date.

Finally...

...got round to scanning some sketch book work from the past few months. I've been having trouble with my scanner for a while now - everything I scanned seem to just turn into a grainy mess. The black ink lines survived, but the grey brush shading seemed to disappear.




Then about 20 minutes ago, right after I'd scanned all of the above, I found the problem. It's called 'Auto tone' and it's been winding me up for over two years now. I clicked reset and shed a tear.



Some quiz night tomfoolery here. I always make a note of the questions because it makes me look clever.

Stuck on a re-routed train from Bristol to Exeter with nothing but my crayons and a copy of daft women's magazine 'Company'.

Chronic Sketch

Talented Beardy-man Mark Thompkins has started a new Sketch Challenge Blog. Along with Mark, Talented Blonde Lady-woman Tori Davis and myself will be contributing weekly. This weeks challenge was Space Cowboy Celebrates his first catch in months. This is my effort:


I think I just about scraped the brief. Barely.

BACK WITH A BANG

New flat.
New year.
Hurrah!

The days plod on...

...and so do the drawings.