Cups of tea & lots of thinking

Have been working hard on Migs film. It's all going good. I think working on a long project you postulate between two feelings: Stress & euphoria. Somewere between is where you rest, bouncing between the two. Because of the rediculous longevity in producing an animation(why oh why do we do it..!) , this is a constant battle. Its like climbing a mountain, you could walk for a whole day till your feet are bloody and your calf's are battered, but still your less than 30% of the way, so you go to sleep feeling the need to keep on walking. However, working to the schedule is the antidote to this, setting little milestones up the climb. By March the 2nd we hope to have atleast 1:20 of coloured animation.


The team dynamic is working really well, in many ways its felt like having extra arms at times - I finish off the animation, hand it over to Grethe, and almost instantly its coloured! And then suddenly theres a beautiful background for it to sit on! Brilliant. Its important that everyone is on the same wavelength and I feel we are

The production method is:

1) the layout is produced
2) from that the rough animation is created
3) the line is cleaned up..
4)..Then the block colour is applied in grey tones
5) Then the light & shade is applied.

During this time Mig works up a lovely background also.

Par examplé:

We're looking for people to come on board in all of these stages (bar the layout & backgrounds). The main jobs are animation (rough & line) and colour (block & highlights). But mainly, what we're looking for is committed people, willing to really get stuck in.

We're also on the lookout for someone who's interested in compositing & effects: someone to bring each shot together.


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Anywho, more soon. It feels as if we're working on this a mile a minute, I'll try to post more, as the project is constantly evolving, and each little crevice we iron out every day is a little battle in its own way.

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Yesterday Ozzy Parker came into uni to do a talk. Was really great to hear from him, a real cool guy. I loved his whole work ethic, and his joy in doing it. Commercials & music videos for him are a joy to make, and are like short, personal work; only you're getting paid for it and get to work with Michael Jordan.

I liked how for him every project is new, a new attempt at an animation style, a new use for the medium. His student film was great; he built some scaffolding and animated old New York vintage clothes bopping along to jazz, what a great idea.

I loved how clearly developed his own style & method were to him, his paper cut out/stop motion stuff was dense with evolved creative ideas

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A song for today: