New years eve

Every New years eve, four of us get together and built things, based on some theme...
This year the theme was "Films"
My better half made a snow globe, based on Guy Maddens: My Winnipeg,
The Snow is crushed ducks eggs shells.
I did a Raven based on Hitchcocks "The Birds", made entirely of paper...
Enjoy...!

Spinning away

Hell, this was difficult.
My friend Steve showed me a zoetrope disk he animated, which not only had a repeating cycle on it, but also an object passing on, from image to image on the disk, once per revolution.
I sat for half an hour in front of it, trying to figure out how he did it.
As the object passes over to the left, there has to be one less of it, than there is of the other elements on the disk.
12 drawings in the cycle, only 11 of the object.
I decided I would never be able to just figure it out in my head, so I decided to do one of my own.
My idea was to do one cycle of a man leapfrogging over a static man, who would then jump over the original jumper.
That's easy if you allow the jumped man to slide backwards into the position from which the jumper took off.
But that's not what I wanted, I wanted for them to remain static when jumped and then leap continuously forward.
The only way, that would work is if the disk returns to it's original position only after 2 revolutions.
So I divided it into 25 segments, hitting the uneven ones the first time round, the even ones on round 2.
I know this all sounds terribly complicated, do you now see why I had to do it...
Enjoy.

Spinning Away from Felix Sputnik on Vimeo.

Running around with nuth'n on

Whatever next... I animated some walk, and run cycles in flash©, to pass the time. Here they are, cut together to some catchy tune...

Animated walks and runs from Felix Sputnik on Vimeo.

Spoooner...

Ha, there...:

The Pirates

Last May, Aardman got in contact with me, asking if I would be interested to design and animate several 2D sequences for their new movie. I contemplated the offer for a second and went over to meet them. I'll be posting some pitch work that got me the job. Once the film is out on DVD in September, I'll blog some of the final sequences too, so, have patience. Here, is a little setup I cobbled together in Photoshop, using props from "The Corpse Bride". There is also a 3D version, in case you are in posession of some anaglyph glasses.

'nother one

I really will have to go out and buy some canvas now...

Paint Paint Paint

I have decided to give painting a try, I mean, not quite paint on canvas yet, but making colour marks rather than drawing lines.
This was an idea I had about doing paintings with bits missing.
I started sketching with a fat brush in Photoshop and then set about colouring it all in.
Now that that's done I'm going to buy a canvas and get my oil paints out and do it for real.
It feels a bit like a cheat doing it digitally first, but I discovered I quite enjoy cheating if I admit to it.
(Ex catholic guilt)