Granny's Gun Lip sync test

Well well well.... long time no post. I graduated from Staffordshire University on Friday 13th of July then promptly started a job the following Monday. I am greatful to be working even if it is not animation related. Money is Money. But because my new job is full time and long hours it has been a challenge to find the energy to stay creative. Weekends are just about the only time I have to persue my animation and illustration work. This weekend I was inspired by an elderly woman I saw on the bus on my way to work. She was very small and very softly spoken. I could not imagine her hurting a fly. So I came up with this piece of showing a sweet granny dealing with hooligans! It is a bit rough as I only have the basic tools to create minimations... literally paper, pen, lightbox, scanner, premiere. What more does one need. Anyway it has been a while, just needed to warm up the old animating muscles.

Enjoy!

 
Granny's Gun from Chloe Howley on Vimeo.

Serenading the man from the BBC

The Water is wide cover from Chloe Howley on Vimeo.

On Wednesday I attended "Top club" with my dad in Doncaster. It is owned by Madeline and Mark Smith, mother and father of actress Sheridan Smith. My dad regularly plays at their open mic night, I went to the evening to meet my dad's friend Howard who has done work for the BBC. He had heard that I am graduating this year and said he would meet me, he was kind enough to give me some tips on how to break into the industry. He shall be forwarding me some useful contacts soon which should be helpful.

After chatting about how difficult it is to get into the media industry, I was asked to perform a song. I was really nervous as it has been a long while since I have sang anything. But I managed to give it a go after a couple of G and T's! The video above is a cover of the song I did "The Water is Wide".

At the moment it's pretty much just pestering and making contacts with as many relevant people as I can. On a side note I may have some work experience in my good friend Lee Hutchinson's recording studio (BH media). Maybe he will auto tune some of my songs and make them better!

Tutor Character illustrations

Here are the mini illustrations I did of my University tutors as a thank you (I also gave them some choccies too! Incase they didn't like my interpretation of them). I can not believe how fast the last three years have gone. And sorry if this sounds soppy... but I will miss everyone, I have met some fantastic people and made some incredible friends. It is almost my time to venture out into the big, scary wide world!

 Daryl giving me a good telling off! I know he doesn't really mind me doing 2D in my final year!

 Laura Weston...The lady who introduced me to blogging. Thanks to her I now plaster my work all over this blog. Thanks for all the advice Laura, your wisdom shall be ringing in my ears for years to come!

And finally dear Adrian with a lovely set of wings! You mad man you!

"Feeble's Attempt" Finished Edit

It has been a year since I came up with the initial idea for my final uni animation, and it has taken 5 months to put together. I am happy to introduce my first hand drawn animation. 

Enjoy!

Feeble's attempt poster

Coming soon!

Here is my poster for my final film...

The animation is nearly completed, just need to edit it all together. Only one week left!!!

FMX Festival 2012 Stuttgart: Coraline

FMX 2012... woo!

Another great visit to the FMX festival! This event does mainly focus on 3D animation and VFX, but it was still a fantastic experience for me (even though I am a tradtional animator). I was lucky enough to attend talks about the latest stop motion films such as Aardman's 'Pirates'. It really is amazing how much work and dedication goes into every frame. I was lucky enough to attend a talk with one of Aardman's talented model makers, Amanda Darby back in November last year. We were able to hold one of the puppets from Pirates, and also look at a sample of the replacment mouths that were used. Laika, the studio that made 'Coraline' was the first studio to use rapid prototyping to create over a million replacement mouths for their puppets. After the Aardman talk, Mark Shapiro from Liaka, did a presenation on Coraline and gave us a gilms behind the scenes of Coraline. They create the mouth movements in Maya and then use 3D printers to digitally sculpt each mouth shape, Mark said that overall they had over a million replacement mouths for the procuction.

Just a small selection of Coraline's replacement mouths, I think Mark said that there were 1000's of mouth shapes just for Coraline. They created a library stystem that would help the animators know which mouths they needed, this is the system Aardman adopted for Pirates. For their new film 'ParaNorman' (in cinemas in August 2012) they have developed colour 3D printing. The sculpts come out of the printer as a white chalky colour and then it is placed in a liquid (I can't remember the chemical name) that brings out the different colour and tones for the skin.

A faceless Coraline... eek! The mouths are easliy clipped on with magnets on the back of the replacements.

This speeds up the animation process as the animators don't have to keep sculpting through as they animate.

A rather shiney me with Coraline puppet, I was scared of dropping her. But we were told a lot of the time the animators would end up breaking parts of the puppets by pushing the movements to the maximum in order to get the very best performance. Many repairs, they must have had a mini puppet hospital.

This is one of the armetures for Coraline, beautifully made so she could move well enough to give a smooth and fluid performance. I would not even want to attempt making one of these, far too fiddley!

Myself and the very talented Lynda Barnes with 'the other father' puppet. His mouth was one of the few puppets without replacement mouths (Mechanical animation). Lynda was just sorting his hair out.

Stuttgart is such a lovely city, so we managed to chill out and enjoy our surroundings in the evenings.

Such a fantastic week, now back to work!

Colouring at 3am....

I had only intended to have a power nap at 9pm so that I could carry on working into the evening... Instead I fell asleep until 3am. Oh well! But I managed to catch up on some animating for Elodie, then after I had done that I got on with colouring these illustrations I posted the other week.

I think they came out well considering the time of day it was.

These will be going in my portfolio for FMX at Stuttgart...