...And all the best for 2012

Next year I'll learn how to draw. Promise.

Børge's New Toy

I'm extremely proud and happy to say my friend and 90 year old mentor Børge Ring will be awarded the Winsor McCay Lifetime Achievement Award at the Annies on Feb 4th next year.
If you don't know this wonderful man and his delightful work, click here!

Tongue Tied

A couple of weeks ago my good buddy Mark Norman asked me to do some animation for a teaser clip he put together to promote a new smartphone game he's developing.
I miss handdrawn animation so I happily obliged. The result can be seen here:


I animated the dog in the beginning and the two dogs fighting over the bone.
A break down that goes into the animation proces from rough to clean up then coloring and shading can be see here.


The game is called "Tongue Tied" and will be on smart phones from Dec 15.

pencil test

For those of you interested in seeing pencil tests here's one from the St Trinians short we made last year. Although it's already very much a Searle character here, when you compare it to the final film you can see how much the drawings are elevated when traced onto frosted cell with pen and ink. It's very short so it's looped 5 times, hope you like it... After having animated mainly with computers for 3 years it was a joy for me to draw again.

St Trinians Animation Test

A couple of months ago I finished work on a lovely 2d animation experiment at Uli Meyer Studios. The goal was to see if we could successfully translate Ronald Searle's
incredible pen an ink scribbles to the screen. We had a lot of fun putting this together, and it made me realise how much I miss animating with pencil and paper. There's nothing quite like it...
We got some attention with the test, notably from cartoonbrew, and you can read more about it here and here.

new job

Haven't been posting much as usual. I've moved to Bristol a month and a half ago and the good people at Aardman Animation have been keeping me incredibly busy, animating on upcoming CG feature Arthur Christmas...

It's a great project to be involved in and I love every minute of it.
Apart from the above image I can't show you anything yet unfortunately, but rest assured it'll be a LOT of fun.