Thursday, September 23rd, 2010

No Wallace and Gromit fans at the Metro, then…

This splash on the latest stop-motion animation short from the UK’s favourite Oscar-winning, Bristol-based animation studio manages to spell the company’s name wrong not just once, but all three times it is mentioned. Oh well, it was at least consistent. And it wasn’t in the headline or standfirst. Just for the record, it’s Aardman with […]

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

New Stop Frame animation blog

I’m off to glamorous Rotterdam this week to do some stop frame animation with my good friend Arnold. He’s very talented (much more so than me), though obviously as he’s Dutch he’s a bit bonkers. Evidence of this can be found in his showreel here. As a result, journalism and digital media are probably not […]

Sunday, May 31st, 2009

Why we still need sub-editors #1

The first in a no doubt ongoing series, (which also happens to combine my hobby and my day job). A bout of insomnia had me watching Channel 4 at an ungodly hour this morning. I managed to catch the second half of Psyche and Eros – an animated retelling of the ancient Greek myth (god […]

Monday, April 6th, 2009

The best animation books (and DVDs)

I see my friend Jessica highly recommends Maureen Furniss’s Animation Bible on her animation blog. It got me thinking about the most useful and/or inspirational animation books and resources available. So – here’s my first ‘best of’ blog list. It’s biased somewhat towards stopframe animation – even where the book is really aimed at drawn 2D […]

Saturday, March 14th, 2009

Fleet Foxes stop motion animation

Lovely to see this video of the Fleet Foxes’ White Winter Hymnal, featuring what looks like a specially commissioned piece of stopframe animation. With a semi-experienced eye, I can see that, while the production design is nice and the storyboard works well, the animation itself is pretty simple for the most part – no interaction […]

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

Stop Motion Magic in Exeter

Mayhem on Saturday morning at Animated Exeter, when I got my first taste of a full-day animation workshop for 12-15 year-olds. Disappointingly, despite the promise of Plasticine modelling in the brochure, workshop leader Josh vetoed it on the grounds that it would be “too messy”. Frankly I thought this was a bit too grown-up, until […]

Friday, February 20th, 2009

Puppeteers and CG animation

Before I got so tired that I had to go to sleep in the cinema at last weekend’s Animated Exeter, I ended up at a presentation of the techniques behind What’s Your News – a new combined CG animation/live action kids’ TV show from Nick Jr. Despite the irritating theme music, the show is actually […]

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

I survive my first animation workshop

Things I learned at Animated Exeter: When small boys create animation, they invariably make things explode. Don’t know why – it’s a DNA thing. Much evidence for this at the Animarathon workshop, where I acted as camera operator and assistant animator for a series of boys aged around 8-10 who opted for the “inventions that […]

Monday, February 9th, 2009

Exeter animation festival

One of the things I do when I’m not pretending to be a journalist is animation. I love stop-frame particularly (that’s Wallace & Gromit-style puppetry) and I managed to spend a very happy three months last summer on the Bristol Animation Course on a kind of sabbatical from work. I didn’t manage to blog about […]