Aliens at the Hairdresser’s

Click on the picture to see a bit of character animation I did a while ago. The fantastic key poses were done by the almighty Toby Jackman, I did the stuff in between.

Cast for Man In a Cat is Revealed!

Kevin Eldon, Josie Long and Isabel Fay are on board for Man In A Cat and we’ll be recording next week! For the full article and extent of my fanaticism over Kevin Eldon go THIS WAY.

How Many Circles Does It Take To Work Out Yorkie?

… A lot.
This is just a fragment of the development gone into Yorkie, let alone Man In a Cat. On paper it doesn’t look like all the options were explored, but by God believe me we did! The seed of this whole story came from one picture, that one in the top left of him punching the inside the cat.

From there we had to work out what kind of story this was and how that was going to work best. That got really nauseating. I still think of all the possibilities and the knock on effects. Ian and I came up with so many scenarios, settings, relationships, arcs and loop-da-loops that we had twenty or so spin offs by the end.

After we had finally decided what was best for Yorkie’s future, I had to design him to fit with every aspect of the story perfectly. I don’t normally draw big round eyes, but apparently this is what this film called for. And scale! Don’t get me started! Even the shape of Yorkie’s skull is carefully considered.

This has been in development now for 3 YEARS, and I can finally say that I’m completely happy with it… I think… I do still like the idea that he’s Super Mario at, literally, the arse end of his career. I’ll try get some more bits and bobs of this kind up here, but the ideas phase was was so loose and wordy that it looks more like the random doodled conspiracy theories of Mel Gibson.

Thumbnails, Roughing, Clean up

A quick video to say hello, and to give you a little insight into how I fit Flash into the world of traditional animation.

Meet the Star – Mrs Cat

Whilst the original idea for ‘Man In A Cat’ stemmed from this silly pic (http://tinyurl.com/maninacatpic) the cat’s personality and mannerisms are pretty much stolen from my family’s own massively over weight cat, Lucy Hudson, aka Mrs Cat, aka Fatbum, aka Fluffy Slops, aka Liz.

So cue pointless cat video! My god, I’m actually contributing to this madness.

Rotoscoped Stop Motion Car

Some jerky test footage of the model car I modified, stop motion animated, then rotoscoped. Really I should have used a green screen as when the white bits of the car hit the white background I had to do a lot of guess work. Which kinda defeated the point.

I stole this technique from the way they animated the cars in 101 Dalmatians. They obvously did it a tiny bit better. Check how they did it here:

Animation Passes of Yorkie’s Reveal

First ‘behind the scenes’ from Man In A Cat from the new Man In A Cat dedicated YouTube channel.

It’s quite a complicated scene involving the rotoscoping of Michelle, the animation of the Cat, Yorkie, a Car, and a boom shot in homage to the famous shot in Citizen Kane:

Man In A Cat Diaries YouTube Channel

For fear of this becoming the Man In A Cat /Popcorn /Man In A Cat blog, we’ve set up a new YouTube channel dedicated to any behind the scenes interviews, ‘making of’s and in-progress linetests. Subscribe to it at: http://www.youtube.com/AllConsumingLove.

In other news, I got me a big lightbox! A lot of scenes could do with being cleaned up in A3 and I want something proper to draw on. Here’s the evolution of my (until now) homemade lightboxes. That little one is still my trusty companion. His name is Arthur. The red one is Gordon, named after the then Chancellor of the Exchequer. This new one is secondhand but I didn’t catch it’s name. I’ll have to take it to the vet to find out what sex it is. What do you think?

In unconfirmed news we have a very lovely producer attached, plus I’ll be sharing some new offices to get me out of the house and stop me becoming the summery equivalent of Jack Nicholson in the Shining. More on that later.

Man In A Cat is Commissioned!

We’re amazingly chuffed to say that out of over 130 proposals All Consuming Love (Man In A Cat) has impressed Screen WM and the UK Film Council enough to become one of the final 6 commissioned films! It’s not all that often you get to be completely self-indulgent on a project for 6 months, especially with the support and backing of some the most experienced people in the country.

So far we’ve had to be fairly hush hush about the development process, if only because we’d look like wankers if the film never actually took off, but now would be a nice time to say thanks to the people we’ve met and who have helped us get here.

The process up to getting commissioned has been fantastic. Before that development process it was getting hard to know what to do with the story. On the first day of development we met Kate Leys, who just with a few anecdotes and case examples, completely opened our eyes to the art of story telling. That was really empowering.

I also had the priveledge of bashing out ideas with Camilla Deacon of Lupus Films and about 15 other talented animators in London. That was really invigorating and affirmed a lot of what we’ve been learning over the last 3 months. Big thanks to The Square for seemingly unlimited chocolate, fruit, coffee and some quite spiffing toilets! Not unlimited toilets. That would be incredible… ANYWAY.

Simon Flynn and Dan Lawson from Screen WM, and June Goldrei on behalf of UK Film Council were in charge of commissioning the final films. They had the balls to see that this could work, and their notes and questions have made sure the story has developed in a very nurturing and understanding way.

Overall, we’re really thankful that we’ve been given the chance to make this unsual and edgy film, and that everyone involved were nuts enough to with the idea in the first place. Now we’ve got to hammer out the last few kinks in the script without desmantling the whole thing, get the look of it all completely pinned down, get some communal office space/therapy for me, and round up some amazing talent to help out with the project. All within the next couple of weeks if we’re to have a good chance of finishing this by the end of August! Ha ha ha!… Oh my God.

Man In A Cat’s Shortlisted for Funding

X-Factor styley, over 100 entries have been whittled down to 12. After the development process 6 of those will be commissioned. Next week we’ll be starting off with a day of discussion and workshops with the other shortlisters and Kate Leys. The development process will go on through till March when we’ll see… If all goes well and we get the green light, we’ll be chucking up regular updates here for you to track the progression of the film.

While ‘Man In A Cat has been talked about for a while, and the tester trailer alone has got over 850,000 views, it had to stand on ice for a while as our other projects and work relationships developed. But after having the storyboards on my wall for over a year it’ll be great to get some outside input. I’m particularly excited to see how the original story changes. While I love the idea of a Man, Woman, Cat love triangle (not like that), there’s still plenty that could be done on the script.

So let’s start from the beginning shall we? Here’s where the original idea taken from my sketchbook when I was 16, which was taken from Tony Lopes’ Odd Streak strip.

Huh, will yer look at that. Message in a Bottle was on the same page. Page 32 was obviously drinking well that year.