I'm so dizzy, my head is spinning...

My mum and brother are doing a rather good job colouring frames, don't you think?

I shall colour the eyes later. They are not composed entirely of flesh.

I tried to churn out as much animation as I could for them seen as they were on half term week and were asking for as much as possible. I got three shots done for them and the frame above is from one of the shots. All animation done thus far is coloured (but not shaded... that's my domain...). Shots 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 and 10 are all animated now so I've got a fair part of the first scene done. Now I'm starting to get to the shots that require more complex backgrounds. I hate backgrounds. Hopefully I'll be able to get my head round it all quickly and painlessly... I'm working on a panoramic background for a wide pan in the charity shop, using photographs I took of my model set. This is it thus far:

Still needs work. Like I say, backgrounds hurt my head.

I'm worried my work my suffer a little at the moment as I keep going dizzy. I've long suffered from dizziness and fainting but now I'm going dizzy in circumstances I never have before, leaving me very tired, weak and completely unable to concentrate, which is worrying. I'm hoping that I just need stronger lens for my glasses. I'm due an eye test so hopefully I'll be able to get an appointment in the next couple of weeks. Methinks a trip to the doctor's won't go amiss either... sigh.

This is the end to an otherwise fun week. Charlesworth and I had a smashing time helping each other not procrastinate, watching Neighbours with our Paul Robinson 'I Like Me' mugs and obsessing over Journey, Jeff Bridges and Weebl's Stuff. We saw True Grit on Wednesday which lived up to our expectations (we had been excited about it for weeks) and continued the day by going to a pub called Lebowski's where I was served a drink with two ice cubes stuck together. I christened this The Jeff Bridges Bridge:

You should know by now that Charlesworth and I have obsessive personalities and proud. We also made many pointless lists, as we like lists.

Ninja skills need improvement.

My lovely colouring minions (aka my mother and brother, Morgan) have sent me back the first shot they've completed and it must be said they've done an excellent job! I'm hoping they can keep this up as it would be a massive help to me...

Twas a Café Crawl Saturday today, though I say 'café crawl'... we only went to one Starbucks and stayed there for around four and a half hours. I drew a couple of folks (in theory I should be excellent at drawing people eating and drinking soon) but I gave up after I started drawing this one guy and he cottoned onto the fact that I was drawing him very quickly. Even when I pretended to draw Christina (who was very close to him in my line of sight) it still wasn't enough to stop him looking round every few minutes to make sure I wasn't looking at him... that or he was just staring at me for no good reason. Either way, the drawing of him looks nothing like, naturally. Soooo I just drew some random stuff in the meantime. I've been faffing about with graphite and pencil drawings recently, as well as scanning graphite drawings and adding colour in Photoshop. Here's the results of today's doodles:

I don't know where this one appeared from within the recesses of my mind but ah well. I might faff about some more with this later but it'll do for the time being.

Here's dear ol' Jay and Lori. Methinks that Lori is a linguist; I can imagine her wanting to master many a language so she can be a true polyglot. Jay, however, is more of a biologist. He's definitely doing some kind of Biology course at university. Don't know what though, I know he's unsure as to what he wants to do for a career. He's laid back like that. He also cannot get a grip on language like Lori can.

As a pleasant distraction from drawing Jay and Lori over and over again (though I do love them really), my one of my best friends, Sarah Turner (who shall almost always be referred to as Turnerface), asked me to draw my interpretation of the two characters in her project so she can show examples of different styles. Her work is based on the Faust tale so she's asked me to draw Faustus and Mephistopheles. So far, I've drawn Mephistopheles. Faustus shall have to wait a little while longer whilst I get some more shots drawn out.

 

Mephistopheles, original pencil sketch

 

Mephistopheles, coloured

Charlesworth shall be staying with me for a few days this coming week which I am rather excited about. We shall motivate each other to work whilst having great amounts of fun in a Journey/Neighbours daze. Plus we shall be seeing True Grit and therefore seeing JEFF BRIDGES. Hells yes.

I hate my vacuum cleaner.

I have a flat inspection tomorrow, so I have tidied and cleaned. However, despite vacuuming my floor for TWENTY MINUTES, you can't tell the difference. The shit little wheely vacuum cleaner this flat has is beyond pathetic. I would buy my own vacuum cleaner and take it with me once I move out if I had the money. Plus, despite using rubber gloves, my hands still smell of bleach. Ugh.

Anywho, filmy stuffs! Methinks I have settled on a title for the film, gasp! I'm going for Donated Memories. Now, if you think this is rubbish, believe me this is the least naff sounding of all the possibilities I came up with. And there were MANY, MANY possibilities. My brother was the one who came up with Donated Memories, though he said Donated Memories: The Past Returns so it sounds like some kind of Star Wars epic. I told him that that would be the name of a sequel, to which my brother said that I must make the sequel just so the title can exist properly.

Dissertation work had been eating up most of my time this past week but I've got a couple of shots sorted. This be Shot 4 and 5:

Considering the transition between the shots was done solely in Photoshop at 2 in the morning, I'm rather pleased with it.

I'm about to eat delicious looking ice cream with the wonderful Christina. We shall do Valentines with style.

I've always had a habit of liking the villains more in Disney films

Horrible gale force winds and rain + pulled muscle in foot = not being able to walk very fast and missed train; fail, me. All trains heading to Manchester getting gradually more and more delayed; fail, train service.
Anywho, I'm back in The Ham of Old now having a natter with my mother about the 50 animated Disney features and a rather rubbish list ranking them in order. NO ONE should rank Home on the Range higher than Pocahontas. No one should rank Home on the Range higher than anything really. That film is rubbish. I'll shush now before I ramble about this for far too long. Anyone who knows me well enough will know that my favourite Disney film is The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It is glorious and would be even better if it didn't have the fat, annoying gargoyle in it and if the other two gargoyles didn't sing. Just give Frollo more airtime. More Frollo airtime would mean more Tony Jay voice acting and this is GOOD.

On my way to Preston where I needed to change trains I drew this lil thing:

It's not the best quality image in the world as I took it with my camera as opposed to scanning it (our scanner at home refuses to work), but you get the idea. I particularly love drawing Young Lori. She's sweet.


Another shot is ready and waiting to be coloured. Here's the linetest for part of it:

I ended up redrawing half of this because Lori's hand grew in size from acceptable to GINORMOUS by the time she reached the right-hand side of the screen, and that just won't do. Methinks this works though.

Animation work is going to have to take a slight backseat until the 2000 word section of my dissertation is handed in on Thursday... ugh.