Try it yourself.

It's been quite a productive week for my little self.

After a few days last week where NOTHING I drew looked right, things suddenly turned around. Very strange too, considering that my sudden burst of productivity came on the 11th, the day the Japanese earthquake and tsunami occurred. Apart from the fact that the whole thing is a horrible tragedy, I ended up beside myself with worry as Turnerface's sister has been teaching in Japan for the past few years and is still there currently (in fact, she is due to return home in only a matter of days). After a couple of hours Turnerface informed me that her sister is fine as she is a couple of hundred miles from the epicentre, but Turnerface was still trying to get in contact with all the friends she has in Japan. Then, when the tsunami warnings were extended to other countries I needed to find out if other people were okay: one of my best friends is from Taiwan so I made sure she knew about the disaster so she could check her family were alright and another of my friends is out working in the Philippines. Fortunately they were all fine, and after a tense couple of days, Turnerface finally heard back from all of her friends, all of whom are safe. A small mercy amongst the horror. I shall donate more to the relief effort soon, and it would be nice if you could too.
Needless to say, I was a bit jittery the whole of that Friday whilst waiting to hear back from people. I don't know whether it was the nervous energy that helped or what, but I produced my favourite bit of animation so far. On Monday I finished the sequence off. Here's a cleaned up linetest - the timing isn't exactly right but you get the gist:

The weekend was spent compositing and lip syncing. I also made a rather big decision considering the shading that I had intended to include. As you can see from previous shots I've uploaded, I was trying to put this kind of scruffy shading on my film to give it a bit of life and stop it from being flat. However, after working on backgrounds which I'm planning to make fairly textured and just taking in sheer time elements, I realised my film doesn't need the shading. In fact, it looks better without. So that was a nice, accomplished feeling decision. Here's the first shot I put together after this epiphany (yes, the background's being worked on):

At the moment, I need to get my dissertation out of the way and done because it's just a massive obstacle blocking the path to film completion. Plus, for someone who usually doesn't find writing too difficult, I'm really not enjoying writing this damned thing so the sooner it's gone, the better I will feel generally.
This week should be quite fun though, as I will be heading to the BAFTA Scotland New Talent Awards to lend my support particularly to the lovely Nuria Gonzalez-Blanco, whose nominated graduate film Christina and I coloured last year, and to my classmate Mr. Will Anderson, who is nominated in the Experimental/Art category. All this, and I'll be seeing Neil Buchanan and his hair metal band perform on Monday. That's right, Neil Buchanan of Art Attack fame. Exciting stuffs, no? As long as I don't spend my entire time laughing at a Vietnamese version of Pokémon Crystal... it's far too distracting. Keep away from that for a while and I'll be onto a winner.