Two Little Ducks

Well, hello again. Just a little update of what's going on before the degree show occurs.

Well, first of all, I turned 22. My mum was in Edinburgh visiting for my birthday and we had a rather good time. The night before my birthday (well, I say the night before, it had turned midnight and therefore was actually my birthday) my friends and I went to see Neil, my sound designer, play drums for one of his many bands which was much fun. I had to inform Neil that we had just been told we needed adjusted cuts of the films in four days time which wasn't fun but Neil, being the excellent chap he is, made the changes I asked for and everything was superb. Later on my birthday, my mum and I went on a charity shop raid and came away with loads of stuff. Methinks my favourite purchase was one that felt as though it was fate.
I had said to my mum and brother that a present I would rather like for my 22nd birthday would be two little ducks. This is because the bingo call for 22 is 'two little ducks' and therefore is the best bingo call, in my eyes. It was suggested that my brother should buy me the two little ducks seen as I seem to have a tradition of buying him duck and/or penguin themed presents for his birthday/Christmas.
Whilst we were on our charity shop raid, my mum and I stopped outside one of the charity shops and looked in the window. What should be there but two identical ducks and a larger duck in the same style. My mum naturally bought all of them for me (we said that the two little ducks are my brother and I whilst the larger duck is our mum). Here are the two little ones:

Two little ducks, with the two little ducks card that Christina gave me.

Twas fate, I tells thee.
Other than that, my mum and I went to two concerts in Glasgow that were the main part of my birthday present. One was to see the Groundhogs, whose lead singer and lead guitarist, the legendary Tony McPhee, had a severe stroke two years ago. I was blown away by how phenomenal his guitar playing remains. He was sensational. He only sung three of the songs as he still clearly struggles with speech; he lost the ability to speak when he first had the stroke. Considering that, he's come on leaps and bounds and although his singing was quite mumbly there were moments were you could hear his amazing gravelly voice shine through. At this point, I found everything rather bittersweet but the band then informed the crowd that they intend to release a new album soon. The material is all ready, they are just waiting on Tony's voice to be better for recording. So hazaar, he is confident he will be back to business soon! If you've never heard of the Groundhogs before (and I'm sure you probably haven't), you should check them out. The next day, we went to see Roger Hodgson, formerly of Supertramp. I didn't realise how steep the gallery seats in the Pavillion theatre are, so my crippling fear of heights and vertigo didn't take very long to kick in. Thankfully, Roger and the band were such an excellent distraction. The most wonderful thing about this gig was, just after the interval, Roger came on and informed the audience that he'd just found out he'd become a grandfather two hours previously and then played what he said was one of his favourite songs he's written, which is one of mine too. Congratulations to Roger!

Finally, on the music front, I am currently in the process of rehearsing for The Blind Tiger Burlesque: Vice Night with special guest Anna Fur Laxis. Before you ask, no, I will not be doing any burlesque dancing. I shall leave that to Charlesworth's older sister, who is the one behind the event. She needed a singer so I was asked to perform so that is what I shall be doing, singing about the cheery subject of whores! No better way to pass the time! This will be my first paid gig too, for every concert I've ever done has been with a choir or school so obviously I've never been paid. Should be pretty good!

So now that my obligatory music ramble is over, back to degree show stuff. Just under a week to go and it's getting pretty exciting. It would seem that eca have picked me to be the representative of Animation and be mentioned in the press:

• eca website
• The Trend Boutique

This stuff was also mentioned in a newspaper apparently, though I do not know which one. This is the Animation section on the official 2011 degree show website and here is We Are Animation, a website that the wonderful Sarah Keeling has put together for us, so be sure to check that out!

Finally, what we've been working towards: The Filmhouse!


Lots of links for you to enjoy there, so get to it! I'm going to get back to practicing my songs. Adieu!

Softly, As I Leave You

My degree is finished. That's an odd thing to say, but it's true so there we go. Here are a few things about the final days of said degree:

This is pretty much all the frames I drew for my film:

My attempt at being organised.

I've just tried to quickly count up all the frames I drew and methinks it comes to roughly 1149. Poor tree.

This was my desk at half 7am on the day of the hand-in:

Messy.

I'd stayed all night in the studio, dressed in my pyjamas at Sarah's suggestion (and what an excellent suggestion it was), finishing off my supporting work and such. Considering I'd been awake for over 30 hours (which was far less than some people, might I add), I was wide awake the whole time. Maybe I was running off adrenalin, who knows. I will say that when I got home after a celebratory drink I changed into my pyjamas, made myself a cup-a-soup and was about to watch Neighbours when I crashed out for 3 hours, woke up at about 11pm and crawled to bed, leaving both Neighbours and my cup-a-soup sadly neglected.

This was the book full of my supporting material:

Note how my finger is propping it closed. This is what happened without any propping:

It no shut. It wasn't even finished at this point. Somehow, after finishing 240-odd pages into the book, I managed to make it prop itself semi-closed. I'm not sure how I did this. Naturally, this book was from a charity shop and I placed all my work in it using photo corners, the idea being that all of my additions can be taken out so the book can still be read. The book was Principles of Immunology so if you're looking to read up about the subject, I may be able to help you out.
More book photos:

But that was over a week ago and I have been free since. I've been back in The Ham of Old for the past few days to celebrate my younger brother Morgan's 18th birthday, which was on the 21st. I insisted I has a picture taken with my best friend on this momentous day but he wasn't too keen on the idea, as you can tell:

He loves me really.

Morgie had a concert with the Oldham Youth Choir in the evening so he didn't have a choice in how he spent his birthday but the concert was wonderful and I enjoyed it immensely (and was super jealous that I wasn't back singing with them as they sung a couple of pieces that I've sung and adore: Locus Iste by Bruckner and the first movement of Vivaldi's Gloria - look them up!). Morgie was part of an 8 voice close harmony group dubbed The Candy Men and they were fantastic. Morgie was the lowest voice part in the group and was dubbed as the steadiest, rhythm-wise, but the conductor couldn't think of something to compare him to so I now call him "steady as a steady thing". I adore close harmony and that was definitely the most fun part of the evening, but methinks my favourite piece was the choir's performance of Softly, As I Leave You.
Now, if you've never heard the piece (you might have heard it played when Jack Duckworth died in Corrie), then you must (I can only find an arrangement for male voices. The version the choir sung was four part harmony for soprano/alto/tenor/bass):

Morgie and I think it's about an elderly couple and one of them is about to die and goes quietly before the other notices. It's such a beautifully moving piece and needless to say that the choir hadn't even finished singing the first line and I was already crying and continued to do so throughout the song. Mum was set off too. Just magical music making. Couldn't be more proud of my brother. What a wonderful eighteen year old he's turned out to be.

I'm going to go and relax now, as the three of us have just had a meal to celebrate birthday times (as my birthday is in a few days - I have often said that Morgan is my twin for all except the fact he is 3 years and 360 days younger than me) and I've eaten a lot of rice and drank a fair bit of wine. I am content.

Brain. Dead.

Whilst I take a break from drawing charity shop backgrounds (which is NOT fun), I shall ramble for a short while.

So, we're into the last 10 days of the project *cries*. I'm hoping I can pull everything together, but we shall see... I have finished my timed edit of the film so, in theory, all I need to do now is slot the remaining coloured frames and backgrounds in and voila! A film! We'll see about that...

Here's a shot I finished today, a nice pan of the charity shop:



Anywho, back to it... *slumps face down onto desk*

I can't think of a witty title today.

So we enter the final three weeks of the project.

I'm working on drawing the final shots of the film, and then to more compositing and working on backgrounds (oh joy of joys). Mother and Morgan are still doing a sterling job with the colouring. I owe them many a thank you present. Neil sent me an idea for the sound and the recurring motif for when Jay and Lori's toys are onscreen is so lovely! I'm very excited about it.

I feel I should show you some stuff, so here we go:

Here's a linetest of the dog from the second flashback. I'm surprised how well this turned out, I thought it was going to look far, far worse.

Here is Shot 28, with the old couple in the charity shop (the background for which will be added at some point). I rather like these two. I completely inadvertently ended up making them look a bit like my parents, to point where my mum now goes "Ooo, look! It's me!" if I show her stuff with this character in it.

Finally, proof I do work, taken by the lovely Charlesworth:

Now to go back to drawing and being paranoid that I have a mouse in my flat... I suppose it was naïve of me to think I could go the whole year without one appearing (that is if there is one...)

Lengthy post is lengthy.

I just realised I haven't posted anything here in a while and I thought I should rectify that. So bonsoir.

Well, what's been happening the past couple of weeks? I went home for a few days which was good fun and super useful. When I arrived back I needed to nip into my old primary school as my mum volunteers there a couple of days a week and she had my house keys. When I arrived my mum said she would just go and gather her things and we could go (twas the end of the school day when I arrived) but we could look at the bells before we left. Now, a couple of days beforehand, I had asked my mum if the school still had the old handbell they used to signify the end of breaktime as I need a bell ringing in my film when the charity shop door opens. My mum had then apparently asked one of my old teachers, Mrs. Robertshaw, if I could borrow this bell to which she said that I could borrow these:

MUST OWN. You can also see the old handbell in the top left.

How adorable are they?! An octave of rainbow bells! Being a musical person obsessed with rainbow/multi-coloured things I got very excited. I need to own my own set of these one day. They make such lovely sounds as well. The first one I tried was one of the red bells, which happened to be a low C and the tone of the note was gorgeous! I then preceded to spend fifteen minutes trying to decide which note I wanted to use (read: playing the bells because I was having so much fun), before being torn between low C and F. My mum then said she couldn't see a problem with me borrowing both and asked at reception if this was OK. There was no problem at all so I took both the low C and F bells, after having a quick chat with Mrs. Robertshaw and thanking her for being so kind.

C and F happen to be two of my favourite notes, the other being A. Yes, I have favourite notes...

So I recorded those and they sounded spiffy. Methinks I'm genuinely a bit overexcited for this one sound effect.
What else happened at home... went to the opticians (the optician who conducted my eyetest was also called Natasha... that's right, we're cool), learnt I have gotten more blind in my right eye and now have new eyeshields. Twas a BOGOF deal so I now have two pairs which I can swap and change: my brother and I said that whenever our mother's back is turned I should change the pair of glasses I'm wearing and not tell her, just to catch her out. Also, speaking of my brother, I recorded Morgan playing his clarinets for my soundtrack. He did some lovely improvisation for me whilst he practiced for his Grade 8 exam (which he got a Merit in, hazaar!).

Here is Morgan playing Bass Clarinet in a concert. He is most excellent.

My spiffing composer chap Neil and I have had a sit down and talked about how these recordings can be used and it's looking positive, so that's something. Can't wait to see what Neil comes up with!
Finishing off my time at home, I went to see a heavy metal band called Marseille at my local. One distinguishing feature this band has other than the fact that they were originally called AC/DC before some Aussies got a bit more famous than they did is that Neil Buchanan from Art Attack is their lead guitarist. You know, this fellow? This promised to be an awesome evening, even more so considering that quite a few of my friends and I partially have this chap to thank for our interest in art.
Now, first things first, the band are really good. My friends and I were by the bassist's side who was enjoying a bit of banter with us in between songs. When it came to their encore, whilst the singer and Neil were talking to the audience, the bassist turned to me and said "Do you want to come and sing with us?" I thought he was joking but it would seem that the members of the band each pick someone (i.e. a girl) to join them onstage and sing the chorus of the encore. So I ended up singing with Neil Buchanan's band. Here I am onstage with them:

My friend also videoed the whole thing. So bizarre yet completely awesome. We then met Neil:

Charlesworth and I with NEIL BUCHANAN.

So that was a lot of fun.

And then I returned to Edinburgh and the grim prospect that was my dissertation. Thankfully it is ALL OVER now. I made sure I handed in on April 1st as I enjoy the idea of my two hand-in days being April Fool's Day and Friday 13th May. If it all goes wrong, I can blame the dates. The Baftas were fun too, though neither Nuria nor Will won, but Anna who was in last year's graduating class with Nuria won Best Animation so congrats to her!
But now I am back to animating and this is good! Here are some linetests you can look at:

Methinks Mr. Runnicles has turned out quite well here, though this was NOT fun to animate. Ah well, as long as it's worth it.

Finally, to finish off this oh-so-lengthy ramble, here's the other drawing Turnerface asked me to do for her.

Before I shaded the face, Faustus looked like Paul Stanley from Kiss in Starchild mode without the star...


I'll shut up now.

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.

Filler Material.

Today I received a letter from my dear friend Eve, written on deli paper (she tends to write her letters when there are no customers in Subway). She also sent this lovely bookmark:

I decided to stick it on my desk to provide motivation. I also thought I'd document my desk space in the studio so I can look back on it with fond memories. So here's my desk...

Here's my model set for the charity shop, sat alongside my Serious Film Schedule of Seriousness. How I wish I could say that I'd stuck to said schedule and was not behind. I'd made it all scary looking to try and keep me on track... clearly hasn't worked. You can also see my second anniversary card from Charlesworth, my Facebook wife.

Here are some pencils telling you that it's my desk. They're works by an artist called Dalton Ghetti who seems to specialise in making sculptures at the end of pencils. Crazy mad skillz he has, either way. You can also see Frollo and The Schofe, who act as the 'If you don't do work, face the consequences' part of my desk.

The other side of my desk. I decided to put up pictures of things that inspire me (more or less my favourite things). You can see the HMV inspiration poster Charlesworth made for me, ReBoot, the Old Spice Man, Bruce Forsyth, Athelston from the Never Mind The Buzzcocks lineup, my mum and brother Morgan, Red Dwarf, Mike Scott of The Waterboys, Journey and Steve Perry Approving and Led Zeppelin, specifically John Bonham because I love him. Also, my fairy lights, because they are a necessity.

Lightbox with (gasp!) frames! I've been propping my lightbox up at an angle on a nice Chinese style box I bought for £2 from a charity shop, seen as I haven't put anything in it yet. I rather love my desktop background, which is a stupidly pretty still of Ram, Tron and Flynn from Tron (another one of my favourite things).


Sorry for this filler material. I have got several more shots done and they're coloured by the wonderful Mother and Morgan but I haven't edited them together yet. Work on the sound side of things will be underway soon as I met up with Neil, the lovely chap who has agreed to help me. We both agreed it would be quite nice if my brother agreed to play some clarinet for the soundtrack but he's a little reluctant (as I expected) so we'll have to see. Either way, I'm excited. I've really been looking forward to finally get the ball rolling the on the music side of things.

Finally, to continue the random, not-particularly-related-to-my-film stuff, here's a GIF I made tother day to motivate me:

You may have to click on it to make it work...

If giggling Jeff Bridges doesn't make everyone feel better about life, I don't know what will.