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.

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.