This splash on the latest stop-motion animation short from the UK’s favourite Oscar-winning, Bristol-based animation studio manages to spell the company’s name wrong not just once, but all three times it is mentioned. Oh well, it was at least consistent. And it wasn’t in the headline or standfirst. Just for the record, it’s Aardman with […]
I’m off to glamorous Rotterdam this week to do some stop frame animation with my good friend Arnold. He’s very talented (much more so than me), though obviously as he’s Dutch he’s a bit bonkers. Evidence of this can be found in his showreel here. As a result, journalism and digital media are probably not […]
The first in a no doubt ongoing series, (which also happens to combine my hobby and my day job). A bout of insomnia had me watching Channel 4 at an ungodly hour this morning. I managed to catch the second half of Psyche and Eros – an animated retelling of the ancient Greek myth (god […]
I see my friend Jessica highly recommends Maureen Furniss’s Animation Bible on her animation blog. It got me thinking about the most useful and/or inspirational animation books and resources available. So – here’s my first ‘best of’ blog list. It’s biased somewhat towards stopframe animation – even where the book is really aimed at drawn 2D […]
Lovely to see this video of the Fleet Foxes’ White Winter Hymnal, featuring what looks like a specially commissioned piece of stopframe animation. With a semi-experienced eye, I can see that, while the production design is nice and the storyboard works well, the animation itself is pretty simple for the most part – no interaction […]
Mayhem on Saturday morning at Animated Exeter, when I got my first taste of a full-day animation workshop for 12-15 year-olds. Disappointingly, despite the promise of Plasticine modelling in the brochure, workshop leader Josh vetoed it on the grounds that it would be “too messy”. Frankly I thought this was a bit too grown-up, until […]
Before I got so tired that I had to go to sleep in the cinema at last weekend’s Animated Exeter, I ended up at a presentation of the techniques behind What’s Your News – a new combined CG animation/live action kids’ TV show from Nick Jr. Despite the irritating theme music, the show is actually […]
Things I learned at Animated Exeter: When small boys create animation, they invariably make things explode. Don’t know why – it’s a DNA thing. Much evidence for this at the Animarathon workshop, where I acted as camera operator and assistant animator for a series of boys aged around 8-10 who opted for the “inventions that […]
Just back from Animated Exeter, where I spent the weekend helping kids do cut-out animation in the Animarathon workshop and generally stood around in a fetching light blue T-shirt being “young and animated” as they put it, wandered around with a clipboard and helped out with ushering and taking tickets. Of the two, the workshop […]
One of the things I do when I’m not pretending to be a journalist is animation. I love stop-frame particularly (that’s Wallace & Gromit-style puppetry) and I managed to spend a very happy three months last summer on the Bristol Animation Course on a kind of sabbatical from work. I didn’t manage to blog about […]