Island Folk

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A short prequel - "Tale of the Space Snake".

The Further Adventures of Island Folk - CLICK

The Benefits

...of being an out-of-work animator I can borrow CDs from the local library for 50p each, and so recently I got David Bowie/Changesbowie, The White Stripes/Elephant and Vampire Weekend's self-titled debut album, which led to me trying to do something but quite frankly I don't know what I was going for really.

Thanks to reelroulette.net my showreel has now been viewed nearly 300 times in just two months, this is possibly slightly skewed data though as each time someone visits my reelroulette page it autoplays the reel and counts as a view, nonetheless, I'm sure many more people have seen it than would have without such a site.

Last week I helped Jane out with a site for the tile shop she works for in High Wycombe, putting it together in Dreamweaver using the pieces that she'd designed prior to me getting involved, you can see it HERE.

I finally got round to reading both volumes of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen (having noticed the library only stocked the second, who wants to start half way through a story!!?).
I also had the library buy in the first of the Scott Pilgrim books which was a very amusing read and now I want to get the rest of them - if you've not heard of it it's about a boy who has to defeat his new girlfriend's 7 evil exes in order to date her.

Edgar "Shaun of the Dead" Wright is directing a film adaptation of it with Michael "Juno" Cera playing Pilgrim, click here for epic epicness.

Uncharted

Uncharted 1 & 2 are action-adventure, third-person games exclusively on the Playstation 3 similar to the Tomb Raider series and the Indiana Jones films.

They follow Nathan Drake (right) as he explores the globe in search of long forgotten artifacts hidden in ancient temples and cavernous tombs. They both use real historical figures with twists of true events to create exciting stories, the first focuses on Francis Drake's discovery of El Dorado with the second being about Marco Polo's mysterious lost fleet of ships.

In the extras there are behind the scenes videos that show how they used extensive motion-capture with the actual voice actors for the cut-scenes making both games very cinematic, Nolan North brings tremendous character to Nathan Drake with a rakish charm similar to Indiana Jones or Captain Mal (from Firefly).

I recommend that you try and play them both, not just for the gameplay but the story too and the multiplayer makes for great fun for playing online.

We have rebuilt him...

… www.christopherjameswright.co.uk is now stronger, faster and more powerful than you could possibly have imagined, visit it and discover work that is up to date and never before seen illustrations, enjoy!

Alphalettering

Created in Flash.

Unusually Long Gestating.

Here's a short piece that came from something I originally drew in my sketchbook in 2008, animated some time in 2009 using Flash and created the soundtrack with Logic in 2010.
Normally it doesn't take me this long to create such a short animation, I'm quite pleased I managed to remember enough of Logic too to make the soundtrack!

I've been working hard on my redesigned (easy to update!) website, and hope to get it online in the next week to replace my old Flash one from 2008, I also recently have found several more animation and design studios in London that I can apply to soon.

5 Second Projects + Showreel Critiques

GreyscaleGorilla is a site that I stumbled onto in my regular internet wandering and thought that it might be a good one to share with the rest of you. It's a site run by Nick Campbell, who works as a motion graphic designer - amongst other things - and has done so for six years, he posts about various techniques and has recorded many videos all viewable on his Vimeo page.
The two things that I found most interesting on his site were the firstly, Demo Reel Critiques and secondly the 5 Second Projects.

The Critiques are where he takes four or five submitted showreels per episode and watches them through, either on his own or aided by another industry professional. They take about ten minutes for each showreel, going through everything from the music used to the pieces chosen, and really explain why certain parts should be cut or even time altered so as to avoid the reel dragging. I recommend watching Episode 4 and Episode 5 as they are the ones where he isn't solely going through them and you get a bit better feedback as there's two of them to bounce comments off each other.

The 5SPs are great and so far he's done sixteen, each one gives you a new topic and a deadline for you to submit a new animation, there are now 'Official Rules' as some of the earlier attempts hadn't been too stringent on content it seems, this is what you have to obey in order to be eligible;

1. Submissions must be five seconds long!
2. Only animation is accepted. Video only submissions will not.
3. The animations has to do with the theme in some way.
4. Original Work only. Don’t cut out 5 seconds of already made work.
5. Link back to GreyScaleGorilla on your Vimeo Post

It's a great way of producing content for your showreel that isn't infringing on other people's copyright, only making five seconds means it doesn't have to take up heaps of your time if you don't want it to and by getting given a theme to work with you have a springboard for ideas, here's a list of the project themes from past months;
I'm Drunk/Something Good, Something Bad/Kick The Bucket/Old Video Games/Summer in Space/Upside-Down/Modern Monkey/Good Night/Circles and Spheres/Fast Food/Spooky Scary/Start with a Photo/Home Sweet Home/Milk and Cookies/Fail

The most recent was Self Portrait but the deadline was Feb 28th, so keep an on the site for the winners of that one and the next theme to be announced soon, and when there is something new then;
1. Create a five second animation based on the theme.
2. Upload your video to Vimeo. Don’t forget to add a link back to the theme's blog post.
3. Post a link to comment thread and he will add it to the Channel.

In the meantime, if any of this interests you then have a practice creating something short using the old themes, remember it's only 60 frames at 12fps or 125 frames at 25fps, simple!

Good luck and be creative!

Moving House

Tomorrow I'm going to turn 24.

Playing House.

This week I have been animating this little house
Maybe some time I'll show you what it moves like
Now I am going to keep working on it a bit more.

Creatures.

I've kinda ran out of sketchbooks at the moment, but in moving my desk around I discovered a couple of narrow rolls of thick paper which are great for laying across my desk and drawing on with my pen. After a couple of false starts I went back to an idea I'd tried out in my moleskine, these jagged-edged creatures were what resulted, with little symbols/badges for their possible habitats. Having scanned the lot in (and stitched them back together, below) I thought that with the new year I should learn some new skills and so the two images above show my initial attempts at digital colouring using a pen tablet, some paper textures and Photoshop.

In unrelated links: Mumford and Sons are my current band stuck on repeat.