The Proof is in the Sketching (Book)!

Here is a bit of a pictoral update, with several combined pages of the swimming man character as different things (originally I had the idea that he could be the phobias, but this meant even more characters to be affected)... but you can see how easy he is to draw and that I enjoyed having him as a focus.


(clockwise from left) Climbing a tree/beanstalk,
drinking a massive mug of tea, ghostly swimmer, swim-sect, heavenly swimmer, bacteria (not pizza), a cat and a Halloween mask.


(clockwise from left) Balancing on stilts, feeling claustrophobic, look I like ghosts, beeeeees and fish, snow-swimmer, round head filled with drink, hello - my name is.... and a dendrophobe at work.

Super Swimmer says....

I haven't been on much lately because each time i try to load images it won't work, and apart from that I've not done a great deal more on Final project but now that I have a digital camera I will be doing more quick stop-motion nonsense once I get back to Norwich, especially now that I've moved my desk around and have more space to play!

I'm home for this week (got back last Saturday) and will go back by train either on Sunday or Monday in time for new year parties in Norwich... then recover and work, work, work!!!

Happy Holidays!

Just keep swimmin', just keep drawin'...

I have been doing work...honest, it's just I haven't made time for blogging about it, hopefully I will add images to this post soon, or make a new one, because I have been scanning in most of them so far.

I have focussed on the Swimming Man and have drawn various different costumes/situations/water-related objects for him.

In other news: I haven't done any Christmas shopping because shops are stupidly busy now, I've been doing things for the NSAD Christmas show to sell some images in little frames, see if anyone would buy them, and going on the internet a fair bit in between eating and drinking. So, not too much dissertation either... oops!

Anyway, I shall endeavour to upload some pictures of my current work, and maybe afx a little something or other soon too.

No Running! No Bombing! No Heavy Petting! No Dinosaurs!

So over the weekend I did some walking about town (which was a mistake, this close to Chrismas the shops are horrendous to be in) and renewed my library books at the Forum which I've had for 3 months now...... I shaved my beard off as it was getting to much and I haven't got round to buying a trimming set like Joseph/Dad.

I transcribed the interview with Lloyd Burr, which took forever, and it was quite interesting to listen and note down speech as it really is, because there are so many times when sentences aren't finished and words are cut off, so writing that down took a while but Hannah's done her half so we can share resources.

I haven't done a great deal of work on the Phobias film but I've done a couple of drawings, including this one just now of a T-Rex and a swimmer man, I like him, he could be a recurring, if not main, character... I like the simplicity and he's got no nose which might be another reason that I like him.

Last week of term started today! So, that sucks as well as being good, but I just want to stop time and do all my FMP or all my diss and then start it again, it's not fair that we have to write an essay, we're art students we make finger paintings!!!

Diss-errrr-tation

So, turns out that Jane had my dissertation stuff all along (because I had given it to her to carry on the Friday after my tutorial) and she eventually brought it in on Tuesday meaning I've had to do a fair bit to make up for that lost week... anyway, I've got started a bit more and finally read some of the books I got from the library and even made a bit of a start on a rough introduction.

We had a talk yesterday from Lloyd Burr who had worked on the Playstation 2 games 'The Getaway' and 'The Getaway: Black Monday' mainly in the animation/mo-cap areas, fortunately we were able to talk to him individually afterwards and this meant that Hannah and I could interview him about subjects relating to my dissertation. Now I just have to write this up and listen to it a couple of times and see what I can gain from both our questions, I've also got a book that's only just come back to the library 'Folk Devils and Moral Panic' which I'll get on with over the weekend.

Is it a monster.......?

Big Foot, Sasquatch, Peter, Hairy Wood Man - these are all names we call

these secretive creatures
of the forest, but maybe there's a reason why we never see them..... are they Agoraphobic?

(can't figure out why this image is getting squashed)

All creatures great and small!

This is a combination of two pages of animals, the right half was from when I got to Q and I had no phobia listed so thought that instead of leaving it blank I'd draw some random animals instead, which in turn might have the phobias.

Last night I got to the end with Z for Zoophobia (a fear of animals) and so drew some more creatures, including a monster and an antelope with a beard.

U is for Uranophobia

The fear of heaven.

The idea on this one is a guy dies and floats up to all these angels but then tries to fight his way back to earth, screaming.

Diss-argh-tation!!! (22/11-23/11)

Thursday
- Pounding headache from 2am to dawn
- Can hardly sleep
- Take painkillers
- Sleep through to midday
- Intend to do dissertation work
- Look for diss' stuff, can't find it....
- Go to college and look, can't find it
- Draw some animals, post them on the blog
- Have dinner and go on the internet
- Watch Mighty Boosh

Friday
- Get up relatively early
- Go on internet
- Look for diss' stuff/Tidy my room
- Come to college and ask about diss' stuff again
- Write this post.....now I'll look some more and then do FMP work
- Drew some angels and scanned them in
- Bought chocolate from the Textiles' girls
- Scanned/Coloured the angels
- Printed out cut out pieces of insects for stopmotion test
- Went to SU for a post-college drink

Today's post is brought to you by the letter.....

One of my favourite pages I've done so far, it is both fears of churches and insects. I might do this and some others using simple stop-motion technique, I can picture this one as a mock B-movie with insects terrorising model churches.

Simple creatures.

Instead of a Q page (since there weren't any Q phobias) I drew a bunch of animals instead, perhaps these can be the ones with the phobias instead of always having people, I'll colour them in soon, digitally I think.

Melomelissophobia

1. Melophobia = Fear of music.
2. Melissophobia = Fear of bees.

(The M part of the Phobia Alphabet.)

(17/11 - 21/11)

Saturday
- Woke up late
- Went to town
- Bought jeans

Sunday
- Woke up late (again)
- Timewasted on the internet
- Went to supermarket
- Roast-dinner party

Monday
- Final Project idea!!!
- Lots of drawing
- Quiet night in

Tuesday
- Get in early for tutorial with Suzie
- More drawing....
- Scanning and colouring
- Help a friend with video editing
- Eat at Wagamama's for the first time
- Watch Beowulf in 3D at the Odeon
- Stay up late talking on MSN

Wednesday
- Woke up late
- Dress smarter than usual
- Return library books to Forum and college
- Animate a silly drawing of a bee playing a trumpet
- Go to the SU at end of the day
- Shop for restocking my food cupboard

NB: waking up late for me is about 10am or so, normally I get up at 8am, a couple of seconds before my alarm.

About time.....

.....I got excited about an idea for this project.

Having been struggling with what to do that is funny but also structured so after talking with people, mainly Bianca, about it I thought more about a guy I drew doing different activities/sports and then this morning (in the shower, no less) I pictured an alphabetised list of things to do.
It also meant that I had a decent first page in my new sketchbook, which is the most important thing of course, all the letters of the alphabet in different hand-drawn fonts....after that I listed (with a little help from Wikipedia) over 26 sports, although not all the letters were as easy as others.
While looking up sports, Suzie suggested doing a list of phobias, which I liked the sound of even more than the sports. So once I had enough sports listed I searched again for phobias and found a superb selection that I can already picture making rather humourous little skits....like the Boots adverts.

From Summer to Autumn...

In preparation for my final year and the major project I would be undertaking I used a sketchbook over the summer holidays drawing random things, from the sights in the French Alps to silly ideas in my head.

At one point I drew a lot of heads, trying to figure out a style that I could easily replicate, and this was when I thought about a racing idea, a driving race probably. I planned to use simple, hand-drawn, black line-art cut out digitally and placed into photographed backgrounds...I was unsure of the technique and whether it would look any good, but took hundreds of plate photographs with this idea in mind.
It looked alright, but I couldn't think of enough of a story to go with the racing idea and so when I returned from holiday it was soon dropped in favour of ghosts and skulls...

This was mainly a material and technique experiment for me, but I did enjoy it despite there being no end in sight. I would love to try and use (brown) paper cut-out in a stop motion way, perhaps having these ghosts drifting about in real world environments.
Starting back at college though I was forced to realise the futility of this avenue and moved on once again.

Firstly....

I am Chris, I am a third-year animation student at NSAD in Norwich, UK, and this blog will show my progression throughout the year as I work on my Final Major Project.

As of yet I am still unsure as to what path this will take but I have done a fair amount of drawing already in an attempt to come up with possible ideas but nothing has really grabbed me.

I shall be including test animations, random sketches and written entries about how things are progressing, hopefully it will be a good account that will show how the project evolves over the year.