Brand New Showreel!

I'm very proud to present my brand new 2D animation showreel!

Music: Some Kinda Shuffle by Don Nelson

 Shot Breakdown

Sunnyside Xmas Cards

Just before Christmas I designed a couple of animated banners for the Sunnyside Rural Trust site and used parts of them to come up with these two card designs, which were then sent out with the 2011 Calendar (+ Annual Report) that I also created in time for the holidays, pictures of the calendar soon!

Christmas Chickens

Sunnyside Rural Trust's Christmas themed banners for their website featuring the chickens having fun in the snow.







The calendar/annual report that I designed for them is going to print as the proof looks great, I've got to wait until next week to see it myself as I've been off this week.

Toasting Chickens

Short looping animation used on the Sunnyside Rural Trust website as a header gif from the start of November.

Beware the Chickens!

Animation made for Sunnyside Rural Trust (in Flash).
[View in fullscreen for all the little details!]

The Jam Process

Here's a part of the 5m30 video that I finished a few weeks ago and was screened at the 20th anniversary party of Sunnyside Rural Trust, it was the first part of the film I completed and it let me play with text masks as well as being a good reminder of how AfterEffects works!
More will be coming soon, just forgot about that pesky title-safe area for burning the film to DVD!

They're here...

The chickens have landed!

After a bit of a wait, some delays and mix-ups, the t-shirts I had previously shown have been printed!
There are two designs; Tree (wrap around image, black on white) and Grid (four colour image), which will be on sale soon, only 75 were printed in this first run and we'll see how they sell before reprinting.

Tree (on Medium)


Grid (on Large Youth)
[click t-shirts to view larger images]

Type of Jam

I have recently been working on a short film for Sunnyside Rural Trust, and have finished off a bit about their jam making process. Mostly using live-action footage, with simple hand-held panning shots of the allotments, I included text interacting with the environment with several key-framed masks (using Wes Anderson's font of choice; Futura). Once it's all done for the 20th Anniversary Celebrations in September it will most likely go up on their website and I shall link it from here too.

Hypothetical Clothing

Sunnyside Rural Trust are celebrating their 20th anniversary, and so with that to come in September we thought that simply selling vegetables, eggs and apple juice we should create something that would be available all year round.


Everyone had liked my sketches of the different sites and the illustrated vegetables too, so now that we've sourced some blank t-shirts and screen-printing facilities I got the task of coming up with some designs. Using a handy t-shirt template pack I found online, I created a couple of different potential shirt designs, including a 20th Anniversary logo on the back of the neck, since a huge logo isn't that appealing personally. We'll also be looking into making tote bags with similar designs, particularly using the vegetables, maybe colouring a few of them in too, but for now we're focusing on the shirts.

At the Northchurch site we have about 200 chickens who live in the orchard where we source our apples for the juice we sell, not to mention their eggs, and occasionally they like to roost in the branches which led me to this idea…


In addition to this I'm working on an LED lighting website, a short film about the history of the charity (including some animation) and utilising my illustrations in several different projects.

North by Northchurch

Northchurch Site, Berkhamsted

(Black Fineliner)

Sketch From Above

Sunnyside Activity Centre, Berkhamsted
(Black Fineliner)

About time...

Well, it had to happen eventually, bound to if you think about it long enough really... I have a job again.
Despite my best job-hunting efforts, all it took in the end was the secret list in the job centre's vaults of positions that were local and suitable. So for the foreseeable (read: 6 months) future I shall be working as a graphic/web designer, it's like a less Heat-worthy model/actress career.

And who was this company that willingly took me on board, well that would be Sunnyside Rural Trust, a mid-sized charity based in Berkhamsted (home of the UK's busiest Costa Coffee) who help adults with learning disabilities get out and about, working on the allotments and several acres of land they own as well as selling fresh produce in their shop and summer market stall.

At the moment I'm working on a website that is a side project/collaboration of the charity as well as trying to promote their eight-trained up PAT-testers by designing an interesting postcard (above) full of information on the back, not to mention a couple of hand-drawn plans depicting the two sites; to improve upon the simple coloured squares of Word it is currently made from.

So that's great that I get to work on several mini projects all as part of my job, and for the time being I'll mostly be working from home but they will be getting me my own laptop for when I come in to the office and as I'm doing just 25 hours a week I can still work on my own things as well as being available for other projects if needed.

Personal Logo

Having had my new website up for a while now I figured my blog needed a new header and so I'm going to try and put up a different variation on my name or the blog title (livingsketchbook) each week, or more frequently if I find myself with more ideas and I'll add them all into this post for preservation.

1. Jurassic Chris

2. Alien Chris
3. Doctor Chris
4. AT-AT Chris5. Chicken Chris