News

I recently took on a commission that's a little exciting. I've finished the first part of the overall workload (unfortunately it's the smallest part) but it should be complete in around a month.
Unfortunately, due to the nature of the project, I can't reveal any of the details until it is made public. As soon as it is I will put all the material on here, but in the meantime, sit tight.

Book It

I just finished the final touches to my "Gilliam Animation", which I've tentatively titled Book - for want of a better name - and uploaded to Vimeo.

(You can see it here.)

It's taken me far too long to complete, what with laziness, tedium, losing a load of work and being put off and having to find the right live-action elements to include. But it's done.

It's almost ironic that the part of the process I knew the least about and had never attempted before, took me the least amount of time. I started this morning and finished a short while ago. (That was compositing the animation with the live footage of the book.)

I think it worked out well too, considering I took the lazy approach and avoided using After Effects and masks - instead winging it with the limited effects in Premiere and a prayer that the clumsy edits won't be noticeable during viewing. (I don't think they are.)

I'm actually incredibly pleased with how it's come out. Especially how well I managed to make digitally animated scans, combined with footage of a blank page, look like closeup shots of an actual book.
It was challenging given the inconsistent colouring of a lot of the source images (that I probably should've corrected at the first stage rather than last) and I ended up using a lot more and far different effects than I imagined when I first conceptualised it.
In particular not being able to chroma key the image backgrounds and having to add digital shadows to mimic those of the page-turn to make them more seamless.

Below are some screenshots to pique your interest/allow me to show off.

I had to write a load of nonsense to make the scenes look more like real book pages. They're not even complete sentences; there's nothing before the left edge of the shot.

I'm not going to pretend that I don't think I'm a genius for adding a layer of mirrored text to emulate the look of the adjoining page showing through the paper.

I think the overall effect is convincing. I'd believe this is a photo of a book page, and I KNOW that I made it.

 

Bloody Chamber

A staple of illustration courses, in particular my own, the assigned project was to look at Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, a series of reimaginings of classic fairytales by the likes of the Brothers Grimm et al.
For this particular venture I was assigned the tale The Werewolf (a loose adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood) and had to produce a series of, at least, six images chronicling the whole story.
I started by reading and breaking down the text into particularly noteworthy events and passages, that conjured the best visual imagery.

Initial sketches of passages whilst analysing the text.

A hand (or paw) is a big feature of the story, so I decided to focus on hands/feet/paws for the scenes I was illustrating. This provided a good way to convey the action in particular scenes without getting bogged down in replicating the text to the letter.
Also since the tale is quite bloody, and based on Little Red Riding Hood, it seemed fitting to have red as theme in the images. I decided the visuals should be black & white with a particular feature highlighted in red. This was easy for the violent scenes and subsequent featuring of blood, but did result is some rather contrived methods of incorporating red into the preceding images.

Preliminary layout roughs for chosen scenes:

Mildly contrived use of red for the knife handle and the claws of the wolf (also the ring in the previous photo), kinda appropriate for the sock, and obviously works fine for the blood.

Red works much better for the scenes after the wolf attack, because of the severed limb. Although, again, bit of a stretch with the spectacle frames.

Red on the stones for final image is questionable.

Quick summary of the story (spoilers): The protagonist is tasked with delivering a basket to her grandmother. She is also armed with a knife for protection en route. Whilst travelling she is confronted by a wolf, which then attacks her, but she is able to use her knife to cut off its paw. The wolf beats a hasty retreat and Red wipes the blood on her apron and wraps up the severed paw, for reasons. She eventually makes it to Grandma's where she finds said matriarch feverish and delirious in bed. On closer inspection she finds her grandmother's hand has been cut off. She goes to check on the paw and finds it has become a hand - complete with her grandmother's ring. She denounces her granny as a witch and a werewolf and the towns people chase the old lady into the street and stone her to death.