Ooh Look Mum I'm Famous!

This month, several of my photographs from my visit to Reeth Athletic AFC back in June, alongside some of my words about the trip, were featured in the fantastic Turnstiles Magazine. With it being an independent, super creative football publication, I was delighted to have contributed to it and support it by doing so. Football is far greater than the money infused Premier League and this magazine sheds light on many aspects of the game, right from the top tiers, to teams such as Reeth Athletic, which you might have never heard of until now!

It was also quite apt that I was featured in this one, being it the 'Yorkshire edition', because (fun fact) I was actually born in York!

Anyway, go grab yourselves a copy- you won't regret it...

New Clip (At Last)!

I finished my first full time animation gig on a feature at the beginning of October. Not that I didn’t enjoy the project (I did ENORMOUSLY- it was one of my best work related experiences up to this point), but I was looking forward to it finishing because it meant that I could start work on my own projects again- something I didn’t have an awful lot of time for during the production (I didn’t want to do too much more animating on evenings/ weekends as was cautious about burning out). Despite this, it took me a while to get going with this next piece.

I think it was a mixture of several things, such as firstly it felt a bit pointless/ directionless. Before working on the feature, I had been perfectly content with creating these ‘test’/ portfolio pieces, which I did in aid of enhancing my techniques, developing my style and experimenting with different ways of creating rotoscoped works. Though since stopping the feature (or at least in the first couple of weeks), it just felt pointless, because it felt that I was no longer working towards anything- I had basically achieved what I had always wanted to do up to that point and it felt like, ‘okay so I guess I made it, now what’.

Another reason was, because it felt like I needed to be creating my ‘best work ever’, or that this first piece ‘back’ so to speak needed to be the best thing I’ve made, especially after having worked on a feature. This, of course, put on an enormous amount of unnecessary self inflicted pressure, which also hampered me from carrying through a piece unless I knew it was going to turn out ‘perfect’. After a strict word with myself(!), I decided that this was nonsense and I needed to get back to creating work just for the fun of it, which is why I do what I do in the first place!

I decided to alleviate any pressure and just create a piece of work which I was to finish. Finishing is very important, because it shows you can carry something through. Sometimes I admittedly am not very good at, usually because of the high standards I put on myself, though it’s something I’m working to improve.

I chose a piece of footage which would allow me to experiment on, something which felt quite freeing/ loose and could have some fun with:

I selected this clip of a busy street (from the free stock footage site Pexels) as it ticked all the right boxes. At times, when animating, it did feel a bit of a slog and took a while to work up to working full days again. But suppose I did need a break as I was working super intensely for the best part of the year. It took a fair bit longer than what I would have liked/ hoped. Not that it matters anyway- it’s all arbitrary! 

First, I made a styleframe to test out several styles, but opted for the one with plain block colours as I knew that I’ve not really worked in that manner before (I often use outlines), so knew it would be a great clip to loosen me up with and do something slightly different. I also thought the bright, bold colour blocks would look really effective.

I used the filled stroke tool to block out each section of the character, such as hair, skin, trousers etc, all in my trademark bright colours (I change them to more realistic later- I use colours which contrast well with the footage or I won’t be able to see what I’m doing if the colour I’m using is too similar to the reference). Another way I could have done it would be to use a brush outline and later fill in via CTG. I decided against this, because I most likely would have been tempted to use the outline after all! Plus it would have taken longer.

Before recolouring the characters

Several days, hours of music and podcasts listened later, the first stage of my clip was complete. Yay! It was now time to add the texture. I know I didn’t do this in the initial styleframe, but while I was animating, I thought I wanted to give the clip a little extra something. So decided to liven up the whole thing with some hand-made grain. I just wanted to make it feel a little more ‘busy’. I did this by using one of the brushes under the ‘dirty shadows’ section and created five frames filling the whole screen and then repeated them the length of the clip. I then silhouetted the character out of the grainy footage and used the blend modes and reduced opacity to merge it with the characters. Again, there are plenty of ways to created such an effect, but I decided to do it this way!

I toyed with adding cast shadows and shading, but decided against it as I knew if I kept adding and adding things, I’d never move on from this piece and spend another week or more altering it, taking away time I could spend on another piece. I had already achieved what I wanted to, so why keep adding to it?

For the background, I just kept it super simple, by creating a water colour effect using the water colour brushes in TVPaint. I didn’t want the background to be pure white, but I didn’t want to clutter it either, conscious of not wanting to take the attention away from the characters. After a little trial and error, the water colour style background suited it best.

The whole thing took a whopping 82 hours, which initially sounds a lot, but considering it being a 16 second clip with 12 characters, plus also counting the time it took for me to create the textures and to colour change each character, it was actually a quite quick clip (wow, that’s hard to say out loud) to create.

So, what do I think? I do really like it: I think the colour block characters are very effective and it was definitely the kind of thing I was aiming for. I would say I would have liked a few more characters, but then there’s the whole ‘where do I stop’ thing and I feel for a test piece such as this, I had populated it enough to sort of ‘prove’ my experiment, if you like.

See you in the next one, oh yeah, and here’s the clip:

Returning to Pitchside

In the last couple of months or so, I’ve unfortunately not been all that active on the photography front. I had still been going to games, but as a spectator, rather than as a photographer. This has been down to a number of reasons (time or lack thereof so wouldn't be able to keep up with the editing, weather [starting to get a lot colder/ rainy-er] and a couple of other things of which I won’t go into), so it was nice to finally be able to have a weekend where I had set up two pitchside opportunities for myself.

One was a (men’s) Vanarama National League game, the other was a Women’s Super League game. I thought after a fairly long break that the photo’s would come out terrible, but I was actually really pleased with both sets.

The editing took longer than usual though- I edited both sets over the course of several days as I found it easier editing in bitesize chunks, rather than the daunting prospect of doing them all in one go. Hopefully this won’t be the case every week, but at least I got them done, right?!

Another sports photographer I know, going by the name of Onion Bag photography happened to be at the same WSL game on the Sunday and snapped this one of me. I love this picture and it’s nice to have a high quality image of me doing what I do (finally)!

Below are some from Stockport County 1-0 Aldershot Town FC. You can view that full set HERE.

And below those are the images from West Ham United Women 1-1 Birmingham City Women. The full set can be seen HERE.

Hopefully full sets will now be a weekly thing, so do keep an eye on my Flickr and Twitter for further uploads...

Horsing Around

As I had quite a few blank horse templates left over from my animation workshop I hosted back in early September, I decided to have a bit of fun with them.

There was one frame I did as an example for the workshop (I made some as examples to help people get inspiration) which I really liked and wanted to know how it might look if I did it for all twelve frames of the sequence:

It's a pattern I use quite a lot whenever I need to do things which involve a pattern- I am aware it's fairly time consuming, but I think it makes a pretty cool effect. You can click the above to make the image bigger, but in essence, it's thick, straight lines making a random several sided shapes, each filled in with thinner straight lines which follow the direction of one of the sides of the shape. I don't know how much sense that description makes, but not sure how else to describe it!

Anyway, I created the piece across a number of days, as doing lots of these in a row was quite hard going! I do love the end result and can assure you it was worth the time and effort, or at least for me it was. I really like how the shapes move within the horse, giving the piece some depth and movement. It was the effect I was after.

This was kind of a 'filler' piece while I work on a couple of other more 'serious' things- well, some rotoscoped pieces and also a short (animated) film which I'm writing/ directing- though more on that soon...

Here's the horse in motion:

Fly on the Wall

My most recent piece of embroidery. This was using one of the free DMC patterns- they have loads of cool designs on their website you can download and print off.

I wanted to try something more complex and more detailed (and bigger) than I've ever done before and I feel I satisfied that in making this piece. It was the first time of using long and short stitch, too. At first, I didn't feel it was working very well and I nearly gave up (what was I even thinking), but I made myself persist and I was actually really happy with the result. And WILL be using that stitch again! I legit need to get over the 'oh, it's not looking perfect right now, so I should stop' frame of mind, especially when I'm only half way (or not even that sometimes) through a piece. I do this with my animation all the time, too! I'd say it's better to finish a piece and it not be quite as perfect as you've imagined (it's usually better than you expect anyway), than have loads of unfinished pieces incase they don't end up 'perfect'. Must remember this going forward...

I'd say it's probably my best piece yet, I really like how neat it turned out and I love the mix of colours (even though some of these were 'off-piste' from the original pattern as I didn't have all of the exact thread numbers it advised, so I kind of had to add lib).

I've already started my next piece, one of my own designs this time, so watch this space!

I Worked on a Richard Linklater Film

Yes, the title you are reading is indeed correct- I did!! And I still can't believe it. A week ago today, I finished a 7.5 month full time gig on a feature film- 'Apollo 10 1/2', Richard Linklater's latest rotoscoped project.

His films, especially 'Waking Life' have been really influential to me and showed me a side of animation I didn't know existed and basically got me started on this whole animation thing way back when. So to now have worked on one of his films feels pretty surreal and never did I imagine I'd have the opportunity to do so. Half of me still thinks that this has been some mad kind of lucid dream!

The experience was an amazing one- I learned so much and worked with loads of super talented and cool people. At times it was challenging, but with such a supportive team of animators around me, I overcame any of the shots I was struggling with and believe it or not, picked up some self belief/ confidence along the way.

I can't wait for you all to be able to see it when it's released (it's gonna look amazing)- it should be on Netflix early next year, though when there is a date and/ or trailer, I'll definitely be posting that here!

Here is me with a j20 (don't drink), pictured shortly after finishing my last shot on the film. Sad that it's ended, but happy that it happened. Here's to the future and hopefully to working on more similar projects x

EbSynth #3

Those eagle-eyed out there will notice that I have removed the word 'test' between the word 'EbSynth' and the number in the title here. This is because I feel that I'm not really testing the software anymore, I am now just using it. I have had so much practise with it in my job, I am now competent with it, so I guess anything like this would be more of an experiment, rather than a test. Because I am experimenting with different mediums for the keyframes etc, rather than 'testing' the software. I hope that makes sense!

So for this piece, I had the urge to make a keyframe (which will translate into the final look of the animation) using felt tip pens. I've been wanting to do this for a while, but because of work and football, I haven't had that much time to make new roto outlines for a new piece. Therefore meaning I haven't been able to experiment with different techniques. I then thought, well whatevs, I'll just use some old outlines for now as I really wanted to make this clip! I had no intention of posting it anywhere anyway (probably b/c I thought it might turn out rubbish- jesus wept my confidence in my ability is literally rubbish: note to self- this needs work!), so thought that using old outlines wouldn't matter. (Spoiler alert: the piece came out great so I did end up posting it places and you know what? No one cancelled me for using outlines I had already used on a different project)!

I printed out one of the frames from the outlines, attached a piece of tracing paper (this was so the keyframe wouldn't have any of the outlines on) and coloured it in:

I then scanned this in, imported it into my TVPaint outlines file, adjusted it so it fitted within the outlines. Then put it through EbSynth. Note: this post isn't a tutorial in using EbSynth- but I might do one of those eventually. So apologies if this doesn't quite follow.

There wasn't loads to touch up on this piece actually, which I thought there might have been. This is because how I have been using EbSynth for work has been using keyframes/ styleframes created digitally, which is why I was a little uncertain how this result using an analogue medium would look. I needn't have worried.

And, I absolutely love the result, so definitely more analogue EbSynth stuff on the way...

xo

Collective Weekender Roundup

A week or so ago, you may remember I said I was hosting an animation workshop as part of the Collective Weekender happening in Preston. It was a four day mini arts/ creative festival which took place in various locations around the city celebrating the variety of talent and artists living in Preston. There were loads of workshops and performances open to the public and more importantly, all FREE. Free arts is something I am a big advocate of, because I feel arts should be accessible for all, regardless of your financial situation or background. There's so many barriers in the arts and I could go on, but that is probably for a whole other blog post!

Here's the result of what we created:

Unfortunately no one besides my boyfriend turned up for the event (which was still super fun as we had a brilliant afternoon drawing horses together!), but quite disappointing on the whole. I put a lot of planning and preparation into the workshop and in all honesty it was quite an anticlimax when I realised that I wasn't going to get any attendees. Perhaps it was because of timing- I mean a Thursday afternoon might not have been the best time for this kind of thing. Or maybe I didn't promote it enough (though there's only so much I can/ want to spam my IG/ Twitter accounts). Or perhaps lack of friends in Preston (maybe I should spend less time in my room animating and do more socialising). That thought scares me..!

Whatever the cause was, on sharing the final outcome from the workshop on social media after the event, I had a lot of positive feedback which makes me think that next time I do something like this, more people will show up. Plus over the course of the weekend I met a lot of other Preston creatives by attending several of the events, so I feel like I have since widened my network.

Me in my element. Look at that smile!

The other events I attended were the Cyanotype workshop with photographer Nicola Lewis-Dixon. This was really fun as I've never done one of these before (basically cameraless photography). I'd love to try this out more in my own time.

Cyanotype workshop

The writing workshop hosted by writer and filmmaker Su Moffat. I've not attended many writing workshops (or at least not as an adult- I remember a few when I was a kid) so I didn't quite know what to expect. Though Su was really good at encouraging ideas and offered some great tips/ prompts for improving creative writing and pulling out a story.

The other event I went to was the portrait painting workshop with artist Sally Dyer. I've not painted in a way which isn't abstract for quite a few years, so this was a fantastic workshop to get back into painting. Sally was great and offered as much or as little advice you needed or wanted. Unfortunately I didn't quite finish mine in the timeframe, but the workshop was really enjoyable and relaxing and has definitely inspired me to start painting again!

Still went for abstract colours though didn't I

If I had the time, I would have loved to have attended more of these events- they all sounded fantastic and from the photographs afterwards, they looked great, too! I really hope this momentum and community of creativity in Preston continues, because it actually feels really good and positive at the moment.

Talking of which, there is actually SO MUCH GOING ON IN PRESTON right now and it's all so cool!! If this ain't the place to be in the North West right now, I don't know where is.

We got a Wallace and Gromit bench installed:

Lancashire Encounter is happening right now. Head here for the line up. There's also a lot of top class poetry/ comedy/ performances coming up, hosted by Enjoy the Show events promotion. Preston has also just released it's 12 year cultural strategy- read more about that here.

So, see you in Preston then, yeah?

August Embroidery

Embroidery in August has been slightly slow (work, football and other stuff which happens in life have been obstacles), but I did get this one piece completed, which I'm really happy with. It's a gift for a friend who has recently given birth, so a colourful alphabet seemed an appropriate thing to sew for hanging in the baby's room. The design is pretty minimal, but I feel the simplicity of it combined with the bright colours (DMC threads are the best!) make it a really impactful piece.

Not only this, but I have also sorted out my sewing box, which was a HUGE MESS! Like threads tangled and cotton reels flying everywhere. Hopefully this will encourage me to embroider even more- it is something I love doing alongside animation and football as it's still creative/ productive, but also super relaxing and fun. Perhaps I should combine the above and make an embroidered football themed animation?! Maybe- I'm sure I'll write about it on here if I do...

Collective Weekender

I know I’ve been quite quiet on the animation front lately, BUT (and that’s a big one) I am hosting an animation workshop next Thursday (9th September) at The Larder.

The workshop is a drop in from 1-3pm, where you can be part of a BIG collaborative animation. Also, you don’t need any prior animation experience- just the enthusiasm to create! How cool is that?! All materials and assistance will be provided. Hot drinks and refreshments are available to be purchased at the venue- would recommend! 

This is part of the #collectiveweekender, a 4 day creative festival across Preston, celebrating the diversity of the creativity that goes on in and around Preston.

The events range from photography to poetry, from dance to drawing and EVERYTHING (yep, everything) in between!

To see a full list of events and to book your FREE places, click here. To see all the creatives involved, click here.

Hope to see some of you down there xo