Embroidered Animation (another)!!

Remember in my last post I said I had been working on a super secret embroidery/ animation project? OK, well, I have finally finished it! Ta-da!

A 21 frame embroidery/ animation/ skateboarding mashup. So basically all of my favourite things combined into one 2 second clip. Was it worth it? Well kind of…

I must admit, I felt the result was a little anticlimactic or at least on having immediately finished it. I think because I had spent so long creating the piece, I thought I’d be super ‘wowed’ by it on completion, but for some reason it fell a little flat. Though that is often a quite common feeling after any big project (or at least in my experience): like when it’s done, a random all-singing all-dancing fanfare isn’t going to suddenly appear and you’re not going to get your favourite producer calling you up out the blue asking if you want funding for a feature film (though one can dream). In reality, you’ve just finished a piece of work and then the day just carries on!

Perhaps it’s a sense of a loss/ emptiness (of finishing the project) juxtaposed with expectation vs result, which is why I felt a little underwhelmed. But also, because it’s not my first embroidered animation, I have something to compare it to and on the whole, I feel the first one I did was much more impactful. Maybe because the previous one was fully hand stitched, whilst this one was only partly hand stitched, part mixed media, so not quite as impressive?

I’m not saying I dislike it, not at all and I am extremely proud of the accomplishment- to hand stitch 21 frames of animation is quite a feat and if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. I think because the sewing is neat, it perhaps looks too ‘clean’ and not ‘hand made’ enough for my liking. Especially when viewed on a phone screen- I feel the detail disappears. You can’t really tell it is sewn unless you play it frame by frame (or watch it on desktop), so it feels like all the hours I spent hand stitching each frame have kind of got lost. And as an animated clip itself (say if it wasn’t sewn), it’s a little straightforward.

I also think the choice of using plain white fabric wasn’t the best for the background- because once scanned in, the texture of the fabric is so blown out. This of course I wasn’t to know going into the project, but perhaps I could have thought ahead and done a scan test of the fabric to see how it might look. Anyway, what good is an experiment such as this if you don’t learn anything from it? I didn’t want to recreate what I did previously because I had already done that, so here I was trying something different, which is (often) always the point of these small clips I make. Perhaps the next one I try will just be stitched outlines- though that might be a short while off, as I’m pretty deep into creating my next narrative short…

Below are a few of the frames before I edited them in post: outlines, hair and shoes were all hand stitched; for the jeans I scanned in some denim and added it in post, the t-shirt and wheels I coloured with gel pens on the fabric and everything else coloured in post and used a ‘multiply’ blend mode, so the texture of the fabric showed through.

Several of the frames

Close up

Final comp image

Update 1/7/24 (incredibly boring post title)

Goooood morning! Looks like I skipped the whole of June on here- too busy to blog- I guess that’s a good thing though, right?! So what have I been busy with? Another assistant editor contract, skateboarding, attending Sheffield DocFest, watching films, a few little trips away, watching even more films, watching cricket, continuing my super secret embroidery project as alluded to in this post aaaaand storyboarding my next short film. I’m sure I missed out a few things there, too!

When I don’t have anything specific to blog about- I.e. if I haven’t finished any of the projects I’m working on yet, I don’t tend to do ‘update’ blog posts until after a while (like this), because I find that I don’t have much of value to say if I keep up my blog each week purely for the sake of it. Plus it takes valuable time away from the project(s) in hand. Alongside not wanting to give away too many ‘spoilers’, so when I reveal the project once complete, it will feel fresher. Of course this depends what kind of project it is- I don’t mind giving work in progress updates of my longer form projects such as the short films I make etc.

One of the reasons that I blog (other than to create a record of my creative endeavours) is often in retrospective so I can analyse (I’m a sucker for a good bit of analysis) and reflect on what I have created, in order to develop my creative practice (and my personal growth). If a project is not yet finished, then I don’t like to go into depth on it, because you can’t tell whether you have met your aims or ambitions with said project if it’s not yet complete. I’m sure any creatives reading this will know not to cast judgment on your own work whilst it’s still a work in progress because 99% of the time you will probably hate it! When it’s finished, this percentage will dramatically drop and given even more time/ distance away from the project, it will drop further and you will be able to make more measured and constructive comments about your work. And if you still hate it at this stage, then you can hopefully at the very least have learnt something from it, whether that be about your creative practice or yourself as a person.

But as it’s been a while, I did want to put something on here to say I’m still chipping away at my work- the storyboard is almost finished- well the majority of the panels have been drawn. Then I ‘just’ need to turn it into an animatic. After that stage, I’ll give more of a ‘proper’ blog post/ update about it- whereas this is more of a ‘check in’/ hello-please-dont-forget-that-I-exist post! So maybe expect something else towards the end of this month? I think my embroidery project should be done around that time too, so expect something on that as well. Plus, I have a painting thing in the works too. And maybe will try and squeeze in some more football photography if I find the time, so will post the results on here if I manage to get out with my camera at all. Just a few bits lined up for July then!! I also realised that I haven’t done a deep dive post on here about skateboarding before, so perhaps expect that at some point as well? I feel that would be appropriate being as it occupies 99.9% of my headspace at any one time! So, yeah, lots going on. What are you working on? Anything exciting? Hope so!

Here’s a pic of my hand drawing my storyboard with myself as reference:

See you in the next one, be good xo

Embroidery Test

I’m about to embark on another short animated embroidery piece, though this time using mixed media rather than being fully embroidered. The reason: the last one I did was ‘just’ a 12 frame walk cycle which I felt I could embroider in full, in a (reasonably) timely fashion. However, this latest piece is 22 frames and is slightly more detailed. I didn’t want to give up on this piece before starting by being put off with the amount of frames and the detail involved, but I knew that embroidering it in full would just be too much. After all, this is meant to be a fun little side project and something which I don’t want to dedicate 100% of my time to at this point. So I was thinking of a few workarounds.

As well as the reasons listed above, I also thought there was little point in using full embroidery again as I had already done that now. I know what it looks like and I know that it works- so why create something similar? What would I learn or gain from that? Very little… And then the idea of mixed media popped into my head- I can’t remember how or why (perhaps from the embroidery sub-Reddit maybe? I love having a nosey on there to get fresh inspiration and to see all the cool projects emerging from this community). Regardless of how the idea got there, I have now decided how I’m going to produce this next piece.

It’s the first time I’m working in mixed media for embroidery (I think, or at least in recent times), so I wanted to test out a few techniques first to see what works (or doesn’t) and how I might go about it. Paint was my initial idea, but then I thought what about pens of some kind? They’re less messy, don’t need much drying time and I already have them readily available- my stationary collection is prettttyyyy big!

So I tested out several different types of pens to see which would look best on the fabric and if any would bleed, dry weirdly or anything else that crops up! In the end, it actually turned out that good old gel pens worked the best. I only tried them on a whim towards the end of my experiments. They drew on the fabric well, they don’t run/ bleed and the fabric retained the colours nicely (looked nice and vibrant).

For this project, I bought a cotton bedsheet to use as my fabric as I need a fair amount. I thought bedding would be a perfect solution to getting a good amount of fabric at a reasonable price. Better so if I had an old one which I could up-cycle, therefore being more environmentally friendly, but unfortunately I didn’t have anything which fitted the bill this time around. The bedding is a lot thinner/ delicate feeling than the fabric I usually use, which is much more robust. The fabric also has a tighter weave, so I wanted to test out how that felt, before I dive straight in. I also wanted to get a feel for stitching next to the inked sections, as I have never tried it before. Another reason for using the bedding was that I actually wanted something with a tighter weave as it’s less ‘gap-py’ and would make for a smoother final result.

I tested out the main three stitches I use: satin stitch (both single and double stranded), back stitch and long/ short stitch. It definitely felt different embroidering on this fabric, though I’m sure I’ll soon get used to it. The main thing I found was that because the bedding material is much more lightweight, using single stranded thread worked a lot better for all the stitches, rather than the double strand which I usually use on my regular fabric. The double strand just felt too ‘heavy’. The single strand took a little longer to sew as it filled up the spaces slower due to less thread, but I felt the overall result was preferable, so that is how I’m going to progress with this… See you in about 8 months for an update!!

Below is the test piece- just a load of circles in different pens and stitches!

Animation Project Update

The short story: I have decided to put my feature film on pause for the time being and make a short film instead.

The long story: I completed my last short film, ‘Bear’ at the end of September 2022, so coming up to two years ago now. I have not created much animated work in the interim either- well a few small test clips here and there, but nothing major and to be honest, it’s really rather agonising. When I have a project on the go I am at my happiest, so inevitably I’m bursting to make something of my own again.

I started developing up some ideas for my feature and wrote a few outlines etc, but most of the ideas I was coming up with lent themselves towards the short film format instead. Maybe this is because I’ve concentrated on that medium for so long and wasn’t allowing myself to think bigger or longer. Or maybe it’s some other reason and/ or a mixture of things (most likely). But regardless, I am shelving it for the time being. I am desperate to satisfy my creative urge to make another film and I feel a feature won’t do that justice at this point in my life, because the time it will take to create. I can likely have the short made in around about a year, whereas the feature will take several. Meaning I won’t have created something complete for, say 3-5 years since finishing up on ‘Bear’. And that doesn’t sit well with me! So that’s where my head is at now with what I’m doing.

I have an idea for my short which I’m super excited about. I won’t be giving a synopsis away just yet, but the film is quite personal (like most of my projects- animation is my way of expressing myself and I find it hard to work on projects which don’t do that). Though the working title is ‘I Wish I was There’.

So far, I have scripted the film- though unconventionally and also started the storyboarding process. To be honest I was having a hard time writing it in the usual script format- you know where you write INT/ EXT WHATEVER LOCATION and it needs to be in a certain font and in a certain layout. I found this extremely restricting. The story was hard to make flow because of the constraints in how it “needed" to be written. And every time I sat down to write it, I felt really put off and unenthused. So I scrapped my Fade In script doc and started writing it afresh in Google Docs. And it came to me so much easier. I didn’t feel trapped and I could write what I wanted without feeling the need to satisfy some arbitrary age-old format. It was much easier to visualise the story this way. I had never questioned it before, but realising I don’t have to follow these rules especially on a personal project, I doubt I’ll go back to writing scripts in the conventional format. Everyones brain works differently, so why should we all have to squeeze ourselves into boxes that don’t fit.

To help me develop my story further, I used the storyboarding process in tandem with my written document. I thumb-nailed each shot and section, coming up with new ideas as I went, which worked better than the ones I had written. It allowed me to see my script as a film in the visual manner that it is intended and easily weed out what was/ wasn’t working so well. I have a complete draft now- which of course needs refining and iterating, but I have something to work with. I’m sure if I continued in the traditional script writing format, I’d still be struggling for ideas and probably wouldn’t have got so far with my story.

I’m excited to start drawing the storyboard up from thumbnails into clean panels and turning it into an animatic- something I have never done with my own projects. For the last almost two years, I have worked assembling animatics for a TV series and I can really see how valuable they are to the filmmaking process. It’s essentially another rewrite of the script and it allows you to see what scenes work (or don’t), if the story holds up, what can be added or taken away and so on. I always thought because I work in rotoscope, a storyboard would just be sufficient, because it was akin to creating a live action film (or at least in the first instance). But as I found out on ‘Bear’, not everything in the storyboard translated to my live action edit of the film, meaning lots was cut and I had essentially wasted precious shoot time which I could have used better in other ways. I also think that using the live action footage as the animatic edit made it difficult for the people I asked for feedback off to visualise what was going on, because the backgrounds were all pretty much just the same.

So, I’m thinking an animatic might be a really useful way of seeing my film before actually seeing my film, if that makes sense! I think as well, it’s much more important in this one, because I don’t have a traditional script as explained above, so it is also acting as part of the writing process. Every film I make is different and therefore requires a different approach in creating it. Though so far I am really liking this way of making my film. It feels like I’m getting stuck in right from the start and it’s suiting my preferred way of working. I’m definitely more of a visual person, so being able to script out my film in the means of images is a work style I feel I might continue using in the future. Maybe if a future film I make requires a traditional script for the purposes of funding or something, I could do all this and then write the script from the animatic, because I’ll just be copying what I see off screen rather than creating my story from the start in that rigid way. PSA for anyone who needs it: there’s more than one way of writing your film: if the ‘normal’ way isn’t working, then try something that does! Though obviously don’t listen to that if you have to do it for an assignment or something, but maybe for your personal projects…

Right, as usual I have rambled on and outstayed my welcome on my own blog. So I’m out of here for now, but I am mega excited about this project and can’t wait to share more about the process on here. To follow my progress for this short, check the ‘Animated Short 2’ tag on the sidebar where everything to do with this short will be posted. Regular readers will know that it is not the second short film I have made, but it’s the second I will have written about in detail on here!

Also, sorry for the lack of pictures in this blog- quite ironic for a visual person, I know! So have an unrelated pic of a recent bowling alley I went to and me skateboarding:

See you in the next one xo

Road to Wembley- COMPLETE!!

WE DID IT!! After a couple of failed attempts since the 19/20 season (which are also documented on this blog), myself and my parter Ben finally completed our ‘Road to Wembley’ quest: attending a match from each round of the Women’s FA Cup! And what an incredible journey- taking in games from grass roots in the early rounds right through to fully professional set ups in the later stages and everything in between. The FA Cup provided us with a real cross section of the football this country has to offer, which is the beauty of the competition and why it’s the best competition in football (I say that as fact)! Each match day experience was enriching in it’s own right, whether that was in front of 273 spectators as Kiveton Park Ladies took on SJR Worksop Women in the Second Round Qualifying or in front of 18,000+ fans at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium at Semi Final stage.

2534 was our total miles travelled (house to stadium by car), the longest round trip being 418 miles (Crawley Town FC for Brighton vs Man Utd) and the nearest at just 20 miles was Kiveton. We saw 45 goals scored and number of photos taken was far too many to count!

The final at Wembley was incredible- the crowd of 76,082 was the highest attended game I have ever watched and the atmosphere was great! It rounded off our FA Cup journey extremely well. A strong Manchester United side won 4-0 against (touted underdogs and first time finalists) Tottenham Hotspur, with their efforts rewarding them the clubs’ first piece of major silverware.

The FA Cup will start again in a few months, so if you’re willing to take on the challenge, then get ready! If you’re so inclined, you can see all the games we attended by clicking the #RoadToWembley filter. See you at a game then, yes?!

Recent Embroidery

Hello hello! Pretty much the title of this post: I have some more embroidery to share! This first one I completed back in February, but as it was made as a gift I only wanted to upload to here once the recipient had received it:

It's the main character from the most recent TV show I worked on: The Rubbish World of Dave Spud (currently streaming on ITVX- go check it out, it's the best)!

And then the piece I finished this morning was just for fun- maybe I'll stick it on Etsy and see if anyone buys it, but not sure yet... It's the Dreadful Flying Glove character from the 1968 Beatles film: Yellow Submarine. At the start of the year I completed a jigsaw puzzle based on the film and really liked the eye catching design of the glove and thought it would look cool as an embroidery. I have seen the film but years ago, though the animation has long stayed in my memory. I reckon it's due a rewatch...

Pretty much all the embroidery I do seems to be either animation inspired or part of animations I make. I think I quite like animation!

Polaroid (Instax Mini) Fun

Around 8 or 9 years ago, I purchased an Instax Mini instant film camera. At the time (and for several years after) I thoroughly enjoyed using it and it was a lot of fun. I then took a break from it for a few years- the film felt expensive to me at the time (I was broke) and I remember not really liking the results of some of the photos. So with those two aspects combined, I shelved it for a while and concentrated more on the digital side of my photography.

I had been thinking about getting a battery and some film for it again for several months now and it was a few weeks ago I just thought: 'yep, you know what, I'm just going to do this!', which is just what I did! And to my surprise it still worked! Having had a break from using it, I've come back to it with a different mindset and I'm really enjoying the results. Yes, not all of them come out well, but that is the nature of analogue photography. And the more you use it, the more you learn about how to use it and the types of subjects/ lighting it works best with...

Few of my favourite recent ones below:

Hand Embroidered Animated Background

Helloooo! I finally have another new piece of animation to share- yay! It was November last year since I last completed a moving clip. So, yes, new work is still going quite slowly, but that’s not to say I’m not working on anything bigger behind the scenes (more on that in another post)…

If you’re a regular here, then you’ll know that embroidery is quite a big thing in my life at the moment. So naturally, I wanted to test out how an embroidered background would look against some animation drawn digitally. Back in February I started a short animated clip of someone walking up some stairs- just to kind of get me going again after having worked on a 16 month contract as an editor. I liked what I created for the character side of it, but I was really struggling to know what to do for the background. I have had the thought in my head for a while of trying an embroidered background, so a few weeks later, I put two and two together and decided that’s what I’ll do to finish this piece!

The hoop was big- like 12 inches big, so of course it took it’s sweet time to complete. But I do really enjoy the process of embroidery, I find it super relaxing and love just sticking on a podcast or album as I watch my fabric laboriously take shape and become a picture!

The original background was quite boring in my opinion- a grey wall, which didn’t feel that appealing to make an embroidery of. So I decided to ‘jazz it up’ a bit and make the wall at the back into bricks, using a colour scheme of five different threads. I personally think the result looks really vibrant and eye catching.

The original background

The background I created

At first when I comped the animation and background together, they didn’t really gel that well, but after drawing in a shadow under the feet, it really tied the piece together and integrated the background with the foreground animation nicely. This definitely has potential as a way to go about creating backgrounds for a longer project in the future. I am also thinking of a few ideas for a fully embroidered animation. And yes, I am a bit mad. But I am inundated with various project ideas currently, so I think they’ll have to come before this one! Anyway, as usual, keep your eyes out on here for all my latest project updates/ ramblings etc! Here’s the animation:

Aldershot Town FC

Photos from Aldershot Town FC 0-3 Boreham Wood, National League 13/4/24, at the Recreation Ground (Aldershot). Full set HERE. Ten below:

Road to Wembley: Semi Final

For the semi final's, we decided upon Tottenham Hotspur Women v Leicester City Women. This was the first time both of these teams reached this round of the competition, therefore in my opinion this was the more interesting fixture of the two (the other being last years finalists: Manchester United against Chelsea). Making this game even more appealing was the fact it was staged at the all shiny and new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. I was fortunate enough to gain pitchside access to photograph this tie- now the biggest stadium I have photographed in!

I wasn't sure whether I'd enjoy photographing in such a big stadium and I didn't know if my kit would quite be up to it: I don't have the longest lens and I only have one camera body. But it was actually a thoroughly enjoyable and unforgettable experience. All the photographers were situated very close to the pitch (I was worried that we'd all be miles away), so it turned out my kit was perfectly fine and I'm super pleased with the set of photographs I took. The stadium is extremely impressive and definitely lives up to all the hype. Would highly recommend a visit if you haven't already been there. Spurs Women actually play there again towards the end of the season for their last home WSL fixture against West Ham.

Stadium praising aside(!), back to the FA Cup fixture: Leicester scored early and held on for the majority of the game, until Spurs equalised in the 83rd minute. Neither team could break the deadlock in the remaining minutes, so 30 minutes of extra time followed. Before Spurs faced another penalty shoot out like in their previous round, Scotland international Martha Thomas hit the back of the net in the 118th minute in front of 18078 fans, sending Spurs to the FA Cup Final for the first time in history! They will face Manchester United at Wembley Stadium on Sunday 12th May and I am so very excited!

You can view my full set of photos HERE and as usual, 10 below: