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