Life Drawing

Things are pretty busy at the moment with all the storyboards we're making for next week's editing exercise so instead here are some of the sketches I drew from our bi-weekly life drawing class. There are no tutors at the class and the model is one of the students from the school (this week it was one of the second year animation directors, Magda) so it's an opportunity just to draw for the fun of drawing.
The poses range from several 5mins poses up to one 20mins pose.

15min pose

20min pose

15min pose

5min pose

5min pose

5min pose

Luis Cook & The Pearce Sisters

Last week Luis Cook came to the school to show us his film ‘The Pearce Sisters’ and also to give us advice for developing our own projects.

As well as his film he also brought along his brilliant sketchbooks for us to look through. Luis told us he’s a big fan of collecting things so his sketchbooks are full of strange collections of clippings and oddities. He also collects ‘thumbprint portraits’ so we all had a chance to make one for him (dip your thumb in ink, press it down on paper, draw your portrait inside the print). His sketchbooks are full of hundreds of these little portraits and we have the honour of going up alongside Ray Harryhausen who was the last person to do one!

As well as Luis visiting we’ve also been working on storyboarding for the past 2 weeks; doing lots of different exercises involving floor plans, viewfinders, shot lists, adaptations, etc. as many ways as possible of approaching a storyboard before we begin our own projects next week.

I’ve scanned in a couple of different things I’ve done.. First is a panel from our floor plan exercise, the entire board is too big to show but I really like the expression in this panel. The next image is breaking down an already existing film sequence into storyboards and last is a quick sketch I made at Marylebone station.

NFTS Graduation Films

It’s that time again. All the animation films I worked on last year at the NFTS are finally finished so it’s time for some promotion! I managed to pick up some postcards from the screening at the BFI in London yesterday so here they are..

Cherry on the Cake Directed by Hyebin Lee

Yellow Belly End Directed by Philip Bacon

Today Only Directed by Toby Jackman

All the films looked amazing (it’s always great to see how they develop from animatics and storyboards through to finished shiny polished films) A big congratulations to all the directors! If your planning on visiting any animation festivals soon then keep an eye for these films.
Also, you can see stills from the other brilliant animation films over at: http://www.nftsanimation.org/departments.htm

Production Basket & Roald Dahl Museum

I've not had chance to do much this week as we've been working on a live-action film set with the producers at the film school. It's been great fun trying out all the different roles on set (camera assistant, sound recorder, props master, etc.) but I'm glad to be going back to the lightboxes next week.

On another note we went to visit the Roald Dahl museum yesterday in the village of Great Missenden. Great Missenden is a quintessential English village, with lots of teashops and a tiny post office surrounded on all sides by rolling hills and fields, very relaxing and peaceful. Roald himself used to live there and you can see the influences for lots of his stories in the buildings and countryside. The museum itself is full of memorabilia from Roald and also lots of illustrations from Quentin Blake (another of my heroes) so very inspiring. On top of all that all children over 5 get a free 'Story Ideas Books' full of tips from Roald on how to write stories and technically since I am over 5 I got one as well!

Next week we begin our storyboarding workshops at school so lots of drawing and redrawing to do, I can't wait!