Here’s a couple of sneaky images from a soon-to-be-released project that I’m very excited about having directed. It’s a music video for New York musician Benjamin Scheuer and his band Escapist Papers. The song is called The Lion and it’s off their latest album The Bridge. It’s a beautiful song and as an accomplished shower singer I can say pretty catchy too. A great privilege to make a video for it, and to have had the opportunity to work so closely with Benjamin. I also want to mention the masterful compositing skills of Russell Etheridge, whom I met at The Mill last year and who has brought tonnes of skill to this video.
Here’s a spot I worked on that may have caught your eye on tele over the summer: a trailer for series 9 of The Dragons’ Den, introducing new dragon Hilary Devey. Check out the shoulder pads. Wowzers. I provided character animation (of the dragons, not Hilary - she’s real apparently). It was directed by the talented Simon Crabtree and produced by Red Bee Media for the BBC. A tough job because of the tight turn-around required, but great fun.
Earlier this year I had the pleasure of animating a couple of commercials under the brilliantly talented direction of Ant Blades, master of sketchy design and comedy timing. Here they are…
What a week for Save Our Bacon! On Thursday I heard the news that we won the Best Professional Animation category at the Stoke Your Fires Festival of the Moving Image in, guess where, Stoke on Trent. A fantastic piece of news, and we’re very grateful to the festival jury for this honour. More info about the awards and the festival here
Then, not unlike waiting for buses, on Friday I heard that we have also just won the 2D Animation Award at the 2011 Animex International Festival for Animation and Computer games, held at Teeside University. Particularly humbling is the names that made up the jury for this award: Eric Goldberg himself, a true animation legend; Shelley Page; Karen deJong; Joseph Gilland; Scott Johnston and Max Howard. A skim through the IMBD pages of this bunch makes for pretty impressive reading, so it’s a great honour that Save Our Bacon won this award. More info about the festival here.
Back in November I directed four idents for the new Volkswagen Caddy. They’ve just been launched on the Discovery Channel, and you’ll soon be able to see them on my website, but in the meantime I thought I’d post some early design work. The inspiration was broadly speaking New Yorker style cartoons, crossed with Tandem’s very own Simon’s Cat, to which the agency creatives at Iris had taken a shine. Originally I designed the characters you see below, but after some creative discussion with the agency, I changed them to make them more cartoony, something you’ll be able to see in the finished product. The canoeist and the chap preparing to swing across the ravine didn’t make it into the final selection.
Save Our Bacon has just won the FILMCLUB Children’s Animation Jury Award at the Encounters Short Film Festival in Bristol. The jury consisted of over 200 children- it doesn’t get better than that! Dennis and Piggy will be over the moon. Congratulations to Davey, Tristan and Valentina, and everybody who worked on the film.
