Adventures in Pencil
It’s been about a year since I tried to learn to draw. I got interested in it because I was watching a lot of old school animation and loving it. In the heyday studios like Warner Bros and Disney were producing outstanding material, all hand drawn in pencil. You don’t see much of it being made these days, especially for short form TV, as it’s just so expensive. And anyway, if they can fob kids off with any old crap, why not. And adults, well, we’ve grown to accept ‘illustrated radio’ shows such as Family Guy and South Park as the norm. I love South Park, but it’s a whole different medium to the stuff that was mainstream back in the 40′s and 50′s. It relies heavily on the script and voice actors, as opposed to the visual elements like in this
There’s been a resurgence of ‘full animation’ recently. You’ve got Disney making films like Princess and the Frog, and Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist as recent movie examples.
Anyway before I rant any further I best get to the point of this post. I was going to post some pencil tests I’ve done over the last 6 – 12 months.
Here is the first one I ever finished, back when my concept of construction in drawing was still pretty none existent.
I tried to remedy the situation by doing John K’s $100,000 dollar cartoon drawing class. This, along with going to some life drawing classes, helped a bit. See older life drawing post
A few months passed and I felt a little more confident so I had a go at designing my own character, below
Duckbill, a cartoon character I designed
Then I went ahead and tried to animate him. I was watching Wimbledon and seeing our guy get beat and thought up a little skit. I drew all the keyframes which totally exhausted me, and I never finished the inbetweens. The thought of drawing all those tennis rackets in perspective sent shivers down my spine. But I learnt a lesson, don’t over complicate it, simple is good, less line is good.
It took me months to get around to having another go at hand drawn animation. A lot has changed in my life in the last 6 months, and it’s been an eventful winter. But, I got the bug again when the sun returned and had another couple of cracks at it. Here’s what came out
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Live visuals update
Hello! I’ve been real slack with this whole blogging thing recently, so I thought I should post up what I’ve been doing lately.
There have been goings on. Last year we had the pleasure of going down to Electric City in Birmingham to support Tony Coleman of Blend. It was great to VJ in a big room to acts including Nosia, Annie Mac, Dubfire, Loco Dice and James Zabiela to name a few. Thanks for the invite Tony! Here’s some rather shaky video clips from a couple of the nights.
We have also been doing more stuff with the Biscuit Tin Sound System, a Leicester based system that always throw a good party. We are glad to be on the team and are looking forward to big things in the future. The clip below is from Rocafellas in Leicester. More recently we have been doing visuals with them at The Music Cafe in Leicester, a great venue which I’m glad to say has been taken over by good people. No more smacks in the face in the toilets! Next up is the Biscuit Tin and friends free party on the 10th of June and I’m looking forward to playing with some new kit and material there along with dotdotw who I often VJ with.
Ah so what else is new? Inventing! I’ve been prototyping my magic mirror. When it’s done I’ll post up the details and a video demo, but I’ve got to build the thing first.
Oh and I’ve got myself an online home dedicated to my visuals. It’s on something called ‘Facebook’ that is apparently the in thing. Check it out at www.facebook.com/tempusvisuals.
That’s all for now, I have clips to rip, patches to patch, sets to build and work in the morning.
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Reference! for Animation
It’s my last post of 2010 and I thought I’d post a few videos of the things I’ve been watching recently. Animation is about story, acting, performance, drama and the relationship between audience and performer (the animator). And then there’s the technical stuff. I’ve been reading Eric Goldberg’s ‘Character Animation Crash Course’ book over the Christmas break and getting my head a little more wrapped around the process of roughing in drawings concentrating on the performance, and then cleaning them up later in Tie-Down. More on that another day!
For now, here’s a few people / things from outside the world of animation that all animators could learn a thing or two from.
Maurice Marcel – one of the great mime artists
Japanese Bunraku puppets
A street performer in Barcelona. This guy is a master!
And finally, Buster Keaton in ‘Battling Butler’ , one of the old silent movie greats from the Chaplain era
All of these videos are packed full of movement that has meaning and allows the audience to clearly read the action that is taking place. Great stuff to analyse and learn about timing, poses, and drama.
That last one reminded me of an old Chuck Jones Warner Bro’s cartoon from 1948 called ‘Rabbit Punch’. I can’t embed it as WordPress only supports Youtube and Vimeo videos, but you can WATCH IT HERE!
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Bits and Pieces
I thought I’d share some motion graphics and animation tests I’ve made. I’m building up a collection of my own VJ clips and these are some renders I made using the particles and mograph modules in Cinema 4D.
A while back I mentioned I was working on a character called Duckbill.. here’s some keyframes from what was going to be his first pencil test
http://www.vimeo.com/johnhammond
Anyone for a cartoon? check out An Itch In Time. It’s an old Bob Clampett classic
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Phone App Sketches
I was down the pub the other day and a mate showed me this app for Android phones called Sketcher. It’s a simple to use and free bit of software that lets you draw onto the touch screen of your phone. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been slightly obsessed with it.
Here’s a few of my sketches.
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Tetleys Tea Characters are back!
They’re back! Glad to see Tetleys have brought the old characters back, and they’ve kept them hand drawn. I’m liking the popularity of traditional animation right now. Especially since I spent a lot of time this summer trying to learn it (see older posts). I really need to get back to the drawing board soon. I made a start on my Duckbill animation, drew the 12 keys and then realised that choosing to do a scene where he holds a tennis racket drawn in 3d was a bad idea. very bad idea. But still, I might post the key frames up for you to see. My next animation will either be a skanker so I can use it in VJ sets, or an Aye Aye – my new favourite animal, so mysterious and weird! It’s a type of Lemur. Lemur’s salied to Madagascar on rafts.. The word ‘Lemur’ came from ‘Lemures’ – Roman for ‘ghost or spirit’.. I have pages of notes for Aye Aye back story!
Aye Aye Lemur
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Outlook Festival, Croatia
Last week I was at Outlook Festival in Croatia. What a venue they had for this year.. It took place in Fort Punta Christo, Pula. The fort had 2 large arenas within the walls, one just outside and 3 more intimate arenas within the courtyards and dungeons.
Oh My Gosh! We had such a good time partying till sunrise every day to some wicked tunes.. and there was a stage on the beach to get everyone in the mood in the afternoons. And the boat parties – I was on Sin City and the Vagabonds one.. brilliant.
Gotta big up the organisers, artists and ravers for such a great weekend! I took a bunch of clips with my little stills camera and made an edit of my weekend, check it out!
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Summer Sundae Fringe Visuals
I was at the Independent Arts Centre in Leicester for the Summer Sundae Fringe. It was a night of music, with local and not so local bands playing, including Free Control and Mellow Baku.
Tony (theLab) was charged with providing visuals for the evening, and I gotta send a big thanks to him for inviting me down, along with dotdotw and VJ Bridd. We had a whole bunch of video hardware, projectors, laptops and controllers to play with and it’s pretty safe to say we all had a good time. It was nice to play with bands and some real mellow acoustic for once – not my usual thing but I can appreciate it for deffurz.
We had the first meeting of the new ‘Leicester AV’ group a few weeks back. The plan is to meet at least once a month on a regular basis up at the Independent Arts Centre. Go to the facebook page and join up if you want to get involved.
And I’ve just created my own Tempus visuals facebook page, so go on, join up and keep updated with my shenanigans!
theLab & VJ Bridd
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Tags: av, free control, independant arts centre, leicester, mellow baku, performance, visuals, vj, vjing
VJ Clip Pack
I thought I’d share some of the clips I’ve made other the last few weeks. This video is a compilation of 11 clips which you can download and use as elements in your sets. Hope some of you can find a use for these. It’s Outlook festival in Croatia for me next week, can’t wait to soak up the sunshine and the tunes. If you’re around Birmingham in November try and get down to Drop Beats Not Bombs, I’ll be doing visuals alongside theLab, dotdotw and a whole bunch of others.
All clips last either 2, 4 or 8 seconds, and some will loop. You can click through to my Vimeo Page where you will be able to download the video. It was encoded into 640×480 MPEG4 with a key-frame on each frame, but Vimeo re-encodes it I believe. I’ll try and get a better source up as soon as I get my broadband sorted.
Enjoy.
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Tags: atoms, clips, electricity, live visuals, video, vj, vjing
I’m still here
Hello all. I’ve been a bad boy.. not posting for weeks, the shame! I thought I would share a few snaps of the drawings that are stuck to my wall at the moment. I’m still working at my drawing, its been about 9 months now since I decided I’d like to be able to draw. These are mostly quick sketches between 1 and 10 minutes, with the exception of the Duckbill model sheet at the end.
Enjoy! Critique welcome!
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