Zzzzzap !!

A quick test of an effect I’m developing.

It’s one of my missions in life to free stop motion from its image of charming rubber puppets in miniature sets. Been there, done that. This is pretty charmless and scares small children, so mission accomplished.

A tribute to Mark Hall

I was privileged to work for Cosgrove Hall Films from 1992-98, and found it a wonderfully creative place – a true ideas factory. While lesser studios came and went, Cosgrove Hall Films seemed immortal, due to the sheer quality of the storytelling it produced and the talent of the people producing it.

The leap from the work-at-home ethos of TV animation pioneers such as Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin to the organisational enterprise of an animation studio with the resources to train up gormless youths straight out of art college, such as myself, is startling even in retrospect. Building puppets and sets, shooting stop motion and drawn animation all under one roof, Cosgrove Hall Films was a miniature miracle.

Studio alumni went on to found their own companies, to win awards and to animate feature films. Many of them have already said it better, but I’m adding my voice to the general background chorus: thank you Brian, and thank you Mark.

Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall

The Canimation industry

Recently, I’ve been getting a fair few messages headed “Rate my Canimation”. It seems a fun competition – Red Bull's “nationwide hunt for creative talent open to anyone who’s passionate about animation, regardless of experience”. I might have entered it myself if my current identity was slightly more animator and slightly less three-year-old’s-daddy.

But how healthy is stuff like this? I don’t mean the high-caffeine beverage. I’m sure that does you a power of good. I’m talking about the health of our creative industries.

Crowdsourcing has become a bit of a dirty word. Mass Animation, a project founded by Sony Pictures to enlist 58,000 animators to work on a theatrically released CG film, mostly for zero remuneration – provoked Mass Scorn when it launched in 2008. But when branded as a chance to “give your creativity wings” such initiatives can seem like genuine opportunities for talent to reach the top of the slush pile.

And maybe they are. It's just that it feels a tad exploitation-ish. Like the government sending the young unemployed to work in supermarkets for up to two months, with no pay or guarantee of a job.

“It seems we’re being used as some free labour, especially in the runup to Christmas,” Cait Reilly, 22, told The Guardian, stacking shelves in a Birmingham Poundland on pain of losing her Job Seeker’s Allowance.

If we live in a society where such schemes are lauded by the employment minister as “a big success”, then it’s no wonder we’re happy to advertise energy drinks for nothing.

Red Bull sold 4,204 billion cans last year. You’d think they’d stretch to a richer reward for their newest marketing brains than a laptop or a month-long internship. But then, their empire was built on such low-cost tactics as employing students to host parties where their product was sold. And that certainly worked out for them. I mean, who drinks Lucozade nowadays? That’s right. Your gran.

Dancing dead mice - a Canimation that caught my eye

Cosgrove Hall studios demolished

Good news for Manchester animators – Cosgrove Hall is reborn as Cosgrove Hall Fitzpatrick (CHJ) Entertainment, with a 2D series creating "at least 75 jobs".

New boy Francis Fitzpatrick mentions the possibility of a return to stop motion – but clearly not in the same location, as demolition begins on their erstwhile studios in Chorlton.

Bradford Animation Festival

I made a flying visit to the Bradford Animation festival as a guest of the Ideas Foundation, to attend a special screening of the St Ambrose Barlow film at their awards ceremony. It was a great way to see the highlights of the festival in one evening, and all for free – an important consideration for a notorious tightwad like myself.

I should really have attended the whole festival, since there were some very interesting people who I would have liked to meet. Maybe next year.

Give us a break!

Two Wallace-style thumbs up to Aardman for promoting tax breaks for the British animation industry – though they muddied their argument with nonsense about Bob the Builder driving on the right and kids growing up thinking the emergency number is 911. C’mon guys, you don’t have to be whimsically creative all the time. Let’s stick to the real argument about keeping UK jobs in the UK.

Ideas Foundation premier

Photos of the Ideas Foundation event held at the Lowry to premier the animation film produced by the pupils of St Ambrose Barlow High School. Guests from the stop-motion world included director Barry JC Purves, Ian Mackinnon of puppet-makers Mackinnon & Saunders, and co-founders of Hot Animation Brian Little and Joe Dembinski.

Meet the veggies

Freelancing as a prop-maker on a CBeebies show called Mr Bloom’s Nursery, I had a genuine geek-out moment when I realised that two of the puppeteers operating the singing vegetables had a hand (literally) in the meanest, greenest singing vegetable of them all, Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors – for  my money the very best puppet-film ever made. Twenty-five years on, they can still perform the exact arm-movements required to create the words “Feed me, Seymour”.

Take your pick of vocal vegetation below...

People are so media-savvy these days.

Photographing Bucket Boy in public, I inevitably get Questions.

“Sorry, I couldn’t pass by without asking what you’re doing,” said a guy on a bike.

“Is it a sculpture?” people want to know. “Is it art?”

“It’s an animation puppet,” I explained to a passing mum with a young child. “I make it move by filming it, time-lapse style.”

“He walks on the compooter,” added my three-year-old daughter, helpfully.

The mother turned to her son.

“We could do that,” she said. “Shoot a bunch of photos, compile them, maybe as a PowerPoint presentation...”

“...And put it on YouTube!” finished the tot.

Damn it. There was me thinking my film-making pretentions put me in some kind of artistic elite.

But, actually, a few Bucket Boy imitators on YouTube would be great. One of the best things about animation is its capacity to make people think “I could do that...”

“Thank you,” the woman smiled as she continued on her way. “You’ve inspired us.”

This is Bucket Boy

Bucket boy is a character who comes to life from everyday litter and junk. He begins as just a bucket and broom – shuffling along the ground with a couple of bricks for support – but gradually evolves a humanlike appearance, and humanlike behaviour. His problem is isolation. As an animated character in a time lapse world, he exists in a different timeframe from real people. Lost in a sprawling urban environment of waste grounds, alleys and underpasses, he experiences passersby as fleeting ghosts, blurry and incorporeal. How can he hope to communicate with them?

I’m still developing Bucket Boy’s story. My aim in building him is to test the feasibility of shooting stop-motion on location, with a puppet much bigger than the conventional twelve inches. By shooting a series of shorts – starting with the extremely short one below – I hope to expand my knowledge of location shooting, time lapse technique, photography and creative use of sound.

A dead man in my spare room

Ever fancied summoning up the virtual apparition of an executed murderer? This website tells you how.

I had a quick play to see if it would work - and it did, first time. It’s the same concept as this iPad app, but with pleasingly sepulchral overtones.

 

Manchester Evening News Article

A nice little write-up of the St Ambrose Barlow project:

St Ambrose Barlow - THE MOVIE!

This project taught me that ambition is everything. Even after we expanded our shooting schedule from two days to three, I seriously doubted it was possible to finish a seven-minute puppet animation film in so short a time. These amazing pupils proved me wrong.

Unlike most ‘workshops’, where the kids are shown some basic tricks and left to experiment, this was a genuine creative collaboration between pupils, students and media professionals – and I think the results speak for themselves. I’m new to the education game but I can’t help thinking this has to be the way forward. Are you reading this, Michael Gove?

Full credit must go to Chris Conlan (who set the creative bar), Sally-Ann Duis (art director and miniature wardrobe lady), David Hanson (script development genius), Lee Mann (sound dude, in more ways than one), Caitlin Clancy (production assistant and Mac-hacker), teachers Bernie and Matt, and student mentors Anna, Dan and Divya (who are actually the ones who made it happen) and, not least, the redoubtable Deborah Davidson, who should exec-produce movies if she ever finishes proving to the world what a talented bunch of kids we have in our schools.

St Ambrose Barlow - making the movie

Behind-the-scenes of high school animation project St Ambrose Barlow THE MOVIE!

2 weeks to make 5 puppet armatures

I made these wire-and-balsa puppet armatures while tutoring a high school animation project. The pupils will work on costumes and faces to develop them into fully-fledged puppets, and then use them to animate their own film. Watch out for future posts about ‘St Ambrose Barlow – THE MOVIE’!

Camera Move Test

View in HD by clicking 720p during playback

I love the way time-lapse can draw your attention to movement you wouldn’t otherwise notice, like the bits of litter flapping in the breeze. Next time, I’ll shoot at a slower rate to heighten the effect of the shadows creeping as the sun moves.

The point of this test was to see if I could achieve smooth movement by animating the camera by hand, then digitally stabilising the result.

Royalty-free music courtesy of Taylor Hayward.

Time Lapse Test

View my videos in HD at http://vimeo.com/paulcouvela

These are test shots for a technique I’m exploring with my friend Mark Wood. Not bad for a first effort, but a couple of bugs need ironing out. I added the tilt shift effect (selective blurring) to each frame individually, which caused slight glitches. I’m pleased to have got this far using only free software (entire budget = £3.70 bus ticket into town), but Photoshop and batch processing is the way forward, I think.

Royalty-free music courtesy of Kevin MacLeod.