Snow White and the Seven Dwarves - 75th anniversery

I've just caught on to the fact that Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves is available in its entirety on YouTube - in HD. Time for a reappraisal!

It must be over 40 years since I last saw this movie, and I suspect that many of the current generation of animators have never seen it. They really should! Some might say that animation styles have moved on a bit, but not entirely for the better in my opinion. And it's unbelieveable that this 1937 feature has production values as good, or better, than most current animated films. They really cared back then: ten art directors are credited, and it really shows.

But don't take my word for it. Make a cuppa, draw the curtains, click this link and hit full screen. It's more than an animation history lesson.

EAT YOUR WORDS!

Another high school animation project with the IdeasFoundation, this time partnering with the National Literacy Trust with the aim of encouraging children to read.

A perky script was developed under the guidance of scriptwriter David Hanson (Coronation Street, Hollyoaks, Grange Hill) with sound recording by ITV producer Lee Mann, all skilfully project-managed by The Ideas Foundation’s Anna Frew.

Odd noises

I can't believe I've worked in animation for 20 years and only just attended my first voice-record.

It was a sightly unusual one.

Gina & Stella

Gina & Stella is a short film I animated over ten years ago now, directed by Sarah Ball, who I worked with on Bob the Builder and Chuggington. It's good to watch it again and see that the animation style still seems just as daft and over-the-top as I intended at the time!

Rise of the cybernetic robo-turtle

Meet Wilbur, star of the school stop motion project I'm currently tutoring.
With a day job in CG animation, it's not often I get to mess around with latex and papier mache, so I'm having fun with it.

Wilbur hides a dark secret inside his shell, but you'll have to watch the film to discover what it is. And before you can do that, the pupils of The Derby High School and I have to finish making it. Two more days to go in our three-day shoot!

Dawn of the cybernetic robo-turtle

I'm gearing up for another education project with the Ideas Foundation, producing a short stop-motion film in collaboration with Derby High School in Bury. These mood-boards have already fired me up to start building the characters. What could be more fun to build than an evil book-eating cybernetic robo-turtle?

Feeling kinky

I’ve been sculpting all week, and gaining hardcore respect for those fine folk down the road at Mackinnon & Saunders. How those guys meet tight deadlines without crimping themselves into chiropractic emergency cases, I’ll never know. It feels like a small but weighty child has been sitting on my head and shoulders – which, ironically, is a common occurrence during my non-modelling downtime. Only green tea and stretching exercises can keep me vaguely human-shaped over the coming plasticene-heavy weeks.

I’d like to blog further about this project, but we’re still in the traditional hush-hush launch phase. I’m sure you understand. Thankfully, it’s NOT plasticene animation.

Chugger Fool

In 2007, I got a call from the traintastic world of Chuggington, and agreed to be parachuted in on a troubleshooting mission. The director was concerned that the human characters in the show were proving tricky to animate. I wasn’t surprised. Correctly-proportioned, naturalistic humans are always a nightmare. Realistic actions look slow and stiff while cartoony ones look plain wrong. This being telly, the animators had no time develop ideas by shooting their own live-action reference, as they would on a feature.

I saw no other option: I had to shoot all the reference myself – alone, with my tiny digital camera, in the back room of my house. I’m no actor but I know about expressing character through body movement. To look both realistic and animated, I had to make natural human movements with cartoon-level energy. And keep it up for 52 episodes.

Was it worth it? I made an almighty fool of myself and got a hernia (no joke)! Did it work? I have my doubts. Maybe the mission was an impossible one. But it was a hell of a lot of fun.