Comic Book Progression

Been doing a bit of work on 'The Mad Trapper of Rat River'

Martin did some rough page layouts, and I went over one of them experimenting to see what it could look like


Martin's Rough Layout


My Rough Coloured Page

Obviously it needs some work doing still, but its looking pretty good I reckon.

New Work - 'Darkumentaries' Comic Book

Lately, I have been doing some with with my good friend/accomplice Martin Woolley.

We had planned to animate a series of films called 'Darkumentaries' which are a collection of weird/creepy/gruesome stories from history.

However, problems ensued as he was living in Bristol and I was living back home. Obviously this made animation tricky, so we decided the other week to instead turn the films into a series of graphic novels/comics.

The first in the series is called: 'The Mad Trapper of Rat River' and so far we've done some concept work and the script. Rough page layouts have also been started.

This is what it looks like so far:

Basically, as you can tell it involves Canadian Mounties, and we decided to use similar backgrounds to those I used in the music video I animated.

More work as we do it!

'Key To The Lock' Music Video & more

Above is the music video that I animated for Matthew Moss. Check out his music by clicking on his name. He's a nice chap and his music is ace!

The animation was made in After Effects, which I've never really used for animating before, but it seemed to work out all right, and I learnt mucho doing it.

It's pretty much all made with scanned in textures, for instance the trees are strips of masking tape.

I also seem to have developed a style thatI'm fond of, which I'm going to try and use again.

For instance:

This was for another music video I was asked to do for a band called Tristram, but unfortunately it got cancelled.

Chilean Miners

TOPICAL ILLUSTRATION ALERT

I was inspired by a quote from one of the miners that had been stuck underground in Chile for 69 days. Tried to do something quite simple with it.

I Get Bored Sometimes...

So I make things like this:

New News News News News

Hi, how are you? I'm good thanks. Nice to see you, it's been too long.

I am still working on the music video for Matthew Moss, and here's a snippet of that:

That's all going well enough and I should have it done by the end of the month probably.

I have also been approached by record label Broken Sound to animate a video for the band Tristram. It's a complete open brief which is mucho fun. I only have a month to make it though, which might prove tricky, but I'm sure it can be done. Here's something so far, more to come in the next few days.

News Update

To coincide with the state visit of the Pope, I thought I'd do a blog post. Not about the Pope though sorry.

Recently in an attempt to get on the career ladder and try and find a job I sent some promotional material (CVs DVDs etc) out to some animation companies.

In order to make it a bit more interesting I also made and sent out one of these:

Basically its a little box with my contact details on, that fits inside the 'hello' envelope. When you open the envelope the box pops out due to an elastic band inside it. Not explained very well, but if you want one, ask and I'll send you one.

Also, if you are visiting here from one of the companies I sent these to, thanks for looking!

In other news, my film Raiders of Noah's Ark has been entered into Witney Film Festival, which is exciting and good publicity.

There was something else to say but I've forgotten it. Bear with me

Music Video Animation Test

Here's a little test for the music video I am in the process of making!

First bit of animation in a few months or so, and I know its short but you get a rough idea of what it will look like. Hopefully the client will like it.

More Music Video Work

And if you think the stag is a moose, you could call it a Mooseic video! I'm wasted in animation I really am.

Been doing some more concept work for the video, and working on the story/plot. Storyboarding will commence soon, and I need to track down video of deer walking to try and rotoscope, which is how I think I'm going to do this.

So, the pictures:

Music Video

A nice chap called Matt Moss has asked me to make a music video for one of his very nice songs.

This is some of the concept work I knocked up today:

I shall keep you all informed of progress, but in the meantime check out Mr Moss' music here!

Blog Dylan

A funny title there from Joe Collins.

Here's a picture showing the many (4) faces of Bob Dylan. I've been a Dylan fan for a while now and fancied doing another picture of him.

So we have, folky Bob, rock Bob, Rolling Thunder Bob, and modern Bob. Though modern Bob looks like Einstein.

Summer Sundae 2010

Me and my good friend Andy Johnson went to Summer Sundae 2010 last weekend. He went to review it, I went to take photos for his reviews. We both got in free and it was ace. Here are his reviews:

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Taking the photos was hard as I didn't have the best of cameras, no SLR with lenses as big as my leg like many of the other photographers had, but I think some of the shots I got were still quite good.

You can see more photos on my Flickr account, click the link on the right!

Raiders of Noah's Ark Final Film

Here it is, Raiders of Noah's Ark in its entirety. Please watch and enjoy. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

More Faces

Faces are my favourite thing to draw at the moment. I like faces.
These were drawn on my brothers driving test form so thats why there's a gap.
The paper texture and blue hue pleases me.

Hello again.

It's been too long.

Have gone home for the summer, so internet access is limited though apparently we are getting it this week or as soon as I get hold of my mums bank details.
Anyway, trying to find jobs is hard. Both animation jobs and normal ones to get money flowing. Ah well, I've only been out of uni for a week and a bit.
Speaking of which, I got a 2.1 for my degree. Pretty pleased with that, don't think I could have done much better. I worked my hardest these last few months and a 2.1 is a fair reward.

Have been trying to do some creative work at home, though my room is a complete mess, but I have a couple of ideas I'm developing. So stay tuned...
Sorry there's no pictures or fun stuff. But soon, friends, soon.

Uni Has Ended...

So now to celebrate, here is a video of George and Iwan smashing up a TV in slow motion. See if you can count how many times Iwan hits the table...

Bear!

Drew this for our exhibition at our Degree Show this week from the 19th! Come along to Bower Ashton campus, Bristol and see some great work!

Look What I Made For George

For our exhibition, I forged some Polish identification papers for George's Jewish character.

Bristol Beer Factory Advert

Bristol Beer Factory are offering us some beer for our degree show if we make them an advert/video for their website. Me, Martin and George are working on one.
A castaway finds a crate of beer, but cannot open the crate. The palm tree then pops out the ground and uses a bottle opener to help the man. They clink bottles and have a great time.
Here's some pictures!

Company Blog Now Online!

Myself, George Watson and Martin Woolley have decided to set up a company/studio/collective to make animation together. There's no work up there yet, but here's the link:

http://donkeytrumpetanimation.blogspot.com/

Faces

Did some drawing/doodling for the first time in a long time.

Loads of faces. Well, a far few anyway. Personal favourites include the bear, the vampire and a couple of the cowboys. The Beatles are also in there too. As they often are.

Business Cards

It has become a bad habit of mine to never be happy with how I present myself commercially.

Therefore I have redone my business cards again.

Here they are:

FRONT:


BACK:

Let me know what you think please? Then I might be able to get them printed in time for the degree show.

The End of All Things

Well, we had the screenings of our films the other day. On the whole everybody had put in a lot of time effort and work and it paid off. There was some really good film, one of which even made me cry with laughter, and that doesn't happen often let me tell you.

Now though before we can finally let go of all this, we have the back up work/paper work hadn in comprising of an evaluation, posters, dvd covers, and all that jazz.

Here's my DVD cover and poster, pretty much the same but any critique would be nice!

POSTER

DVD COVER

Raiders of Noah's Ark Trailer

So, night before the deadline.

No doubt there will be excitement and sleepless hours ahead. It's almost like Christmas, except Father Christmas is John Parry and we've had to work for this Christmas. The presents consist of films and no doubt by the end of the day we will be stuffed full of 1600 approx minutes of film turkey.

Now to end this drawn out and frankly daft metaphor; an early Christmas present in the form of a trailer for my film. Made it this afternoon. I mean Father Christmas made it. Don't shatter the illusion now.

Do I blog too regularly?

Is this boring for anyone? If so, tough buns.

Sorry about the other day, feeling better now!

Was allowed into uni yesterday (Saturday) to do some work, and it really helped. Only got a few more shots to do now, and should hopefully have finished animating sometime on Monday. Quite exciting.

Something else quite cool is that one of my stills has been chosen to go on the Bristol UWE flickr account, see it here. Might hopefully attract some attention!

Got to do editing and things now which I think may be more work than I hoping for...

Update: Joe Collins Close To Nervous Breakdown

Today was tough. I'm not going to deny it. About 10 hours work done today at uni, pretty much all of it stood up in my work station animating. It was hot under the lights.

This film is really starting to get to me. I am both physically and mentally exhausted. My health also seems to be teetering on the edge. I seem to have acquired a black eye from somewhere too.

I keep 'spacing out' all the time as my mind wanders. I almost started crying today I think, for no real reason.

This is not fun. In no conceivable way is this fun or enjoyable anymore. I am very close to giving up. Though managed to blast out 16 shots today in a weird trance. This is both good and bad.

Though is it all any good? I don't know, not sure I'm too bothered. Will this film be appreciated? Will people understand the work that has gone into it? That everything you see on screen I spent months making? I doubt it. And its not as clean and nice as a Flash film so it will look shoddy. I hate it.

I didn't write this for people to try and cheer me up or whatever. I just want this feeling of almost despair recorded so possibly in the future I can look back and say it was all worth it. And I'm sure I'm not the only one like this either. Most of the rest of the class seem to be working flat out, and close to exhaustion too. We've got to all keep each other going now, we're into the last week. Any encouragement is good encouragement.

Good luck to you all. See you tomorrow.

God I sound like a pretentious indie/emo kid. Yay.

Poster Redux

I am redoing my poster and promotional material for Raiders of Noah's Ark. This includes the DVD cover and a design to be printed onto the DVD itself. I am redoing everything in the style of Drew Struzan the guy that did the actual Indiana Jones posters, as well as Star Wars and many more. Therefore I am using more pencil and coloured pencil than before. It fits the look of the film better too and I'm pretty pleased with how it looks. This pic is based off one of the stills I made.

Rebecca Dale has begun on the soundtrack which should be done soon! It's all most exciting.

...

Can't think of a title for this post. All forms of creativity are aimed towards completion of my film.

Which leads me on to the meat of this post; film progress is going well. I am just over a 3rd of the way through animating my shots, which is quite good I reckon. With two weeks left from today I still need to animate over 70 shots though. Cripes. I am editing and post-productioning as I go along, which is saving time.

Tension seems to be running high in the animation department these, which is obviously not surprising. Everyone seems to maintain high spirits and good humour though.

This sounds like a letter from the trenches of World War 1. Hope to be home by Christmas.

Yours,

Joe

PS: A video for you all. A monkey skidding round a corner.

Experimentation.

Thats a pretty rubbish post title, my apologies.

Todays nugget of stop motion fun is a rhinoceros horn coming thorough some floor boards. This is just a test, but it may end up in the film as time is running out. The clean up is a bit sloppy as I had to get rid of each rig holding a floorboard. Let me know if you like it, or any advice.

In other news, the general animation is picking up pace now with several shots being done a day, but there is still much to do. It goes from being fun and enjoyable at some points to very annoying at others, but that's life sister, get used to it.

Correspondence continues with the masters student doing my music.

Ideas for films after this are developing slowly. Me and George are working on a series called 'Orphans VS ...'. Its funny - more details soon.

Thats all I can think of for the moment, more news as it comes to us here.

Back to your lives citizens.

Toying with a few ideas.

Over this Bank Holiday weekend, I have been convincing myself there's not much work I can do as I have to do all my animating at uni (oh the joys of stop motion(!)). I've made a few things, like a crate that can break open for a particular scene and a few other bits and pieces. Something else I have been looking at is sound effects. As well as having the audio track, I thought it might be quite nice and possibly fitting to have the onomatopoeic words appear on screen like they do in Batman. This will lend to the comic/cartoony feel I want the film to have and could work brilliantly. Or fail miserably. I made a few mock-ups:

Here's one on a storyboard frame. Looks pretty sweet.

And I know this frame isn't relevant but I thought it would give me an idea of what it'll look like. Looks pretty good also I think, but if anyone disagrees, let me know your thoughts.

In other news, have received an email from a Masters Student at Bristol Uni who would like to write the music score for my film. She sent me a sample of her work, and I think it could be a good partnership as she really likes writing big exciting John Williams style music. How exciting!

Blimey thats quite a long post. Hope everything is going well elsewhere for my fellow animators, and probably see you all tomorrow. This is getting oddly weird now, thats what you get for 3 days on your own. Gah, shut up Joe.

My Film Has Begun To Exist!

So here, as promised is some animation I did today. It has a few wobbles and knocks, but as the first real piece of stop motion animation I have done since roughly last January, its not too bad.

Hope everyone likes it!
Though it seems Vimeo has compressed it a bit weird.

Animation Has Begun

So, the animation as finally begun.
However, me and George spent most of the day trying to get the new digital SLR cameras to do what we want. Eventually we got it, and I managed to animate a little bit. It's ok, though I'm probably going to redo it tomorrow. Main thing taken from today, new knowledge of cameras and Stop Motion Pro, and that it is very possible to fall asleep in the uni bar. This animation lark is tiring, and I reckon we'll be the living dead before too long.

Hopefully a video tomorrow!

Night!

Some More Stuff

Work is continuing (obviously) on the Raiders. Though enthusiasm is waning.
Meanwhile I found another image from Edambusters.

This is 'Red' Lester.

Might put up some Raiders stuff later.

A Day to Make You Make That Sort of 'Tsss' Hissing Noise That You Make When Somethings Gone Wrong But You Don't Want to Go Nuts in Public About It

Bit of a lame day today. Attempted casting the first of the final monkeys. It went disastrously wrong, to be honest it couldn't have got much worse unless I'd cut my hand off in the process. The foam didn't really work very well, was too sticky and made the mould very hard to open. When it was finally opened, the mould had cracked and the monkey looked like some hideous burns victim with bits of foamy flesh hanging all over the place. Needless to say I wasn't best pleased.

However I tried animating him as he's useless for anything else, and he animates very nicely indeed, probably testament to my ace armature making skills (!)
Here's the video. I like the nose wiping the best



And here's some photos showing the extent of the horror.

Raiders of Noah's Ark Animatic

Just realised I hadn't posted my animatic yet. Here it is in all its hand drawn glory.

Some progress.

Hello again.

Here's a few photos of models and things. I have done more than this honest, it just hasn't been photographed.

Practice monkey cast. Cast in 'expanding foam' in a plaster mould.

Rhino. Possibly finished. Though inability to move the neck and the inane grin on his face means I might have to redo it.

Close up of desert set. Need to get a sky backdrop done. Did some work on that today.

Desert set.

More photos to follow shortly. Including different monkey expressions!

Oh man.

This flipping place needs a re-design. If you look up, that header is awful. I think I did that last year sometime when I reckoned I was good at design. Obviously not. Anyway, redesigning that should distract me nicely from making my film.
Talking of which, things are going ok on RONA (Raiders of Noah's Ark), but as I have yet to complete any of my puppets I am leaving very little time for animating. It's cool though, we're still cool right?
Photos of puppets will appear this week once I get the photos from my friend George!
In the meantime, check out the work of the people following this blog! There's awesome stuff!
Au revoir!

I have been a bit slack here abouts...

Recently, a ot of time has been spent making characters and sets for Raiders of Noahs Ark, so there has been little time to post here. I am hoping to rectify this, this week hopefully. So watch this space!
Also, thanks to all you new guys following me! Ha!
As a reward, heres some work for a possible new film called Edambusters - some sort of war film about cheese?
This is Brie Roqueforte, a member of the French Resistance in the small town of Boursin: