My Mickey Mouse Degree

I’ve decided to move this thingy over to blogger, I’m finding updating here a bit unwieldy. I’ll keep this up for now just in case, but if for some reason you want to keep up with what I’m doing, please head over here.

Cheers,

- Matt

I can’t seem to get a job in what I want to do right now, games was as hard to breach as regular animation, so I’m backing up and looking at my reels, and am currently working on some new stuff that should help me stand out a bit, or at least tick more of the boxes that people want ticking.

Learning Maya is one of the boxes that must be ticked, plus I’m building a much better 3D portfolio as my current one consists of naffness galore (probably a reason games don’t want me).

Still, I’m relatively positive. I’m spending my days working on my skills and not looking ahead too much, and it seems to be moving along a lot more smoothly than trying to work on skills, find an animation job and look for a normal job at the same time was.

I guess I can live with being skint for a while longer.

Here’s a coupla drawings I’ve done recently:

Flippin’ animation is extremely hard to get into. I knew it would be, but it really is, really a lot more than I knew it would be.

At the moment I’m applying to pretty much everything that I can, so hopefully something will come up soon, but hell, it’s getting a bit tedious emailing and sending out letters all the time. Meantime I’ve just started trying to get a normal job, as in, a rubbish job that I don’t actually want, because that money stuff that everybody loves so much is starting to become sparse in my general vicinity, and I need money to drink, and buy stuff. And eat.

Not been doing much drawing or anything because of all that crap, but I think I have a couple of sketches, hold on…

YogiJump

Apparently that’s all I have scanned that I can show right now. I’ve got a few comics that I did but they need inking and stuff.

But yeah, I was working from that fancy ‘Hanna Barbera Treasury‘ book (which is astounding) for a while, trying to draw the characters from model sheets and stuff and then giving it a shot on my own, this was my best Yogi, which is still pretty average, but I’ll have another crack at him when I stop applying for these blasted jobs. I did some Quick Draw McGraw too but that’s not scanned.

Suppose I’ll leave it there. Oh, and the spam keeps on coming, anyone got any ideas on how to get rid of it other than having to delete them all the time?

Okay, I’m gonna link this at last. This was my final animation project at university, the animation and rendering and all that took about 6 weeks in total. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, but I’m not that arsed, I got it finished on time. Anyways, click the image below to view (and make sure you select the high quality version on the left menu, because the small version drops frames like you wouldn’t believe). -

Title copy.jpg

I’ve done a few sketches and stuff since finishing the course, too. Mostly it’s been Hanna-Barbera stuff because I’m trying to get some of the style to rub off on my designs (it’s gonna take some serious work). Nothing’s really scanned yet, but I’ll stick it here when it is.

At the moment I’m applying to jobs all over the shop and working on a portfolio site, and a showreel for the games industry (apparently they like cycles, I don’t have any cycles on my other reel). I’m working on a few cycles right now, typing this is my break.
S’all going good I guess, the money’s running out but I suppose I’ll have to get a normal job to sort that out, which is a shame. Normal jobs are shit.

Now I’m off to see what the damage is on this walk cycle.

Hookay. I am back after much uni and animation. So much for this blog documenting my student journey, eh? Right, to save me typing stuff up again, I’m going to paste my deviantART blog thing here -

“I’m done, and it tastes less sweet than I would have hoped.

Sure, I’ve been drunk quite a lot recently, and that was good. But now sobriety is slapping me in the chops with it mighty reality fist, and my teeth are flying asunder.

Trying to get an actual job in what you want is quite a daunting task, and I don’t know the first thing about making a website to promote myself. I’ve started sending out showreels to places, but only recently so no replies as yet. Fingers crossed and all that.

Uni went well overall though, I expect. It was fun, and it taught me how to ‘draw stuff what moves’. That’s pretty much what I signed up for, so I’m happy I got that out of it.

Also, everyone keeps sodding off. It’s really difficult to high five people when they’ve moved away. I guess we’ll have to have high five reunions in the future, but still. Bloomin’ sucks it does.

What else? I read ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’, it was excessively kick arse. I’m now reading ‘Crime and Punishment’, which so far is excessively kick arse. Maybe I’m easily impressed?

I suppose that’s all, I’ll actually put up my Final Year Project soon. Exciting, eh?”

Golly, I enjoyed that. I’m gonna post up a few links to my work in the next post so this one doesn’t last several weeks, hang on.

I’d like to apologise for two things.

1: My absence - I’m very, very busy with animation at the moment and I have no time to spend updating this. Even the time I’m spending now should be being put into some animation. Regular posting will resume in couple of months.

2: The huge amount of porn spam I’m getting in the comments sections. I have no idea how to stop it but am attempting to delete them as often as possible.

Apparently Geoff from Hanna-Barbera Town liked my Yogi Bear sketches from a while ago and will be sticking them up on his blog, which is nice of him. You should probably check the place out, there’s some great stuff on there.

There’s not really that much more to say at the moment. I might get some blogging time early February as I’ll be at Animex (the university’s animation festival), but until then I’m going to be trying to make stuff look alive even though it’s not through the magic of computers.

Cheers for reading,

- Matt

They do, or rather more accurately, visiting our university. Not just to look around, oh no, but to tell us stuff about things. It’s good.

Last Friday we had Roger Mason, a storyboard artist (mostly for advertising) and independent comic book creator who helped me with my drawing skills (not with a z, I have no use for skillz right now) last year, and returned to tell us all how to sell out and make a bunch of money.

I’m seriously down with getting me a bunch of money, but I’d rather get paid sod all to be an inbetweener at the moment, it’s this month’s official ‘Bohemian Artist Dream’. The bohemian part is just to sound cool.

Today we were visited by Peter Dodd (I can’t find a site for him), an excessively good 2D animator who’d worked on all kinds of stuff, and is currently working on the keys for Sylvain Chomet’s latest film: The Illusionist.

He gave us a few tips on showreels, timing, portfolio and 2D animation in general, it was effing good. It reminded me of how much I want to be a 2D animator, which is pretty hard to do because I’m ALWAYS thinking about how much I want to be a 2D animator. Especially now because I’m writing about it.

Other things that happened today -

• A visiting lecturer for my Studio Business Practice module called in sick half an hour before he was supposed to show up, so the lecture was cancelled after we all got there.
• A water tank leaked in one of the buildings so the Linux server had to be shut down, which meant we couldn’t do any character animation in uni today. Of course, we found this out after we turned up there too.
• I finished reading Tunes for ‘Toons by Daniel Goldmark, it was immense and has helped me verily with my dissertation research
• I wrote some crap about Scott Bradley for said dissertation that I will probably revise, right now

And that’s about it for today.

Man, look at me here, posting stuff. Unxpected, eh? I only seem to post here when I’m in a rut, because the rest of the time I’m crazy happy and animating my tits off.

From the previous sentence you may have discovered that, indeed, I am out of that elusive creative juice. Still, Tuesday was a good day, I did a bit of 3D character stuff for one of my assignments and it turned out ‘right proper nice’. Today I attempted to continue with it, and it just turned into a festival of hatred, and swearing.

There was a lot of swearing.

Eventually I decided the best thing to do would be to play SEGA Rally for as long as possible, which is what happened. I feel better now, and will tackle the cursed animation head on tomorrow, full to the brim of enthusiasm giving coffee.

Also, I’ll be rendering out what I’ve got so far at some point tomorrow, so I’ll stick it up here in the evening when I get back from a crit session with some of my friends.

I really have sod all to show at the moment otherwise, and that sucks because I’ve done a bunch of stuff, but it’s all in aid of my uni work and I don’t really want to be plastering that all over the net at the moment (because clearly everyone in the known universe reads this blog).

I did a sheep animation thing a bit back - CLICK!!

It was exciting, but looking at it now, it’s nadgers. I’ll have to do better next time, eh?

.

FINALLY, I found this website by some guy (officially referred to as Pete Emslie), which is a little bit awesome. It’s kinda like John Kricfalusi’s blog but without as much ranting (not that I’m adverse to rants, but it’s nice to read things from people who are calm now and again). Still, an excellent place to check out.

The ordeal is now over, join me tomorrow for some 3D character animation excitement.

Had a meeting with my Project Supervisor today, and he revealed to me that my idea was in fact almost identical to something that was submitted last year. I have never seen, nor heard of this thing from last year, yet I have officially ripped it off almost to the letter.

Clearly my idea can’t be any good if someone’s already done it, that much is obvious.

So now I’m working with something else, which is a bit more ‘researchy’ but still allows me to produce some animation at the end. Trouble is, I haven’t done research on anything in a looooong time, and even though it’s about animation, it still manages to seem overwhelmingly daunting to me. Perhaps I’m just easily daunted.

I got that list I was on about sorted, and have made SOME progress with my work as a result, which is a relief. I figured I’d be stuck jumping from one thing to another and getting nowhere for the rest of term, which would have blown monstrously.

Drawing is still going badly, but luckily that doesn’t matter so much at the moment, everything’s all ideas right now, though I am managing to produce some decent life drawing stuff on the Friday session I go to.

That’s all there is today.

Hold on, I’m just checking through my crap to see if I can find anything worth sticking up here.

…

I don’t appear to have that much at the moment, most of my time has gone into pondering story ideas and doing test animations for my projects here at uni, which I can’t really show you yet.

Still, here’s a couple of thingies from a while back -

Bugs Vector Sketches

Fox Take

Bleh, I need to get my head around all the work that needs to be done, since at the moment I’m kinda lost with it all and not doing anything other than feeling confused. I’ll write a list I reckon, should help me sort it all out in my head.

I’m also lacking a camera now and thus any easy way of digitalising my traditional work, so don’t expect any sketches to appear anytime soon (and I have a lot of those…)

I think I’ll leave it there for now, and go write that list.