But I have tried, anyway – I’d love to be able to create work like the following amazing stuff by Greg Broadmore, & a mate of a colleague, Kirk Hendry, who directed a short called “Junk” – people like me tend to have numerous ideas swimming around in their heads for films / graphic novels etc etc they’d like to make, but often hit the wall of simply not having the required skills / resources to realise them beyond a few pages of outline – or, in my case, a fully co-written feature script.

So they end up being added to a never-ending “to-do” list of things which may never get done – the closest I have got in terms of purely personal work are the “Retro Idents” which you can see on this site, and which were short animated sequences in a “retro” style – as a kind of taster for a short film idea I have had for a while. – I did these in 2004, when I still had a bunch of enthusiasm enough to sit for the required number of hours modelling, rendering & comping, and before working in the bowels of certain studios knocked the stuffing out of me & convinced me that doing endless motion-graphics is a sensible career and I should forget all about ray-guns and sh*t.

But enough with excuses !…and I have a few…If anyone wants to join me in a totally non-sensible fantasy romp with ludicrous amounts of special effects (I hate the term “VFX”…) give me a shout…better still, design it for me….or I’ll draw it and you concept art-ify it…whatever…

The ongoing debate about who conceived many of Marvels’ signature (& lucrative) characters, seems unlikely to end, particularly since Jack Kirby isn’t around to give his side of the story.

I don’t think Kirbys’ legacy & contribution to the medium will disappear soon, but the issue here is one of credit where due and also by how much and to what extent Kirby and his family should be beneficiaries of the huge success of the Marvel brand – something Stan Lee seems to dispute – “Smilin’” Stan, to give him his due credit, certainly changed the public perception of comic book publishers in a novel way by removing the anonymity normally associated with them, and opening up a dialogue with what soon became legions of fans. Previously comics were known by the brand (eg “DC” or “Marvel” etc), and comic strip artists, whose names featured prominently – although sometimes they worked under pseudonyms.

In that sense his business strategy was a masterstroke, he gave the Marvel brand a human face beyond those of the characters which populated the Marvel Universe, compared to the faceless hard-nosed peddlers of pulp that went before him, and to whom artists seemed to be reduced to the level of hacks when compared to writers – what seems to have remained is the employer / employee relationship which seems to have undermined the true nature of the working relationship that existed between Stan Lee and his best artists – which was one of collaboration in the truest sense, and which in some cases, was never clearly set out or acknowledged in contracts, leaving the artists in the position of having to relinquish all rights to their work – or worse, even put in question their creative contribution.

]]> http://www.raviswami.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=1599 0 http://www.raviswami.com/blog/?p=1587&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=felix-the-cat http://www.raviswami.com/blog/?p=1587#comments Sun, 18 Mar 2012 14:35:07 +0000 admin http://www.raviswami.com/blog/?p=1587

Back in the mid 90′s I was working out of a studio in London called Speedy Films, for director Paul Vester – towards the end of my period there, just before the studio closed, we worked on this episode of “The Twisted Tails of Felix The Cat” : “Copy Cat” – based on the iconic character from early animation.

I’ll be posting an entry on storyboarding styles, but this example serves to illustrate how boarding can very often involve adapting both a drawing style and style of storytelling, depending upon the characters and treatment / illustrative style.

These days I tend to employ a “blanket” approach to boarding which will very often ignore the specifics of character design / illustrative style, in favour of blocking out the visual narrative structure – this is more often because of time constraints when producing the board – a good example of this is some “Boomerang” idents for Cartoon Network featuring classic Warner Bros characters, which I worked on last year (2011) @ Th1ng – which I hope to add to the portfolio section of this site.

Felix was an interesting, and in my case, rare,  exercise of conforming to a template, which had to be adhered to strictly, since the boards were to be the basis for materials to be sent to outsource studios – in effect each frame was actually meant to be a layout drawing for the animators, and not just a sketchy suggestion – this is more and more standard practice in series production, and can take getting used to.

The end result was quite startling, to me, since the animators had stuck very close to the board, which was split between myself, Paul Vester (co-writer & director with Michael Ouweleen) & Barry Baker – and works very well, not just technically, but also in maintaining the “retro” tone of the storytelling style.

We had to work out timings in a detailed fashion beforehand, effectively making the film in storyboard form, on paper – the method used in the earliest days of the development of the animation process, when the kind of more or less instant feedback offered by digital work today, was science fiction – quite fitting considering the age of the character.

Apologies in advance for the quality, but this is the best example I could find.

The Twisted Tails of Felix the Cat

I was always a bigger fan of the work of Phillipe Druillet, one half of the founding duo behind “Metal Hurlant / Heavy Metal” - the other significant half being Jean Giraud or “Moebius” as he signed himself and came to be more widely known…and well known…outside of France.

BTW, this blog post is by way of an introduction to my next one, which aims to contextualise my student grad’ films, made in the early 80′s ,when I first discovered Druillets work (Forbidden Planet bookshop in St Annes’ Court, Soho was a frequent lunchtime destination when I was at art college – St Martins in Charing Cross Road, just around the corner) – with what was happening in animation in the U.K around that time.

Giraud passed away last week – in a month which saw the passing also of another titan in the field, Ralph McQuarrie – the artist whose work was the driving force behind Star Wars – and also, coincidentally, the month when Disney / Pixar released “John Carter of Mars”.

Whilst I can definitely appreciate Girauds’ work and also its clear influences on some of my favourite films, like “Blade Runner” &  “Alien” – it never touched me in quite the same way as Druillets’, possibly because around the time I discovered Druillets work, I was reading a lot of Lovecraft, which heavily influences his work.

Druillets’ iconic “Lone Sloane” series features many elements which resonated with me aside from the Lovecraft references – Frances’ colonial past, & and the fascination for the “other” in its colonies of North Africa & Indo-China also inform his work – but there is also Druillets’ flexible and adaptable drawing style, which ranges from the precise and geometric when illustrating his weird bio-mechanical cities and entities, to loose and wild, with colour schemes which appear to place it within the “trippy” Eastern Art influenced genre of 70′s pop art – against Moebius’ more considered “ligne claire” style of illustration –  as much as it’s possible to be wild with a ruler and dip pen – Druillet managed to do it, achieving an interesting tension between his taut, mechanical line-work, and loose inking.

Druillet also relies heavily on signature forms which re-occur regularly within his work – in particular when depicting anything “alien”- as a kind of visual shortcut which would inevitably serve to make creation faster when working within the usually tight comic deadlines – but then these are “tricks” which just about every comic strip artist will employ – even Moebius – as a matter of style.

In terms of their individual profile as artists, it is tempting to consider that it may have fallen to something as simple as a name – “Giraud” is almost as odd sounding to an ear attuned to Anglo-Saxon as “Druillet”, but by choosing the pen-name “Moebius” – as “TinTin” creator George Remi became “Herge” – Giraud managed to neatly sidestep issues to do with wider acceptance.

While less well known in the English speaking world, Druillets’ work has influenced many films in terms of production design – eg George Lucas tapped his work both for a possible Star Wars poster and also some elements seen in the background of Return of The Jedi, and Han Solo bears many similarities, not just in his similarly sounding name, to Druillets’ “Lone Sloane”.

I think most of the appeal of his work, to me, lies in a willingness to explore, and some might say, exploit, forms which are clearly influenced by the art and mythology of South East Asia, combined with a heady mixture of science fiction – don’t forget, this was the era of Von Daniken and his oddball theories – but always with what appeared to be a deep respect and fascination for them and this idea of the outsider or “other” – which is also the underlying theme within Lovecraft’s writing.

I spent an interesting day yesterday, with Nina Paley – she directed “Sita Sings The Blues” and is in London for a week.

We spent the day visiting Southall, where I grew up, pretty much (we were there for about 15 years before moving, in the late 70′s), trawling the Broadways numerous fabric and outfit stores which are hidden away in Mumbai style covered arcades, and the street stalls which spill over onto the pavements – before settling on Rita’s for lunch.

Ritas has changed hands since the mid-90s, and despite an extensive make-over (with water feature etc) – the food is no way as good as it was, which is a shame.

We later visited Touch Press, & Theo Grey (Ninas’ partner), a company which creates I-Pad apps based on visual books – quite interesting and definately the future – a great medium for combining text, animation & live footage in a portable medium – especially now that the HD I-Pad is due for release soon.

http://sepiamutiny.com/blog/2005/07/10/blood_brother/#more-1825

It’s perhaps a warning that changing your online identity too often can have a detrimental effect on how you are perceived, but then that was always my intention, good or bad – I’ll admit that my current site has less of a clear & focused identity compared to the one mentioned in the article, but then I think my general outlook has changed over time – using “Domenico Modugno’s rendition of “Volare” (the original and the best), seemed totally appropriate at the time on my then showreel, but now,  7 years on, less so.

Nice write up & mention for a job I worked on a while ago (thanks @ Richard Morrison !) for noted film titles designer Richard Morrison – an atmospheric opener for a film festival in Poland, which I composited, (with some additional finishing work by Kimon Matara).

http://www.firedbydesign.com/22/filmic-homage-in-off-camera-titles/

I recently (Xmas 2011) did some work for Richard on a proposed “Sinbad” TV series – rough design frames to suggest  various approaches for possible titles, which were worked up by his partner, Dean Wares, into full colour presentations – these took the form of storyboard frames but were quite loose and not locked down like a production board – will put some of the images up in the gallery at some point.

I also contributed some roto work over the holiday, for a recent title sequence for “Now is Good”, which he directed.

Animatic for a “Cartoonito“ promo (a channel on Cartoon Network) for Flux Design @ Th1ng & currently airing – a 3D CGI character –  part of the Cartoonito brand identity, escapes from a TV and tries to catch the attention of a (live action) girl in the “real” world.

Although the characters are quite simple geometric shapes, the style of the animation had to reflect the more rounded style of classic CN cartoons, and this had to be reflected in the board to some extent.

The animatic was used to establish timings and angles before shooting the live action, and to determine how much animation would be required.

]]> http://www.raviswami.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=1425 0 http://www.raviswami.com/blog/?p=1100&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=tips-tricks http://www.raviswami.com/blog/?p=1100#comments Sat, 07 Jan 2012 18:40:00 +0000 admin http://www.raviswami.com/blog/?p=1100 Looking for solutions to things you want to implement or fix on a website can be a frustrating and time consuming trawl of the internet, but one thing I’ve learned is that all the answers are out there.

Josh Leuze’s  “Meteor Slides” plugin is one such example,  but because he has a personal responsibility towards a plugin that he’s developed & hopes will be used by more people, he is very good as far as offering much needed feedback & solutions.

At the other end of the scale, you very much have to “go figure” – for this site I wanted to replace the default grey background colour  with an image – not too difficult, except that when I altered the CSS to allow for it, the image wasn’t centered, tiled badly and moved with scrolling in a way which conflicted with the visual material in front of it.

OK, this led to a few hours on the internet looking for the same problems, and CSS solutions – most of these issues were solved quite quickly by the addition of a few single lines of code – the last issue, scaling the background to fit any browser size and remaining fixed in position – offered several solutions of varying complexity , the actual solution was absurdly simple – one extra CSS command, which leads me to think that some web designers seem to delight in over-complicating things sometimes.

The initial appeal of WordPress was this “WYSIWYG” approach to web design, but it still has some way to go as far as being user friendly – Pagelime is a much better solution to client-side customisation & worth checking out if you build sites from scratch, or even via WordPress.

The previous theme, “Photo Nexus” by ThemeForest, was quite good design-wise, as far as using it for visual work, and feedback and support was also OK, if a little sluggish – drew a blank again on slideshows, which never worked that well – I had the theme running for almost a year since I bought it, but the main niggle was the way in which the slide shows loaded and the solution might have been a mixture of server problems (since addressed), files sizes (also addressed) or a javascript issue – the last being one outside of my limited web design skills.

Customisation of this theme – Portfolium by WPShower – is possible, but only after a lot of fiddling around, and it’s a free theme that’s been around for a year or so – support from the developers is non-existent apart from forums, where the sub-text is “go figure” – I guess they have an agenda in keeping certain aspects of the coding under cover, and also encouraging people to learn about coding before wading into WordPress – never the most user friendly program for building blogs / websites, although it’s getting better.

What started out as offering text , rather than visual, based sites, has grown to embrace sites which no longer simply look like magazine pages, but proper websites, and it’s starting to look very interesting.

The solution to the slideshow problem came in the form of the very excellent “Meteor Slides” plugin from Josh Leuze – I wont go into how the default slideshows for BOTH themes didn’t work as per the demos on the developers sites (same problem in either case) – but there was never an endorsement for third party plugins from the developers, maybe because there’s a conflict of interest – so you have do some research and Googling before a solution presents itself – part & parcel of using WordPress is the use of numerous third party plugins to address issues which are not covered by the basic WordPress program.

Josh is very committed to offering feedback and solutions in the form of CSS code to fix issues that are encountered when using various themes, since there’s no real consistency across themes, despite the robustness of WordPress itself – as usual it was more than simply installing the plugin and hoping for the best, but it works and that’s the main thing – the alternative was to limp along with a site which looked like it suffered from bad coding or poor design, and people will leave the site, no matter how good or interesting the work is.

Overall, I haven’t changed the theme that much,  since (like a lot of people) I liked its clean, modern design and focus on the visual aspects of work, out of the box, as it were – but even the most basic customisations requires a detailed root around the CSS for the theme – so it was a bit of a learning curve.

It’s tempting to make it a site covering all aspects of work, but it’s focus will mostly be storyboarding – and also a way of highlighting aspects of work which I can’t, or haven’t been able to implement so easily on my main website, which was built from scratch in Dreamweaver.