Getting to know you...

Sometimes, it's a bit difficult to talk about the work I'm making, cos I don't want to spill every bean, sometimes I'm sworn to secrecy, and sometimes I don't know how to fully articulate where I'm going or how I'm arriving at the results I'm arriving at.

However, I'm currently working on some new characters for a range of projects, and have been thinking about that quite a lot.

I read an interview with Jon Burgerman the other week (who did a great talk at our latest 'Loving your Work' event at Eye Candy), and he talked about how a doodle can sometimes take a long time just to get right. It's easy to think that a doodle is a doodle, and the time it takes to come out of the pen is the entire time of the process attached to it. But in a way, it's like casting/acting and wardrobe all at the same time - it takes a while to find the character you want. It's a bit like that thing where hammy old actors talk about how they 'always start with the shoes, darling' - I kind of always start with the heads. I guess it's then that you can see the person you are trying to bring to life. My heads are always really simple - kind of playmobil style spheres in a way with contour lines on them. I like the simplicity of it, and the kind of deadpan expression. - It's oddly naturalistic, in that animation characters are so often exaggerated to express a stereotype, but these simple heads are more like real life because most people spend most of their time with their faces fairly straight. The deadpan face somehow allows you to look deeper to understand the character.

I read so many animation and cartooning books that say things like - a posh lady walks like this, a fat man is this kind of character etc., and it drives me mad. Animation so rarely gets beyond first impressions. - So, if you strip the face of all the cliches, potentially you can give more depth. I hope so!

For the Second Life project, I was working to a brief, and had to 'characterise' to personality types. It was a fight to get across the need not to give the whole character away from first impressions, but Ricard had seen the characters from 'Angels', so we were able to reach a point where the characters were enough 'mine' and enough 'his' to work well.

I'm currently working with another film-maker, Mark Devenport, to develop a new cartoon, set in a primary school, a kind of Peanuts meets Bash Street Kids, by way of Last of the Summer Wine, and last night I started some character design for a new short called 'In Spite of all the Damage I've Done', which is a really simple story, a kind of sequel (I think) to Angels, based around a Be Good Tanyas track.

The most exciting new project though, may be a new fictional blog I'm working on. I was trying to find a way to loosen up the whole animation process, which is in a way linked to my thoughts about live art and spontaneous animation. The idea is to be able to develop characters and stories 'live', through creating a blog by a fictional character, who just happens to be a cartoon.

The blog allows for slower development of character, from 'Hi, Welcome to my Blog' to 'Yesterday, my heart got broke', and allows me to sneak in narrative ideas that can be developed, or abandoned as I work out what works. I don't know what the blog will lead to, whether I'll pull strands out to turn into scripts, or whether I'll just let it go where it wants to go for it's own sake. The idea is to give me a space to work through animation and illustration ideas, and post them within a context. -I've written a few pieces to start the story, and I'll post the URL when it's set up.

Oh, yes - last night I accidentally came up with a new idea for a short, I can't tell you much about it for now, but it involves a Golem. - I was doodling and one of my standard monster characters came out (I generally ignore the standard monster character, it's like my phone doodle), but this time I thought it looked really nice, especially when I drew a Victorian magician next to it, which looked a bit like the Pringles man. From then, it was a simple case of a bit of common insomnia, and the seed of a new film was sown.

In real life...
I moved house last week; cheated by watching sneak preview Lost while babysitting (therefore destroying tonight's TV); and as you know, went to see Douglas Coupland, which was good, but ruined by a rubbish interviewer, who didn't even touch on the big themes of Coup Land. Oh, and Be Good Tanyas announced their new album! - It's been a long wait, nearly as long as the wait for the Breeders 3rd album.