[BOOK] Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist

Chuck Amuck is an incredibly fantastic book, the way it is written is as if it is a script taken from one of the Looney Toons shorts. Chuck Jones is an American animator, filmmaker and cartoonist who is best known for his work with the Warner Bros. Cartoons on the Looney Tunes series.

The book is an autobiography on Chuck's life, it delves into his entire work and the characters he not only created, but also contributed to. The book isn't only an autobiography, it is written in such a way that also aids animators understand character development. It is sort of a biography into the development of Looney Toons as well.

The book is very fun to read, and it is enlightening and entertaining filled with images and drawings from early production, fully drawn and coloured cels and even photos of the animation team in production of one of the Looney Toons shorts. The book discusses each of Chuck's directed Looney Toons episodes and how it made an impact, how it was produced and what the response to the animates short was.

Overall, the book is incredibly insightful, a fantastic read for anybody who loves Warner Bros, Animation as much as myself. It is great to read about the life of Chuck Jones and how he contributed to animation, I would recommend this book to anybody who has an interest in animation and to anyone who enjoyed early Warner Bros. animation. 

[RESEARCH] Getting contacts - Update #1

I feel that I should update my whereabouts on the whole research side of my Masters, that being getting animation contacts to help me with my essay. I currently have sent off 35 emails to animators with varying backgrounds, from various countries and with various skill sets. Some of the animators include; Ed Skudder, the lead animator for the web series Dick Figures, who recently created the Dick Figures (2013) film. Jake Ganz, the creator of Studio Yotta, a Flash based studio which specializes in frame-by-frame animation and have worked on numerous projects such as Smash! by Starbomb and OKKO: Let's Be Heroes! on Cartoon Network. I also contacted the animators who worked on Ethel and Ernest and animators who worked on Jay & Silent Bob's Super Groovy Cartoon Movie.

Currently out of the 35 emails, only 10 have replied, these include Yotam Perel, Max Collins, Haakon Ziegler and Steve Stark to name a few. However, after checking through the replies that they all sent, I unfortunately will be able to use 3 out of the 10. The reason behind this is because most of the answers were either to short or too ambiguous. However, the 3 that I am going to use are incredibly insightful and will help me greatly. I wont use the 3 names but I am very grateful for the amount of effort they put into helping me.

So far, I am realizing how difficult it is to get people to email you back. Many people said they would get back to me in a few days, and never got back to me, which can be both stressful and disappointing. I am hoping that over the next week more people will get back in contact with me, I will send out more emails over the course of this week in the hopes that people will get back to me.

[PRODUCTION] Week 10 - Finalizing the first two scenes

The main purpose for me this week was to get as much of the first two scenes done as possible, once they have been fully finished I can focus on scene 3 to finish allowing me to focus on the traditional drawings. I unfortunately did not finish some of the shading on some of the shots, however the first two scenes are now fully coloured. Once I have finished the shading I can focus on getting the "everybody can draw" drawings completed and scanned, to make the walls filled with drawings.

I am hoping that I can at least finish all the shading by week 12. I would have liked it completed by week 11 but I feel I need to focus more energy on getting my research completed, once I get the essay underway I can come back and get scene 1 and 2 completed. I am happy however that I got most of the shot done in scene 2, as I was beginning to worry that perhaps I would forget to add the Old Animator moving around the room, or it'd be too long and I would end up drawing him differently.

I am anticipating to not get much animation done next week, however I feel that I should be focusing my energy on something that is getting left behind. I believe that it will be worth it in the long run, and once this essay is complete I wont need to worry about any more writing assignments.

[LECTURE] Lecture 6 - Halima Cassell

Halima Cassell is a Ceramics Artist born in Kashmir in 1975, she moved to England at a very early age and became a student at UCLan in 1994 studying Ceramics. In 2002 she returned to UCLan to study her Masters and then went to study for her PDQ in 2004. Halima’s presentation focused on all the work se has produced and what has influenced her into becoming to designer she is today. Her creativity and work is heavily influenced from her Asian roots, the multi-cultural background is the basis for most of her work being influenced and inspired by; Islamic and other intricate architecture aspects such as church, mosque and synagogue architecture, her other main influence is mathematics and artists who use mathematics in their arts such as Bridget Riley.

Halima then proceeded to talk about her early work, she worked with simple designs such as rectangles, triangles and squared to produce work such as; Moss Ripple, Reverberating Segments, Gold Cross Hatch and Coliseum to name a few. She then explains how she began to see influences in structures of the past and contemporary building styles, she was intruded by how internal space and the construction articulate together, she then focused her work on this creating; Blackburn on the Hill, Concentric Flower, Chain of Diamonds, Marmor and Citadel to name a few. Through this she created Tsunami, her first piece which was curved and had no edges, like all of her previous work, this then influenced her to create Mag, Harlequin Shift, Carapace & Magma, Voluta and R.E.M to name a few. As her work began to develop, it began to become more complex and each piece of work began to become more detailed, soon she was using comments and observations by people at exhibitions to develop her work.

I wont delve too much into what else was said here, but I will explain how I have been influenced by her work during my research assignment at a later date.

[INSPIRATION] Titmouse's Betty Boop 2017

This is a very interesting animation, Titmouse Inc are responsible fortelevison shows such as Home: Adventures with Tip and Oh, Moonbeam City and Son of Zorn and are also responsible for the feature film; Nerdland. This came out of nowhere as the last time Betty Boop was featured in new animation was around 30 years ago, now she is the new face for M·A·C Cosmetics. The entire premise of these three 30 second long shorts are simply to advertise a new dress collection designed by Zac Posen and a new M·A·C Cosmetics lipstick shade "Betty Boop Red".

This for me is interesting, as for me this is possibly the most recent use of mainstream rubber-hose animation since Futurama and The Simpsons parodied it, they then bring the animation back into colour at the very end when showing off the products, however the use of rubber-hose through out the animation is visually pleasing. The animation is clearly not done using traditional methods and is created using Flash I would assume. I personally found it a fantastic attempt to recreate rubber-hose animation and was very inspiring to watch.

[PRODUCTION] Week 9 - Finishing Scene 3 and going back to Scene 1

I was able to finish scene 3 this week and now I can focus more on the finalization on every unfinished shot thus far. I have currently finished off shot 6 and 8 from scene 1, I still need to try to get shots 2, 10 and 11 finished, shot 11 shouldn't be too hard to complete however, I feel that 2 and 10 will eat up a good amount of time as the majority of these shots are just a floating head. I still need to animate the body rotating and moving, this will take me a few hours to complete.

I am hoping that throughout next week I am able to get a few more shots finished, perhaps complete all of scene 1.

[LECTURE] Lecture 5 - The Brothers Mcleod

The Brothers Mcleod are made up of two brothers; Greg Mcleod and Myles Mcleod. Greg is an award winning illustrator and animator who has worked on a variety of projects using his distinctive hand drawn art style. Myles on the other hand is an award winning writer who has written for children’s television, animation, lyrics and music for songs. The two brothers are directors and set up The Brothers Mcleod in late 2006 after working at their family company Spark Zoom. Spark Zoom focused on creating eLearning material, and although the brothers were working for themselves, the job wasn’t their primary interest. While working at Spark Zoom, ther used the facilities to record silly voices and try animating over them, through this they began to bend the work they had to do into something they wanted to do. Soon they were contacted by the BBC to produce 10 x 5 minute animations, and through this their business The Brothers Mcleod set off.

The two brothers began their presentation with a show reel, they explained that students would often ask them what a good show reel was, however they had never actually produced a show reel before, so this was their first unveiling and interpretation of a good show reel. Once they showed their show reel they began to explain their creative process; they explained that they both think visually to develop characters, narratives, stories and worlds. They did everything themselves in the beginning, and because of this they had control over everything, however now they outsource their work to freelance animators. Now when working on a project, they design everything, write everything, and then use a team of freelance animators who don’t work within their studio to animate the video. The brothers explained that this is one of the ways they have survived 10 years, because they don’t have to budget for an in-house animator, they can pick and choose who they want on each project making everything much more flexible. 

They then began to explain a project that has been in the making for some time, ‘Marfa’, a animated documentary about Greg’s trip to Marfa in Texas. While Greg was in Texas, he wanted to get as much information as possible for inspiration; photographs of various areas, audio recordings of different settings, local live bands and of course varieties of drawings and doodles. They were unsure about what style to go with for this animation, however they didn’t see this as a problem considering it is a personal project and they don’t have a deadline. As they were developing the idea, the style began to look visually similar to their previous animation ‘365’, one of their most successful animations. ‘365’ is an animation in which they drew a second of animation every day for a year, the Brothers Mcleod tried to push 365 as much as they could on Social media and they built up a huge following. They posted clips on Vimeo, kept people updated on Facebook and Twitter and accumulated a very large following, once released the film was seen by a large number of people and was sent around to many different festivals. This lead them to working for their biggest client; Disney.

Disney wanted the Brothers to create a bumper for Disney XD in a similar style to ‘365’, they gave the brothers a very tight deadline, however out of all the companies that were working for Disney at the time, the Brothers Mcleod were the only ones to actually submit the video by the deadline. From this they then started working with the shorts department, where they produced ‘Pranksgiving’ and a separate project where they were asked to pitch and produce a short series, once the project was finalized they were given two years to develop the animation.

I wont delve too much into what else was said here, but I will explain how I have been influenced by their work during my research assignment at a later date.