I bet you’re so teased.

I keep meaning to do a succinct, satisfying round up of All Consuming Love (Man In A Cat), but instead you’ll just have to swat up on the film on it’s official page, follow it on Facebook, check it out on IMDb, and read the story so far on the blog.

Lotsa fun!

I made this to put on the background for any screenings we put on for Man In A Cat.

If you’re an animator you’ll probably know David O’Reilly. If not, he’s a maverick, BUT HE GETS RESULTS GAD NABBIT!

Now Man In A Cat’s finished (I’ll do some de-briefing soon), it was really reassuring to read this blog post by David on post-film fatigue and dealing with critism. This line struck home the most:

When something’s gonna take over a year of your life, fill you with paralyzing self-doubt, destroy whatever social life you have and empty your bank account, what’s the point on re-doing what you’ve done before?

It’s just a shame that David’s similar age and incredible intelligence, respect and success also fills me with paralyzing self-doubt.

Here’s the post: http://www.davidoreilly.com/2011/02/thankyou

…and here’s the motivational gin.

Matt Partridge did a fantastic job of designing the final backgrounds, character designs and animation. As budget was quite tight it was a pleasure to take a step back and guide someone else having fun with that side rather than forcing them into an unfamiliar style. In terms of hands on animation I just did a few character animation tweaks and the final title sequence.

It was also a cosy little Dice collaboration too. Ian Ravenscroft wrote the script, and Tom Reid and myself did the character voices.

Now get checking those lumps!

Hmm… If you count all of those trees I’d say there were more trees per capita then any other city in the UK (Sutton Park skews the figures).

I’ve bought a new thing! It’s a monitor stand that tilts, swivels and adjusts height. Yeah, I’m that cool.

The reason being is that quite often I want to trace something off my computer monitor. Lately it’s been mainly used to do rotoscoping for Man In A Cat (coming soon). The problem with nearly all monitors is that they can only tilt up and down a little and it looks like only HP made these types of ergonomic beauties as standard. Fingers crossed this should make the experience more natural, as long as the hinges are tight enough to not wobble around while drawing.

Here’s me thumbling with a fixed monitor like some sort of cretin.

There’s always something you could alter, but we’re pretty chuffed with how it turned out in the small amount of time we had. Enjoy…

*Update*

And it turns out Yoko Ono ‘loves it’. Wowee!

From there we had to work out what kind of story this was and how that was going to work best. That got really nauseating. I still think of all the possibilities and the knock on effects. Ian and I came up with so many scenarios, settings, relationships, arcs and loop-da-loops that we had twenty or so spin offs by the end.

After we had finally decided what was best for Yorkie’s future, I had to design him to fit with every aspect of the story perfectly. I don’t normally draw big round eyes, but apparently this is what this film called for. And scale! Don’t get me started! Even the shape of Yorkie’s skull is carefully considered.

This has been in development now for 3 YEARS, and I can finally say that I’m completely happy with it… I think… I do still like the idea that he’s Super Mario at, literally, the arse end of his career. I’ll try get some more bits and bobs of this kind up here, but the ideas phase was was so loose and wordy that it looks more like the random doodled conspiracy theories of Mel Gibson.