Man In A Cat Teaser Clip

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!

Looping, Pulsing Innards

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

Other People’s Stuff – David O’Reilly

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.

Viva Los Birmingham

Man In A Cat’s set in Birmingham dontcha know? More specifically New Oscott – it’s got a big Tesco.

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).

Behold the Swively Thing…

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.

Cast for Man In a Cat is Revealed!

Kevin Eldon, Josie Long and Isabel Fay are on board for Man In A Cat and we’ll be recording next week! For the full article and extent of my fanaticism over Kevin Eldon go THIS WAY.

How Many Circles Does It Take To Work Out Yorkie?

… A lot.
This is just a fragment of the development gone into Yorkie, let alone Man In a Cat. On paper it doesn’t look like all the options were explored, but by God believe me we did! The seed of this whole story came from one picture, that one in the top left of him punching the inside the cat.

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.

Thumbnails, Roughing, Clean up

A quick video to say hello, and to give you a little insight into how I fit Flash into the world of traditional animation.

Meet the Star – Mrs Cat

Whilst the original idea for ‘Man In A Cat’ stemmed from this silly pic (http://tinyurl.com/maninacatpic) the cat’s personality and mannerisms are pretty much stolen from my family’s own massively over weight cat, Lucy Hudson, aka Mrs Cat, aka Fatbum, aka Fluffy Slops, aka Liz.

So cue pointless cat video! My god, I’m actually contributing to this madness.

Rotoscoped Stop Motion Car

Some jerky test footage of the model car I modified, stop motion animated, then rotoscoped. Really I should have used a green screen as when the white bits of the car hit the white background I had to do a lot of guess work. Which kinda defeated the point.

I stole this technique from the way they animated the cars in 101 Dalmatians. They obvously did it a tiny bit better. Check how they did it here: