h0le: subject research

h0le was, surprisingly to me, picked as one of the 16 animations to go forward to the next stage of evaluation, based on storyboards, pre-production and an animatic with completed scratch track. I say surprising, I was so nervous pitching the idea I'd forgotten most of the experience and peoples reactions before the day was out.

So currently I'm re-doing the rough script I wrote up before I start any storyboard roughs and I'm trying to decide on what the blue words should say and I've encountered a problem.

As this is a heavy-handed metaphor, what helps a person out of their depression?

The basis of the blue words is that they symbolise that the white creature (should I name him and the black thing? It's getting tiring writing "white creature/black blob" all the time)is not alone at the bottom of the hole, despite how he may feel, so the words need to be encouraging.

But is this enough? Certainly, for any amount of time a person spends depressed words become relatively meaningless. I suppose in the context of an animation, they're more of a kick-start to the white creatures determination to already leave the situation he's in.

So the words are more of an assistance, shown in the way they become hand holds in the climb up. Unfortunately deciding what types of words should be used is more of a problem because its difficult to come up with phrases that feel genuine, rather than theatrical. Having the inside of the hole looking like a collection of fortune cookie sayings would be terrible.

I've decided against making a blog for h0le, yet. It's early days and I'd rather the project made it through to the next stage before I start making official looking things.

Heres a quick animation I made. I'm badly out of practice and still trying to decide on which software to settle on, this was TVP.

h0le: Pitch

Alright, here are most of the images I'll be using in my pitch. Now if i can sort out the talking parts I'll be good to go.

h0le: additional research

Trying to find some kind of pose reference was strangely difficult today, couldn't find the right things anywhere. However, Derek got me looking into an artist called Saul Steinberg to get a different perspective on using symbols and marks instead of actual words for the abuse (and nicer things) being hurled into the hole. Here's some of the works that I thought were relevant to the theme.





I found more images here but I'm prevented from sharing them, so you'll have to check them out here yourselves. Sorry about that.

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Another artist I found completely by accident today is Beksinski, a polish artist whose work reminds me of a mixture of Francis Bacon, Giger and a dollop of surrealism.

(click for full size)
I saw this piece-



-and the skinny, stretched limbs really struck me, so I looked for similar pieces he'd made.




I don't intend to make my animation in this style because that would be bonkers, but I'm tempted to do a piece of concept art on a similar style to make it look as grim as possible.

h0le: concepts

More background tests, these are all watercolour roughs with a little digital fixing. I'm going to try to make more serious concept pieces this week when I have better access to photoshop


A little something to lighten the mood. Can't work on something dark without a little bit of light.


The blog also needs a bit of an update, which I'll work on when I get some spare time.

h0le

So still working on the h0le idea over this and the previous week, seeing how it goes. If it doesn't go anywhere, well, I'll have to see what happens.

Last years life drawing

I realised I never scanned a life drawing from last year at any point, so I photographed the pile I'd collected. Expect my foot to make some cameos.

Crew Productions

Catch up!

I've uploaded the videos of the animation I did of the Inbetween a Fable work.


The crowd of revellers inked, I think mainly based on a photograph. As I gather they're meant to be in the background of the shot although whether its the same one as the musicians I can't say off the top of my head.


The crusader-esque purger of gypsies. I inked and did the secondary animation on her hair strands.


The drummer, the head was a simple translation of the inks to keep it simpler.


The flutist. He was mainly static so this wasn't too bad providing I kept to the right layers.


The dancers inked. I grew to steadly resent those pinstripe trousers, but one thing I liked about this one compared to something like the accordian is that almost all the frames were quite different so it stayed "fresher" feeling and lacked the repetition of one like, say, the accordion (seeing a pattern?).


The final animation I did, the coloured accordion player. She wasn't as red as the other characters when I coloured her so she possibly had some correction done in post.
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Otherwise, I've made a sequence of the TIFFs I drew for Lets Blame Dahmer,which should be my final video upload. The style gets rougher towards the end but fortunately the guy starts to move forwards, so the terrible drum kit gets less attention.