Archive for the 'nattering' Category

Things I Draw When I’ve Had a Few

sydney July 6th, 2008

I got back from the Annecy festival a few weeks ago.. don’t have any Deep Thoughts but a couple of film recommendations and some sketches.

On the whole I found the films kind of a let down (I’ll never brag about having film in Annecy again.. ) but it was worth it for one film, I think the best short film I’ve ever seen: Skhizein, which won the audience award. Very funny for 10 minutes, then turned suddenly incredibly sad; on a rare subject, and I’m still thinking about it weeks later. Catch in on the festival circuit if you possibly can; I suppose it will come out on the ‘net when it’s done touring. Also excellent was the feature Peurs du Noir. Not normally much of a horror fan but really inventive graphics in this one:

Anyways we all really go to Annecy to drink and socialize and stock up on graphic novels at the fabulous comic shops, all of which activities I thoroughly covered. Having a glass of wine or ten with fellow-Narnian Caroline, I couldn’t help noticing how ideal her features are for fast drawing; and then there was a random guy sitting behind her with classic French-comic-book-hero chiseled cheekbones, so I drew this:
fee et brooding 1
And then I thought, obviously, HOW MUCH COOLER, not to mention more French-comic-booky it would be, if Caroline was a fairy:
fee et brooding 1
and Mr Brooding noir hero could solve crimes featuring ogres and witches, but dark! and French! and brooding! It looked pretty fantastic on a bottle and a half of cheap red and a week’s all-graphic-novel-and-animation diet.

I promised Caroline I’d put it up so here it is… I was kind of fancying mocking a cover up in colour, because that’s the sort of thing I waste my time on, but I’m shockingly paralyzed by the death of my Toshiba tablet. I’m a lot more dependent on Photoshop than I’d really like for polishing stuff. No one seems to make tablet PCs with decent graphics cards anymore so I’m ogling Cintiqs now, which I can’t really justify as I’d mostly use it for doing things like covers for imaginary comic books.

Hey, I Resemble That Remark

sydney May 15th, 2007

“Typically animators drank heavily, both to relieve their tension and loosen their inhibitions; alcoholism was practicaly an occupational hazard, though it may also have something to do with the fact that the kind of men who were attracted to animation were likely to be emotionally stunted and loners, lost in their own heads.” Walt Disney: The Biography, Neal Gabler

I picked up the new biography of Walt Disney, and naturally (as one does), the first thing I did was look up Milt Kahl in the index for outrageous stories. This led me to the above quote. I nearly spilled my martini! Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go back to surfing the internet for Harry Potter theories while inventing clever comebacks to things people said to me 10 years ago.

Coincidentally, I was having a conversation with a guy in rigging (at a pub– +1 alcoholic, -1, emotionally stunted loner) about why there were so few female animators. In an effort to give it a positive spin, he suggested that animation required a level of self-absorption most girls don’t have (except I suppose for Paris Hilton). Poor fellow was kind of stuck insulting me one way or the other!