Tom Collie Animation

Shanghai Nights

2010-09-29T23:00:00.000-07:00

For the past 5 months, I have been working at Jetoon studios in Shanghai. This has been truly a great experience, not least because it has let me see China, but moreover it has allowed me to work on some interesting projects (see below). What has been important is that this tour of work has allowed me to juxtapose my commercial experiences in London to that of the far east. It does beg questions about the life of a freelancer back in the UK - animation work here means you can live a stable existence like any job and not have to bounce back and forth from studio to studio. Long term projects in London and UK are rare enough and if you dont want to draw or animate for advertisements, you're in a bit of a pickle! Enough musings from me here though...

Here are the projects I worked on - animated previews available later in the future once the shows have been aired!

GROOVE HIGH

Groove High, a Disney TV series, set to be released sometime in 2011, was produced here in Shanghai and also in conjunction with Planet Nemo (click here for a peek). The kids TV show is aimed at 7-12 year olds and is set in an elite school for performing arts. It follows the success of Glee and High School Musical and will presumably, like its live-action predecessors, drive you fucking crazy. I was given the opportunity to work on this show and animated characters in Adobe Flash. The designs for these characters were lovely and it will be good to see the toon finally aired on TV.

SILLY BITTY BUNNY

Aimed at the pre-schoolers this time, this toon is similar in vein to Pepper Pig et al and plots the experiences of SBB's first-time experiences. Again, this was made in conjunction with Planet Nemo in Paris and was animated using Flash. A really great project, less complex asset-wise compared to Groove High, but nonetheless tricky to get some true life into simple symbols and tweens. Our studio produced animation for France so lip-synching was all in French bien sur, bien sur!! Check out the pilot in English here.

ANIMANATIONS

Animations and designs were produced here for UK web-based "Animanations" who provide a satirical and ridiculous viewpoint on current affairs. All designs were roughed out in Photoshop and then finalised in Flash. As usual, animation was made using Adobe Flash. See the Animanations in all their glory here.

ONE LAST THING...TINY D

Jetoon Studios have been busy building their own characters and stories. One of these details the story of a young child who shares a simbiotic relationship with the spirit of a dragon. His journey through life is assisted by three other mentors, fantastic creatures, who tutor him in the ways of defeating a world-terror in the shape of a great Fire Demon... Anyway, enough of that - if you wonder who the narrator is for the trailer - c'est moi, bien sur, bien sur!!! Check it out here!!!

Bitbots Toys

2010-09-15T08:25:00.000-07:00

After months of hard work, time, money and travel, a highly esteemed friend has launched his first toy series. Series Zero marks his first step into the vinyl toy market and marks a response to the popularity that has swept the globe. For those who are unaware, these toys come in a set model format but differ substantially in the design placed upon them. Other main players dominating the market include Kidrobot's Dunny series.

Bitbots officially launched this September in London at Playlounge, on Beak Street in trendy Soho. The public turnout was great and the toys on display, including those from Series Zero and other custom designs, looked impressive but moreover stood -up well against and overshone the more established rivals!

Series Zero includes 8 designs, one of which I am proud to announce is my own! With any luck, "One Eye" along with the other seven designs will help establish Bitbots firmly inside a highly competitve and niche market. Visit Bitbots and witness the intial steps of a toy company that I am sure will make leaps and bounds within the industry.

CD cover in HMV nationwide!!!

2009-08-02T05:10:00.000-07:00

Finally, the debut album from Jake Goss's Banyan is out in the shops nationwide. Its called "Looking Up" and features the cover I did for him. You can buy it here. Check out the previous designs in the May 2009 section.

In case you missed it, here's the final design cover:

Creep walk

2009-07-19T09:30:00.000-07:00

Modelling

2009-06-25T14:11:00.000-07:00

Here's some modelling I did in Maya. Basic animation I know but this was all about the contraption itself.

Here's another one, this time situated within a simple environment:

ZBrush

2009-06-04T08:23:00.000-07:00

Here's some door knockers I modelled up in Zbrush - more to follow since I've got to model up a backing plate and a door. Maybe I can cast them up in bronze...

First venture into Maya

2009-05-30T17:08:00.000-07:00

Right, here we go! The journey into technical expertise begins! I've been dabbling in Maya for a while now and I've kind of grown fairly fond of it. Compared with 3DS Max, it seems a little more "grown up" - Max seems to do things for you resulting in fairly unconvincing animation and also frustrated digital artists. Nevertheless, its a pretty powerful tool, industry renowned, and for that reason a nod to it must be given. I acquired some tutorials on Max a while back, and to be honest, it helped me understand Maya a lot better.

First and foremost, I've gotta say a big thankyou to Pete Kasim who I've inundated with questions and who's given me tutorials to understand spagetti junction aka the graph editor as well as walk-cycle references. Nice one Pete.

Well, here's the very start of it - a ball bouncing in Maya. Had problems with the render system which for some reason had to have a port freed from McAffee. Also I rendered it out in perspective view - camera-view to follow at a better resolution - watch this space:

Here's the ball animated in Maya and rendered in Maya - this was an experiment to see just how long my machine would take to render out just 200 frames. 8 sodding hours!!! I couldn't believe it really but luckily I had a load of stuff to do outside in the blazing glorious sunshine.

Here's a Ping-Pong rendered out in Mental Ray - this one didnt take long at all.

The same video, rendered at a quicker time for experimentation purposes:

The same video but this time imported into AfterEffects in order to add a second camera:

Waterstones Competition

2009-05-30T09:55:00.000-07:00

I got tipped off about this competition to win an opportunity to illustrate a kids book written by Julia Donaldson, famous for the Gruffalo. The competition, called Picture This, run by Waterstones, insisted on hard copy prints of illustrations done by budding artists. I ran into a few problems at the print stage whereby my colour range on my printer clipped the colour gamut on my machine - it was frustrating to say the least. I managed to get my entry in on time and am awaiting results. The opposition is quite daunting - check out the Flickr site. Hundreds of entries. Mine are below. With these, I tried to mimic the painting styles of young children with fairly simple characters but, most of all, a really loose painting style. All paint effects are done with Painter, another computor program on a long list I have yet to master fully.

This is Freddy, the small boy of the piece.

This is Bessie Bell, the part-deaf cack-handed fairy of the piece. I modelled her on the great Sue Pollard who instantly sprung to my mind from my days watching Hi-De-Hi on TV. I tried putting an "s" and a "p" into the fairy wings as a small gag but this melded into just pure wing design - you can kinda see these letters at the tips.

These are some animal examples as per spec for the competition.
This is the fairy queen. I modelled her on some 1920's gangster molls and some art-deco fashionistas I found on the net. I tried to make the lettering in the wings a little more explicit. This picture I had the most trouble with at the print stage since the colour gamut in the printer clipped the really vivid blues. It was annoying I had to send this off with not a true representation of the colour I had chosen. Well, all I can say is lesson learned - get the RGB to CMYK conversions sorted before the print stage. Way before!

The last two pictures represent a centre page spread, and in this case, the last 2 pages of the story. I wanted to make the gorilla huge compared to the boy but I had to scale it down a little. I just made the ape dominate the last page. I also made sure the orange in the background was scrawled across the two pages like a kids painting. Kinda works but I think, compared to the other stuff on the Flicr site, I should have put more detail in the background. However, I was going for simplicity. I dont know - how the hell do I know whats going through a kid's mind? - what do they want? - detail to scour and obsess over or sheer simplicity to fixate upon? I might ask one one day although I feel she may only be able to communicate through a medium of masticated rusk and proto-simian yelps.

Jake's Banyan Tree - second pass

2009-05-29T18:32:00.000-07:00

After sending Jake some ideas, we reworked a few and then looked at some more. He wanted a "mystic" feel to the cover to mirror the music - the trippy Deadhead album inspired cover wasn't gonna cut it, even though I liked it and liked doing it. Jake sent me the image below summing up the kind of thing he wanted:

So with that in mind, it was back to photoshop, collaging tree branches into recognisable Banyan trees so we didnt get nailed for copyright issues for using someone's photograph that we'd nicked off the interweb. Here's a few mystical Banyans:

Jake Goss's Banyan Tree

2009-05-29T15:37:00.000-07:00

My sister knows this guy called Jake. Jake plays Jazz. Jake was looking to cut his first record and asked my sister if she knew anyone who could design him a cover. She volunteered me to do it. So I did. Here's the first batch of designs I did. One of them, the green one that looks like a piano, was designed by my sister Alice and then produced by me.The Jazz band is called Jake Goss's Banyan. If you're wondering why there's so many "s"' in Goss, its apparently grammatically correct to write it like this. A Banyan is a tree commonly found in South East Asia famous for its branches stretching out and then down to form new roots.

All these were produced in Photoshop and Illustrator. The last one (below) was inspired by the Grateful Dead's Aoxomoxoa

It first started as a sketch...

Then I placed it into Illustrator in order to manipulate the image without having to constantly redraw the whole thing...

Then I inked it in to to make it look organic...

Another redraw, this time with more detail...

The last pass before the design was abandoned - Jake didn't like the trippy representation of the instruments acting as seeds!

Woof and Caroline Jayne Church

2009-05-29T15:07:00.000-07:00

I was lucky enough to meet Caroline Jayne Church (check out her website), a children's book illustrator. She was kind enough to give me the opportunity to animate her character, Woof. Here's a small skit I did - I did it in the style of a children's book:

I did all the animation in Flash and then composited it in AfterEffects. Music is by the legendary shit-kickers Hayseed Dixie.

LeSingeMedia

2009-05-29T14:22:00.000-07:00

Well, here's writing in hindsight. This is some work I did for an internship at Brighton's LeSingeMedia

This body of work is pure cartoon character design. Check it:

More sketches and Photoshop frustration

2009-05-29T14:13:00.000-07:00

A few images here trying to capture some charcoal effects - yet more toying around in the vast possibilities that are Photoshop. I'm on the left - the guy on the right is made up.

APB distraction

2009-05-29T14:03:00.000-07:00

A Scottish games company were looking for artists to flesh out their new punk/GTA/Warriors console game. I thought about giving it a go and then got distracted by something. Anyway, this sketch was entirely out of my own head while I was simultaneously trying to learn human anatomy and also displacement maps in Photoshop. The idea was to make a gang of surfing gangstars, kinda like and pretty much exactly the same as those seen in that awful Reeves/Swayze Point Break bonanza (loved it!). Displacement maps are annoying!

Iglu and Hartley

2009-05-29T13:52:00.000-07:00

Its been a while since I've posted - busy I guess. Well, here's some work I helped out with at PartizanLab studios making a music video for Iglu and Hartley. It was quite refreshing to see some animation done in the traditional methods for a change.

Mirrors edge

2008-11-07T07:03:00.000-08:00

Been a while since I blogged but check out the storyline trailer to Mirrors Edge, the new EA Games parkour-first-person adventure/beat-and-clim-em up, published by Dice.

Helped out on this project. I must say the lead animators at Chase are nothing short of genuis'. I could only look on in awe! So fast too...

King Louis and the plants

2008-06-11T15:49:00.000-07:00

Strangely, I saw this and it influenced me making plant animations. All I'd say is pay particular attention to the banana:

Experimentation

2008-06-11T15:27:00.000-07:00

Below is a scene which took a day or two to do but I decided to cut it out! And put something else in!

Backgrounds

2008-06-05T10:21:00.001-07:00

These took bloody ages to do but I thought while I was at school I might as well crack on with getting to grips with Photoshop! Below this image is the one I used as reference

The crater:

Here are a few pictures that I stole off the web - I used their palette for my image:

Initial stages...

2008-06-05T08:15:00.000-07:00

Here is the picture from the National Gallery on which I have based my work.

The first two scenes of the final animation were quite problematic. Check below for the animatic to know what I'm talking about:

Firstly I had to animate a blazing meteor which would turn to earth and you would see Cybele the goddess inside! Fire, meteor trails, and image within an image. I realised that I had actually made quite alot of work for myself and I hadn't really started. I animated a meteor in flash using a standard fire cycle - which admittedly I had kicking around on my machine from an earlier project - which I then stretched out a little. Added a trail. Hey presto. I gave up with the face in the flaming ball - it would have been nice but to pull it off would have taken longer than I'd wanted.

I changed the meteor scene significantly. Or iginally I had based this scene significantly on the introdution to the Iron Giant which looking at it meant I had just ripped it off! Check out the beginning:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYYOTaPOSws

I couldn't really justify using all these ideas from the film, brilliant as they were so I left out Cybele in the meteor since you could see the Iron Giant in the meteor too. I changed the opening shots a little so there were no real close up's of the meteor too - this way there could be no recognising any inconsistencies in the Flash symbol or in fact any recycling of images!

In terms of the meteor crashing to the ground, this turned out to be a massive scene. Originally I had allocated two days per scene for this project with a massive 20 scenes!!! A bloody nightmare by no mistake.

Final project

2008-05-29T15:46:00.000-07:00

Right!

The last surge forward, over the trench of school room safety into the blazing guns of unemployment! Again. Shit! I'm invincible. Even the dole cant get me. The bastard.

So, the last project is upon me. We've had bloody ages to do this and to be honest I was a late starter. Some of us have to work for a living over the summer holidays, dontchaknow! Not swan around in the nude for over a month (the Easter holidays) drinking wine from a gravy mug and reliving the initial stages of Withmail and I, glue in hand waiting for the pub to open. Anyway, we all relived the initial stages of that film in the studio whereby a plague of mice invaded and made it their sole purpose of the meagre existences to defecate over my desk and light box. They are dead now. All of them.

So, while I was working over the four weeks off, I did concoct a few ideas attached to a few pictures which never really passed the pre production stages. For those who dont know, our college works in conjunction with the National Gallery - we pitch an animation in relation to a picture we like in the gallery and the gallery in turn plays these on their website and in their viewing spaces too (for a short time). I started off initially by looking at all the pictures in the museum online with a friend. This took bloody ages and by the time we finished we both had a massive book of pics and ideas. Anyway, the final idea I came up with was based on a Turner picture called Calais Pier which depicted a ship in a storm. I really liked it. This came after two ideas based on the Queen of Sheba and Androcles and the lion. I pitched them to the gallery but they didnt like them - said I was just placing stories onto images instead of really looking at the images and getting something from that.

Wrote to anyone who would listen on Facebook looking for help. We've got a CSM 2008 group. Adam heard my consternation and wrote some advice which really helped basically stating that I needed to have a story invented and explain IN DETAIL how it related to the picture. After I did this, I had the gallery eating out of my hands.

Anyway, my idea was formed in the shower at home. I depicted a Viking ship stuck in a storm, with two Vikings, male and female, Thor and Freya , who are confronted with a huge wave (like the one off Perfect Storm - really bad movie). They steer into it and at the apex of the wave, just before all is lost, the ship turns into a dragon and they sail off into the sky and into the sunset. Bloody ridiculous when I think about it now but there's really no point in doing animation if its not totally fantastic...whats the point in drawing something totally mundane...would take ages and be more dull than normal!! I pitched this idea to Lee at the gallery - she liked it.

So, after spending a good deal of time blasting through ideas I'd finally got somewhere and did the storyboard. I'll post this another time - spent a good deal of time doing this. Then I pitched it to Steve and Kev, the course tutors...

First let me say I think they both liked it. However, when I first mentioned the storm, ie in the intial first five minutes, Steve physically sagged in his chair muttering "oh no ...water". This certainly got the alarm bells ringing for sure. I looked at the first few scenes of the Iron Giant, some stuff off of Fantasia....water, eh...? Piece of piss....I can do this...what can be harder. I'll tell you what...my nemesis...the humble fish. I had so much trouble with this. It turns out that anything oceanic based will officially turn me into the incredible hulk. I had a few goes at animating water in Flash but I think you've gotta know when to fold your hand before you loose too much. I was certainly holding the metaphoric Dead Mans Hand. Apparently, WIld Bill Hickock was holding the Ace of Spades and a black eight when he got shot in the old west. A killer hand but one which effectively killed him. Water and fish, spades and aces...

Anyway, when I got back it meant reinventing a new idea again! It came down to the first picture I saw in the gallery that got the old sparks flying...one that my friend Ife and I remarked would have a good story to it. It had Romans and goddesses in it. As an archaeologicst in an older dirtier life, fate had provided me with the vehicle to say goodbye to the past while simultaneously beckoning in the future and a new career direction. It was set. The die was cast. The gods had decreed it...my story would involve a goddess crashing to earth in a meteor and bringing luck and victory to an ancient Rome beset by the tusks of the Hannabalic elephants. This was based on the picture intitled "Introduction of Cybele to the city of Rome". Here's a taster of the final animation, a still from the introduction...

part of the showreel...

2008-05-29T14:56:00.000-07:00

Right, about a month ago I applied to Framestore to get a few months work, no doubt making cups of tea for five year olds who were taught Maya and 3DS Max while simultaneously learning the alphabet. Anyway, I rigged together a small show reel knowing full well that it would fall flat on its arse. Seriously though, I got bored watching it -I should have edited it better but fuck it, I wanted it done quickly and wanted some experience in just blasting stuff out there. So with my DVD in hand I went round to the studio in person and handed it in - lo and fucking behold - rejection. Still, what can you expect - I reckon the whole lot of us have done bloody well to singlehandedly learn the entire fundamentals of animation in nine months. Mind you, looking at the Bournmouth 2007 class reel from last year made me weep salty bloody tears. You can really notice the difference between a team effort made over 6 months or whatever and one bloke doing everything in 8 weeks!! Some of the stuff was lush - and I dont mean that in the vernacular sense of the word - the colours and layouts were rich and diverse. Movement and timing were spot on. Character design was awesome. I almost went home after watching this since it was getting towards half eight - almost until Adam showed me the stuff from Gobelins. Then I really did go. Straight to the pub. So this is some of the stuff I placed on the showreel. God help us, one and all...

This pilot was my first exercise in lip synch. - I'd decided to draw it traditionally at first and then we were taught the basics of Flash and how lip synch is really ideal for this program...just make one mouth symbol with a load of mouth shapes and enter the frame number as and when you need it.

the last weeks...

2008-05-29T14:48:00.000-07:00

Christ!! Nearly finished the course! Up to my guts in work at the moment - reckon if I nail upto four scenes over the weekend I may finish with a week to spare so I can run a load of stuff through After FX and jazz up the animation. Failing this, I'll do this after the assessment on Friday in two weeks (as well as making a web site, sorting out the showreel, printing cards, writing CV, turning water into wine bla bla bla)

In the beginning...

2008-01-22T15:35:00.001-08:00

Well, here we go...

Anyway, animations will be forthcoming once I get them off the system at school.

I must mention that I'm back at school at St Martins College of Art, halfway through a gruelling 30 week non-stop course, training to be an animator. I will be spat out in June to the mercy of the animation industry (think Soho London) and try in vain to find work. I'm quite anxious about this and must hit the ground running - literally.

There's not enough hours in the day to blather on. Tonights the last night before I begin another late night work-stint for the rest of the week. Just created this blog on the advice of Wesley Louis who's also on this site somewhere.... check out his work! Its good and he pretty much embodies why everyone on my side of the class got into it in the first place!!