My blog is like a bus stop, as the metaphor goes- you spend ages waiting for one, then two come along at once! Today, we have some work for BBC Radio 1, in the form of this animation:
The observant amongst you will have worked out this kinda follows on from the animation I did for DJ Q’s M1X Show on 1Xtra earlier this year, which sadly never got picked up. You can read about that there though, as this post is about the Benji B one that has just gone live!
It seems to be getting a positive reception so far, which is fantastic! I’m pretty pleased with it too- considering how much I hate working with flash, it’s turned out rather well! It might be a little daft having made a video for a radio station, but it’s all good in the internet age!
It’s nice to do stuff outside of my D&B corner of the music industry, even if it is still music-related. I didn’t really know much about Benji B before I did this, but he’s taking over Mary Anne Hobbs’ slot, who I had heard of, so he must be good! He must have good taste too, because by a bizarre coincidence, one of the tunes they picked for this video is one of the few records outside of Drum & Bass that I did the artwork for- MJ Cole & Wiley’s From the Drop:
If you’re wondering why his mouth doesn’t move, I did do a second version (which I may or may not upload somewhere in the future) with talky mouths, but it was a bit on the ghetto side- I guess too ghetto for the BBC. Probably for the better really. Anyway- cool! It’s my work on the BBC! You can see it on the official Radio 1 page here if it being embedded in a BBC player here wasn’t enough, or you can see it on Radio 1′s official YouTube channel here too.
The views expressed here are quite clearly mine and not the views of the BBC or anyone who works there, just in case I inadvertently upset anyone
I should probably write about the things that influence me more often. A couple of weeks ago, I rediscovered The Secret Life of Machines, a Channel 4 TV series from the late eighties / early ninties. I used to watch this with my Dad when I was really small- it was on TV when I was between the ages of 2-7 apparently (!) – and despite being so young, it clearly made an impression on my tiny mind!
Here is a clip from the show, where Tim Hunkin describes what the concrete ballast in a washing machine is for, with the assistance of Rex Garrod:
Genius. They picked such an expressive washing machine for the demonstration too! It’s great watching this stuff again as the longstanding lines of influence are pretty apparent. For example, here’s a series of post-it notes from 2007 that bear a subtle resemblance to the above clip:
Which is a concept I revisited last week:
Now there’s an idea that is going somewhere!
Anyway! If you like washing machines, you can see more of my washing-machine-related daily artwork by clicking here, or if you just like machines in general, you can find links to watch more of the secret life of machines on Tim Hunkin’s website.
Here is a pitch I did for BBC Radio 1Xtra earlier this year. The producer of the 1Xtra M1X shows had an idea to do some promos to go on the web- animations of ‘A Day in the Life of…’ for each of the five M1X show DJs, and asked me if I wanted to have a go at one.
I hadn’t really done much animation prior to this (other than a few random stopmotion experiments), no less serious animation, but it was only meant to be short so I thought why not give it a go! I was sent a script which I had a little think about and drew a storyboard up to. I’m not very good at drawing caricatures, but DJ Q has a nice big smile so I ran with that. After I showed them the storyboard, the producers and DJ Q made the audio track for me to animate to, then after a bit of feedback and tweaking, it was finished!
I didn’t really know what to make of it when it was done (having never done anything like this before) but the reaction seemed to be positive, which was a relief! Even all my silly visual puns seemed to go down well! I’m rather proud of it now, but I’m not sure on what its future is, so I figured I’d put it up on my site to show people I can do stuff like this!
If you follow me on the Twitter/Flickr/SCED thing, you will likely have seen this already, but it’s worth posting here. It’s a little taster of the sort of thing I do every day, condensed down to about 30 seconds through the magic of timelapse! Unfortunately my little Flip only records two hours in one hour segments, so that’s all we have in this video. I probably could’ve done with setting my nikon to timelapse more frequently than one frame per minute too, but it works!
It seemed to get a good reception on the flickrtwitter, so I guess it’s relatively interesting, although I think a lot of the interest came from Hospital stalkers – I know you meticulously went through this frame by frame to get the Sick 2 tracklisting out of it!! Yikes!
This is my creative activity for today, but I’m far too amused by it to only post it on my Flickr-based SCED project, so it’s going up here too! Besides, it looks a lot better via Vimeo than Flickr’s video service.
I took the Vespa out for the first time in the best part of three months this week, and came back feeling rather hairy. I’ve been convinced for almost as long as I’ve been driving this machine that my facial hair grows quicker when I ride the Vespa. It kinda makes sense in a fuzzy (pun not intended) logic kind of way- my face feels the cold, so my body probably tries to do something about it short of growing a scarf!
Me being me, someone who likes to make stopmotion things and having an occasional fancy to make random flash-based toys, I decided to make this this afternoon- a virtual version of Lilly’s letterpress!
It will run by itself, but you can mouse over it to make it work yourself too! just move your mouse up and down over it!
If you know your letterpresses, you might be a little confused by the ink disc ratchet. Yes- it’s something I made myself, out of an old scrap of metal, and a cent I have had knocking around on my desk for ages (it wasn’t heavy enough on its own and Abraham Lincoln was happy to help!). The original one was very broken, too short, and not well attached, so I made this replacement on the weekend. I didn’t have a bolt of the right size though, so it is currently being held on with a small screw and chunk of wood. I’m not really sure if it looks or works anything like it is meant to, but it seems to work!
If you are curious to what we’ve been printing so far, you’ll probably find it on my Flickr. This weekend, we made our first prints with the litho ink I scored last week. Cool!
Here’s a little stopmotion animation idea I came up with last week. I probably could’ve done with making the clip a lot longer than 10 seconds, but it’s only an idea that could be used somewhere else in the future, and it took long enough as it was! Thus is the nature of stopmotion though I suppose!
Note: unlike my other stopmotion experiments, this one has sound on it (which is kind of the point). In case you wanted to know, the track is the classic Ram Records wobbler ‘Turbulence’ by Moving Fusion.
Hello, internet world! As usual, it has been aeons since I wrote anything here. I’m quite sure I have a reasonable amount of stuff to write about to show for my time between writing here. so let’s see what we have!
Stopmotion
Mouse Stopmotion
I’ve been having rather a lot of fun with my Nikon, as you may have been noticing if you follow my Flickr, as heaven knows it gets updated a lot more than this. Although I don’t think I’m taking anything particularly exciting, I’m enjoying hiding behind a nice big peice of glass wherever I go. Anyway, that’s mild digression. Following a bit of inspiration from the Lilliship, I have found myself dabbling in stopmotion animation, which I’ve put some of the fruits of up on YouTube- They’re only a few seconds long but I’m rather fond of them, so check them out!
Syncopix - Icarus
Logistics - Reality Checkpoint
Black and Red
Like the first felt tip markers in the pack to run out on you as a child, the past three album covers I have made have all ended up mostly black with red detailing, by some freak coincidence. This includes the long-coming Icarus album cover. When Syncopix told me he was calling his album Icarus, I decided to take the title semi-literally for the art and ended up sculpting a pair of wings, casting them out of wax and melting them back down again for the cover imagery, photographing it all along the way.
John B - Mr. Freud
There are smatterings of new works throughout the portfolio for those who are looking for a new reason to shower me with money and to entertain you Trickartt-stalkers out there, in various sections. A couple worth talking about are the sleeve for John B’s new single, ‘Mr. Freud’, and the Sausage Bracelet. Mr. Freud appears to be a runaway popular sleeve, and despite my apprehensions when I made it, it turned out rather nicely. I was worried it was going to be a bit too much like a cheap blue monday, but it ended up holding itself up. When I received the finished copies, it made me feel like I was holding a giant floppy disc, which in my eyes qualifies it a success. The sausage bracelet was a valentine’s gift for Lilly (aren’t I sweet?), modelled on her sausage dog, hand-sculpted by me. It’s not perfect, but i don’t think anything I make by hand is.
As usual, there are other random bits forthcoming that I’m not really in a position to talk up, as well as a whole world of incertainty. I guess if you’re interested, you’ll find out whenever the time is appropriate. So that’ll do for now!