I still have yet to find a job in animation but I have still been very active. I have made quite a few professional and artistic decisions to help myself develop and become more employable. I have decided to continue focusing on animation and pushing myself further as an animator, but I have also decided to incorporate more motion graphics stuff into my work. I have also decided that although I have focused quite strongly on 3D CG animation, I have decided to bring a lot more 2D into my work, which will mean that I will be doing increasingly more After Effects and, dare I say it, more Flash animation. I am hoping that this will help increase my versatility and make me more employable.
I feel that this would be a good move as I am currently developing a pilot for an animated web series called Fenton Gray with a personal friend of mine called Josh Kendell and we have pretty much visualised this concept using 2D imagery so it is likely that this will be a 2D animated series.
As well as Fenton Gray, I have also very recently signed up to an exciting new project called To This Day. This is a really amazing project that seeks to tackle the subject of bullying, something which in my view, has never been challenged adequately or accurately. The film project will consist of a very powerful poem by Shane Koyczan and will be accompanied by several 20 second sequences by numerous animators and motion graphic artists.
Given that I suffered bullying pretty badly all the way from primary school through to sixth form, I can say quite strongly that bullying is something that has been very poorly addressed and a lot of anti-bullying campaigns that I have come across have been patronising, half-hearted and pretty much a cop-out. They make a lot of assumptions about how the victims feel, but they barely even scrape the surface. Another thing that irritates me about many anti-bullying campaigns now is that they initially purport to be against bullying of all forms, but then their campaigns and materials focus squarely on Cyberbullying, which is ultimately only ONE variant of bullying (not that I am trying to undermine the effects of cyberbullying).
I have been given a piece of the poem to animate against, which belongs near the end of the poem and speaks of how we overcome bullying and we make it past all the bad things that happened at school. I have quite a string visual concept for this 20 second piece already and I am starting to think about the methods that I will employ to realise this project. I will start to post up mood boards and concept art over my next few blog posts so you can see how I am getting on.
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