Animated Yorkshire at Barnsley Digital Media Centre

2011-12-13T05:46:00.000-08:00

We had a smashing evening with animator Alex Collier on Thursday 8th December in Barnsley also with Tallulah Speed and Caroline Last from Imagine Animation Magazine.

Thanks to all those that made it through wet and windy weather to the event. A few people couldn't get through due to roads closed and trains cancelled with high winds, which was a shame.
We still had a fairly good turnout however and cracked open a bottle of bucks fizz and munched our way through some mince pies, and even started to feel a wee bit festive!
Here's Alex's summary of what went on.

As you can see Alex is a lively speaker (he's been a stand-up comic too), and he talked us through his adventures in comics and animation.
Alex has oodles of talent - he started making comics to sell in the playground at school. He went for a week's work experience at Viz and the rest is, well, history...
Whilst still at school, he designed a character which was taken on by Viz Magazine. He worked his way up to Editor on all aspects of the magazine, and thoroughly enjoyed his time there.

Alex was looking for new challenge and decided he wanted to get into animation, so went back to study at Sunderland University.
"I loved doing comics, but it's so much more satisfying when you see your drawings move, and you can do so much more with them."
He found his time at University really valuable and working with others became key.
His advice to students studying animation is "Don't get stuck working on your own at University. Now working in animation I spend a lot of time working on my own - I'm really glad I that I learned from the people around me whilst I was studying."
He met his partner Lotti there too, and they work together now in their company Oddball Media.

Alex has taken his talent for comedy into his animation and developed really interesting projects working with comedians and broadcasters.

We enjoyed him showing the way he developed ideas for "The Windiest Night of Vic Reeve's Life", a short made for the BBC Jesting About Comedy scheme in the North East. This started when reading Vic Reeves' autobiography, he thought that there were possibilities for animation in elements that he'd been reading. He animated this himself on his own and felt it took a long time, but was really pleased with the results.

He got hold of the audiobook and set out to make an animatic.
"However good your ideas and animation, it's really difficult for TV commissioners to visualise your ideas, so an animatic is a good way to piece your ideas together quite quickly to show to others."
He showed how he'd refined ideas when he could see in the animatic that an element of the animation wasn't quite working.

Alex finished this project 9 months ago, but it's only just online now - please spread the word about this one.

The path to success hasn't always been smooth for him. His first experience of directing others didn't work out quite as well. He'd worked up a script and animatic with Ross Noble on Stand-up Comics and their favourite hecklers. He produced an animatic and some key drawings, and the plan was to be working with another company to make the animation. The money wasn't as much as the company had initially thought,so they pulled out with very short notice, leaving him with lots of animation to do in a very short period of time. He wasn't as happy with the results, but its been picked up by a company who might want to use the ideas in their advertising.

Then we got a good look behind the scenes at the Viz Comedy Blaps. It all started with a chance meeting at Bradford Animation Festival with Tim Searle from Baby Cow Animation. Tim absolutely loved Viz and had lots of really good ideas about how to bring it to life successfully. There have been some terrible attempts in the past including a Fat Slags live action feature film, which Alex says was truly appalling.

These blaps have great scripts which bring together a collection of characters in short scenes in each episode, so each episode feels like the magazine. Tim Searle and his team did an excellent job of bringing all of these elements together, and a great voice cast including comedian Sarah Millican and Steve Coogan.

Alex enjoyed working remotely with a team of really talented animators, working in Flash, each sending small SWF files across. They worked with cutout heads and mouth-shapes and fully animated bodies. Alex showed how he'd spent weeks animating mouth shapes, and the various tests he'd used to get everything working together, and the endless charts he needed to keep everything ontrack.

The colour effects were added afterwards digitally and caused a few technical headaches, but worked well eventually. There were times when Alex said he had to be unpopular with the animators - he showed a scene where the poor animator had to change all of the facial expressions as they weren't as they should be. However, the results were well worth everyones' hard work.

Post production for Alex became a bit of a nightmare, several days without sleep. Working with animators with different versions of Flash from CS3 to CS5. Earlier versions of Flash were fine - the bugs came with the most up to date versions! This nearly resulted in cutting a scene from a blap, but a good night's sleep, followed by Tim Searle sending a 1 terrabite hard drive up by courier and bringing back to London - all was resolved.

Reassuring for the rest of us to know that we are not alone when we have technical crises!

We think the Blaps are really top notch - hope you do. Channel Four need encouragement if these are to get from the dark corners of the internet to our TV screens. We need you to LIKE, Tweet, Facebook and basically tell everyone you know about it!

Caroline Last and Tallulah Speed from Imagine came and talked to us about all of the wonderful stuff on offer. Do check out their website www.imagineanimation.net

Those who came along got a voucher for a discounted subscription and Bill Beaumont from Distant Future Animation won a free 2 year subscription in our raffle and Michelle Cheetham won a signed Viz book from Alex.
A few pics below of the event - check out the videos below - and remember to tell everyone you know about them! Happy Christmas! See you again in 2012!

Vic Reeves Windiest Night Out

2011-12-13T05:42:00.000-08:00

Viz Comedy Blaps Episode Two

2011-12-13T05:39:00.000-08:00

Viz Comedy Blaps Episode One

2011-12-13T05:36:00.000-08:00

Animating Viz - An Evening with Alex Collier

Animated Yorkshire at Barnsley Digital Media Centre

Vic Reeves Windiest Night Out

Viz Comedy Blaps Episode Two

Viz Comedy Blaps Episode One