Hello! I've been building clouds (for the film, of course).
I could have painted clouds instead but I wanted more control over how they moved, so I built them out of raw cloud material: ORBS! Lots of orbs on lots of little ferris wheels. And by orbs I mean gradient circles because this is 2D.
I had no idea if it was going to work, but I think it came out pretty nice in the end and so I've made you a little cloud presentation! Watch until the end, I promise it turns into a nice p...
2020-10-01 06:15:48 +0000 UTC
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A perfectly normal botanical illustration of some banksia seed pods- or "Tree Furbies", if you prefer.
2020-09-22 06:53:30 +0000 UTC
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More scenery! Most of the work has been background-related lately, so backgrounds are what I have to show you. Hopefully soon I'll have some foregrounds for you as well! Here we have some layers of mountain, and also the branches of a Tasmanian King Billy Pine.
2020-09-17 00:08:15 +0000 UTC
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Hello hello! Recently I posted a gif on here, which was a paper animation made from all the Pen Pal drawings I did last month. I also recorded all of me making it, so I could show you the process! Here is me showing you now!!!
This is, I think, the third month that my Pen Pal drawings have doubled as a paper animation. But before the "first" paper animation there was actually a failed attempt made on a light box. Because these drawings are primarily physical artworks for patrons I want...
2020-09-09 06:50:25 +0000 UTC
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I know there's nothing "animated" in this gif but every layer of the background is a different length, so it can only exist inside a camera move.
Our story reaches its climax at the top of these trees! The ascent begins
2020-09-04 01:25:42 +0000 UTC
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Hello all, and happy September! It's been an exciting start to the week here, with the trailer for the film going public. The frog is out of the bag! Now it's just a matter of making the rest of the film exist so the trailer isn't a lie.
Here are the Pen Pal drawings for this month, which I'll be sending out in the next day or so.
They're an animation again, kinda- this time they're all distinct illustrations from each other, but together their silhouettes make an animated form...
2020-09-02 06:03:13 +0000 UTC
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There's still more work to be done on the film, but we're getting closer now! Close enough that I think it's time for a trailer!!!!
By which I mean, close enough that I can say "coming soon(ish)", and it's arguably true. "Soon" is subjective, but if I said it too early then I would still be a liar and everyone would know it.
But I can see the finish line now. I can kind of guess when it might be done by, and even if my guess is wrong "soon" isn't too much of an overstatement.
I'l...
2020-08-25 01:16:45 +0000 UTC
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(It's a tiny dock for bugs)
2020-08-11 02:01:38 +0000 UTC
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Hello all! This is NOT a scene from the film I'm making now, but the only finished shot from a film I started in 2015, before giving up and making Double King instead.
"Gnostrum" was going to be a film about whaling in Australia. The story was largely inspired by a real town, which in the early 1900s clearly had too many dead whales lying around, because they started cutting holes in the sides of their carcasses and charging people to bathe in them, as an alleged cure for rheumatism. T...
2020-08-04 02:58:44 +0000 UTC
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Hello computer friends! I've made another ink animation!
This time, rather than draw a completed frame and then moving on to the next one, I animated a character one body part at a time. I animated an eye moving around, and then when I got to the last frame I went back to the first one to add the next body part, and repeated the process 9 times, building a character out of moving bits. I documented it as I went, so you can see the animation come together!
The completed frames at...
2020-08-03 04:01:30 +0000 UTC
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The frogs in this cartoon look completely different in every shot. Today they've turned into beanbags
2020-07-30 07:44:03 +0000 UTC
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I don't quite know how to explain what this thing is. It's in the film but it isn't quite anything, and isn't any more of an anything even when its in context. All the more reason to show it to you without one!
2020-07-21 05:21:51 +0000 UTC
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In the film this guy is very small, in a corner, and not the main focus in the only shot he appears in. He seemed angry about it so I'm giving him his own gif where he can be the star of the show! He's still cross though, I'm not sure what he wants
2020-07-17 02:55:40 +0000 UTC
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Disgruntled thumps from your tree neighbour
2020-07-17 02:36:43 +0000 UTC
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Animating pretend software! What happens when you beep the keys?
2020-07-08 04:29:20 +0000 UTC
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Hello everyone, and welcome to the middle of the year! We're halfway through!!! Thank you for being here and helping me make the things <3
Here are last month's ink drawings for Pen Pal patrons- all of them, displayed very quickly in sequence. Normally that would look horrible, but this month the drawings are also an animation!!!
Inkeeping with the Pen Pal drawings from previous months, these frames were all drawn directly in ink without any pencil sketches or other sorts of ...
2020-07-02 00:13:32 +0000 UTC
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Hey so the film looks like this now??? I mean not really, but kind of- it's happening on a screen IN the film. Don't worry it's MEANT to look like a horrible melting nightmare! It will make sense in context, but the context isn't ready yet so you just have to look at it like this.
This started out as actual 3D hills, and might be the first true 3D I've used in one of my cartoons- but then I mangled it into this.
2020-06-19 02:53:55 +0000 UTC
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What do you call it, speedpaint? Is there a word for speedpaint but with animating? Anyway here's a timelapse of me designing a character, building a puppet, and animating them walking! (You can also skip to the end to see the completed animation, if you're not interested in watching me nudge bits of spider around.) I've figured out the dumbest way of anthropomorphising a spider's face and I'm sorry.
To clarify, this isn't a final shot in the film, the spider is just one asset of an un...
2020-06-05 04:06:49 +0000 UTC
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Hello everyone! The latest batch of ink drawings were shipped off to Pen Pal patrons yesterday- and I do mean shipped, literally! Due to many countries not currently allowing flights in or out as part of COVID-related measures, a great deal of the drawings are travelling from Australia by boat, and unfortunately may take a few months to arrive!
Here's a digitally coloured version of one of the drawings. This is Captain Dog, who will vigilantly protect the other drawings from seamonster...
2020-06-04 03:59:12 +0000 UTC
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Look what I found while deleting stuff of my computer!
I didn't document a whole lot of behind-the-scenes stuff like this for my films before starting Patreon. But I must have briefly entertained the idea while working on Double King, because I apparently screen-recorded the making of the royal caterpillars! This is the only thing I recorded though, hence "briefly".
This timelapse shows me designing the characters, and building the puppets along the way. I go through several dif...
2020-05-27 03:49:56 +0000 UTC
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This one's a bit visceral, sorry. I want to say it will be less confronting in context, but I'm not sure how true that is.
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Duplicate post because I shared this in the wrong tier, and then immediately deleted it forgetting that it still emails a copy of the gif to everyone. Feeling very exposed that everyone saw my lumpy tube! And now you're seeing it twice.
2020-05-11 09:45:08 +0000 UTC
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Hello all!!! I hope everyone reading this is safe and well.
Last month's drawings for my Pen Pals were all shipped off yesterday- among them, the original lineart for this big human and their little finger friend. Soon, one of you will hold these friends in your fingers- take care of them!
2020-05-06 06:08:39 +0000 UTC
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Here's some smoke from the shot I'm working on, as well as the rough animation I used as a guide!
It needed to be painterly to match some other things going on in the scene, so I thought rather than doing hand drawn rough animation just to paint over it, I'd try something else.
I've always liked this style of procedurally generated "bubbly smoke" in old computer graphics, so I emulated the effect. Probably an odd meld of styles since most people who want to do painterly by-hand stuf...
2020-04-21 10:19:27 +0000 UTC
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this shot is gonna take a while
2020-04-09 23:48:40 +0000 UTC
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Hello everyone! I hope you're all safe and healthy wherever you are.
I sent out the Pen Pal drawings for March yesterday- amongst them was the original lineart for this delicious fruigetable! Hope you enjoy it- don't eat the seeds though.
March was a crazy month. But of course it was! It was a crazy month everywhere in the world. More specifically though, our baby had two separate stints in hospital. It's hard to shake the feeling that we may need to go back, but for now we're b...
2020-04-07 06:31:46 +0000 UTC
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Hello! Here's a little process gif of a shot I'm working on.
Animating in sillhouettes is fun! It feels like it should be less work because there's less detail, but without the internal information communicating form and depth, it's hard to know where the edges are meant to go. So for this shot, I started by animating some cutout pieces as a guide, where I figured out the rotations. Then I animated frame-by-frame over the top to wrap skin around the pieces, and to add in the arms.
2020-04-01 03:29:45 +0000 UTC
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One of my favourite backgrounds so far in the film! A little home in a tree (with a hook to hang your oversized straw hat on).
I've always just made line drawings with pen, and never been able to paint or anything. Up until the start of Double King, all my backgrounds were lineart and flat-colour, and from then on I've been taking very tentative steps away from my comfort zone to make more rendered art. It's been a slow process but this background feels like a breakthrough to me. All t...
2020-03-16 03:24:12 +0000 UTC
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Hey everyone,
I haven’t been at work for most of this week. Shortly after my last post on here, our one-year-old was admitted to hospital with pneumonia. He is still recovering, but today he was able to come home, and is in a much better state than when we took him in.
It’s been one of those awful scenarios where we could tell he wasn’t ok for days and kept taking him to doctors, but he was repeatedly dismissed or misdiagnosed so that once someone realised he n...
2020-03-12 10:42:15 +0000 UTC
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Realised the shot I'm working on has some parallels with this old shot. When tasked with making a character climb something, my default solution appears to be "throw them at a vertical surface at full force while scrambling with hands and feet, and they'll gain upwards momentum".
To be fair though, I've seen brushtail possums actually climb treetrunks like this, whereas I've never seen a king do it.
2020-03-09 01:05:47 +0000 UTC
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Hello and happy March! Whether you are now entering either Autumn or Spring, I hope you will enjoy the impending medium-range weather.
The ink drawings from last month's Pen Pal patrons have now been shipped- here's one that I've chosen to colour digitally, of a lengthy gentleman on his way to somewhere. The original lineart is on it's way to somewhere too, along with a fistful of other drawings! Beep beep
2020-03-05 06:55:15 +0000 UTC
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