Huckleberry Films

"Huckleberry Films is a creative film company based in Accrington, Lancashire. Offering a range of styles and services - from documentaries and educational films, to promotional and animated films - they are commited to delivering a professional high quality service to each client. "

Some of their national and international clients include Friends of the Earth, Lancashire County Council, Mid Pennine Arts, Age Concern, St. Mary's College, and Life Association.

You don't really get much more information about the company on their website, they don't mentions who works there and only shows a few examples of there work but the reason it attracted me is it uses the hand drawn look filled with textures and patterns similar to my current project and something i am very in to! One other thing i noticed was that they like to participate in local projects and supporting their community. One of their animations that i really enjoyed is called 'Animating Accy' and its about the day in the life from a variety of people who live in Accrington using animated characters to portray them, its almost like they are having a discussion with you or an interviewer i really enjoyed it!

EEK Films

EEK is a company based in Liverpool of a team of professionals who collaborate with young people to develop their ideas into animation (straight away i loved this as it is so hard to showcase your talent to its full potential so with a group of experts think of the things you could do! ... its what i need!).

Some of the 'Main Players'

"'Eek Films’ director Tony Ealey, has an extensive list of traditional animation credits with studios including Disney’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit, BBCTV’s The Chronicles of Narnia and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He has directed many top rated series for international television.

Recent work includes animation for the cult Channel 4 TV series Modern Toss and animation for the hit Cbeebies TV series Tommy Zoom."

AND

Tony Ealey is a lecturer in animation at University Centre Blackburn College and is also involved as a Youth Mentor with Media Trust teaching screenwriting for animation at schools in the North West.

I think this is also nice to have 2 people from different backgrounds one an animator himself and the other a lecturer in animation this gives the company a variety of skills rather than that just creative.

They only have two examples of their animations on their 'video' page and they have both won awards (it didn't say what awards or when which is irritating as i want to know!) so they are clearly showcasing their proudness and succession.

Film below is one of the 'award winning pieces' on you tube it does mention that it was nominated for Activision First Light Movies Award, best film by U13's.

Mainframe

Mainframe Motion shop is a company specialising in motion graphics, animation and VFX - 'home to some of europe's top directors, producers, animators and vfx artists'

'Mainframe has offices in London and Manchester as well as being represented to direct commercials by Independent in London, Duck Studios in the US and Ablaze in Asia.'

Client list includes:

-Toyota

-Coca Cola

-Sony/Syco

-MTV

-Harrods

-Nickelodeon

-Nike

This advert and ident for Nickelodeon are what attracted me to mainframe, i have looked at mainframe briefly before in the first year but i always come back to it because their style of work is so varied and interesting which possibly suggests the use of different freelancers through out different briefs?

One thing i found out that the company are hugely excited about and proud of is the fact that their founder Adam Jenns has been asked to judge the 2011 TV and Cinema communications category for D&AD and has been a judge for multiple competitions in the past which connotes his importance to the moving image industry (He judged at the Graduate Showcase awards 2 years in a row 2009/2010).

Daylight

I came across a company called Daylight, they are an award winning, independent, creative moving image and design company based on Turner Street in the Northern Quarter Manchester. They create Tv Graphics and TV Commercials for music, fashion, education, public sector, construction and charity and their client list includes:

-Levis

-Oasis

-All Sports

-Wrangler

-Inland Revenue

-University of Bolton and Sheffield

-Cancer Research

and many, many more.

Daylight prides themselves on being a 's

mall company of experienced creatives' and they believe that 'being a small team we maximise the efficiency and communication needed for the project' so i think this implies that they always have a small team of permanent staff and maybe get freelancers involved when needed.

Whats also nice about the company is that they have little hobbies between the team like taking pictures of objects with faces and taking photos of light such as sunsets, sunrise, light between buildings ect...i think this suggests a closeness within the team, they work well together and shows a pleasant work environment.

Show reel - http://day-light.co.uk/showreel/

Cut out Waves

Rick suggested to me to look at the end credits of Lemony Snickets A Series of Unfortunate Events for inspiration for the aesthetics of my animation.

“…What was the purest example of visual elegance on the big screen in 2004? If you pushed for the final minutes of the Jim Carrey comedy, you’d get no argument from me. A miniature masterwork of mood, the end credits used paper cutouts, spectral graphics, and Thomas Newman’s dancing-skeleton score to conjure up an entire giddy universe of disasters…” The Boston Globe (www.jamiecaliri.com)

Land Ahoy was created in after effects from cut out paper which was scanned into photoshop looking at this i think i want to try cutting my shapes before scanning rather than drawing and filling in on photoshop it will give it a better 'cut out' feel!

- I have tried this technique but because of the patterns and textures i am using i lost the shape of the waves and it all became a blurry mess of colour.

I was recently watching the E4 channel and this sting came on and i thought the movement of the sea and colour pallet is lovely - it is one of the finalists for the Estings competition this year. I am going to use this as reference when looking over the colour scheme in my piece to make sure that i am portraying the correct mise-en-scene.

Little Boat by Nelson Boles

After my tutorial with Rick i was having a chat with Tom, Jack and John and Tom suggested i watched 'Little Boat' By Nelson Boles on a website called 'Cartoon Brew'. It is a basic boat shape and it travels through different weather conditions and scenarios where it gets destroyed and then rebuilt again, its a really great narrative as it gives an inanimate object a character/a life you really feel for the boat and feel what it is going through which is exactly what i want my audience to experience!
On the website www.cartoonbrew.com this animation is compared to a short film by Albert Lamorisse called The Red Balloon (1956). It is a story about a young boy who finds a red balloon on the way to school one morning and from then on the balloon seems to have a mind of its own following the boy throughout the film. It is similar to Little boat and my animation in the way that life has been given to an inanimate object which leads the audience to create emotions and attachments to the object.

Sunrise and sunset

During a group discussion Kirsty mentioned using a sunset to portray the element fire. Using colour to show mood i think is a much more subtle way of creating the mise-en-scene of my animation. So my animation will be all about the visuals, the colour, pattern and style of drawing with limited animation to portray what i feel. I have drawn a few examples into my sketch book but as i was looking at photos of sunsets i have realised that things in the foreground are almost silhouettes so i think i am going to make the boat into a silhouette in this scene and the background will be the dominant feature.

Then i thought of a sunrise and the colours are different in that of sunset - they are cool colours to represent new beginnings so i could use this to show inspiration the start of a new idea this could represent the element air.

Dinosaur

I started to have a look at companies within the North West that i would like to work for and i have come across the company 'Dinosaur' before but i wanted to research a bit more into them as the company really appeals to me.

OK so the company is called Dinosaur and they are situated in the center of Manchester on Back Turner Street near the Northern Quarter, they offer a large range of different services Advertising, Digital, Experimental, Brand Identity and Design. They have created work for huge companies such as:

-Alton Towers

-Manchester United

-Selfridges

-Pets at Home

-Ryman

-Wagamama

-Key 103

-Urbis

-Manchester City Council

The company won 2 'chip' awards at the 'Chip Shop Awards' in 2009, one for 'Best mobile ad in which they created an Ipod app for Raid Fly Spray and a 'best ambient media' award using the soon to be completed Angel of the South as inspiration for a Baileys Horse Feed outdoor execution.

One thing that i found out about this company was that they have teamed up with WWF and for each client added to their portfolio they adopt an animal on their behalf! Another thing that was great is they are very supportive of fresh talent and give away placements to winners of the MPA roses student creativity awards.

Narrative ideas

I have now thought that i want my narrative to be personal to me so i thought about using the boat to show my struggle in confidence and how over the last two years of the degree course my confidence is improving. I was going to show this through the 4/5 elements but instead they have just become a starting point for me to brainstorm ideas.

For example i could use a storm to portray the battle with my ideas and frustration of my thought processes.

Michael Dudok De Wit

Michael Dudok De Wit is an animator, illustrator and directer from the Netherlands. He directs and animates commercials for cinema and television but has also created a number of short animated films which is what i wanted to look at. I also wanted to look at Michael Dudock De Wit because the short narratives he uses are so beautiful and powerful, showing me again that the narrative is hugely important and the aesthetics are there to drive it forward.

Andrey Shushkov

"I was born in 1986. I was interested in everything from my childhood. In the middle of teenage I realized that I want to create tales. Tales that should become real. At least for somebody.

In 2005 I started my film school in Saint-Petersburg University of Culture and Arts. I studied directing, photography, scriptwriting. At the same time I was learning as much as possible from internet, discover new things and new thoughts. I fell in love with animation. I started to work as a freelance photographer. " Andrey Shushkov (http://shushkof.com/bio.html)

"A love story from the world of gears and bolts. Inspired by Lotte Reiniger works and Antony Lucas’s Jasper Morello film." (http://animatedshortfilms.wordpress.com/category/directors/andrey-shushkov/).

I love the technique used within this animation, it almost looks like paper cuttings and also very 'Tim Burton' with the use of long, spindly silhouette characters. As well as the aesthetically being beautiful the narrative is what takes control. I need to nail a narrative before even thinking about how i want my animation to look as the aesthetics will help push the narrative and bring it to life.

Tip!

"The moving of the camera is the single best way to make your animations stand out." Will Kalif.

http://www.stopmotioncentral.com/articles-3.html

The 4/5 Elements

"The four elements considered the building blocks of the Earth"

After i did my presentation on Thursday i read through my feedback post it notes and one thing that kept popping up was the aesthetics of the boat look good but it needs a narrative behind it to bring it to life. When i was creating the tractor and the boat style frame i thought of maybe using the four elements as a starting point to the narrative so i have been looking into the meaning of each elements, where they have comefrom and how different cultures use/see them differently. The first thing i came across was that in a few cultures such as in Greek and Indian unlike the four states-of-matter describe matter the fifth element describes that which is beyond the material world this also occurs in Japan (Earth, Air, Water, Fire and Spirit). This is something completely new for me as i thought there were only 4 elements and i would presume that this would be the same for many people. I think this 'spirit' element would be nice to add into the animation as it contrasts with the 4 original elements and i could find some beautiful symbolism to portray this.

I also had a look into Analogy of the elements and this is what i found -

AIR-Thought
FIRE-Desire

WATER-Emotions
EARTH-Stability

This is why we may have sayings such as -
Cool breeze of reason (Air)
Flames of passion (Fire)
Swamped by emotions (Water)
Solid as a rock (Earth)
The Chinese on the other hand have a different 5th element that being metaland they are understood to be types of energy constantly interacting with each other similar to how earth, wind, air and fire interact with each other to create our planet. The Chinese also see these elements in two different cycles - a generation/creation cycle and an overcoming/destruction cycle almost a symbolism of life and death.
This is how the cycles are believed to work -

Generating

• Wood feeds fire
• Fire creates earth (ash)
• Earth bears metal
• Metal collects water
• Water nourishes wood

Overcoming

• Wood parts earth
• Earth absorbs water
• Water quenches fire
• Fire melts metal
• Metal chops wood

Also the 5 elements within the Chinese culture also play an important part in Chinese Astrology and the Chinese form of Geomancy known as Feng Shui which is very popular in our culture today.

I also looked into how the four elements fit in with Astrology (Horoscopes) ... the elements are split between the horoscopes giving the different signs traits relating to the human form.

So these are a few of the key words i picked up relating to each group of star signs-

Water - Emotion, psychism, mysticism, intuition

Air - language, intellect, reason

Earth - practicality, stability, materialism, realism

Fire - passion, energy, impulse, enthusiasm, inspiration, idealism, faith

Boat Tests (After Effects)

I have been playing around with the boat scene testing different movements like how the water will move and how that will then influence the boats movement but i have been finding it difficult to gain the right feel so i needed some sort of reference that i could look at to see how 'calm' waters would move along with the fishing boat. So i bought a toy boat and filled the bath with water to see if i could get some sort of reference of the movement by creating some small waves with my hand i think it will be useful because i am trying to create a relaxed, chilled out vibe not a vicious storm so i am sure that this will help
Here are some of the animation tests before i bought the toy boat.