10 Seconds of Terror

The TAIS (Toronto Animated Image Society) had an open call to submit a 10 second animated film for their Monster Edition of their TAIS showcase. Anyone could enter a film as long as it was some form of animation, had monsters as it's theme, and was only 10 seconds long. They would then edit all the clips together to make a  "MonsterJam" animated  film to be screened along with some other short films at the NFB Mediatheque in Toronto. You had me at monsters!

I have wanted to try my hand at animation for sometime and this seemed like a good excuse to do it. So for 2 months in my spare time (which there isn't much) I made this stop motion paper cutout animated monster movie. I recruited my brother Dave Coleman, who is just beginning a career in film scoring and sound design, to compose the music and he did a brilliant job! The music made it come to life better than I imagined, thanks little bro!

So the screening was last night (June 27/08) and my brother and I attended the show. We were late arriving and the show was sold out but we were able to stand in the back of the theatre and watch all the films. There were so many cool monster ones in the jam, and it was a thrill to see ours among them in that setting. There were some really neat monster prizes and although we didn't win anything, I still had such a blast just going and hanging out with my brother in the city. 

I'll post some "making of photos" later and if you want to see a better, bigger version of it just go here.

Movie

I have been busy making a movie, well a very short animated movie with a monster in it. I'll tell you all about later.

IF: garden

Evil Nutcrackers

I drew these for my homemade xmas tags last year.  I'm only posting them here because if I didn't give you a Christmas present then you haven't seen them yet.

IF: multiple

My Illustration Friday contribution for "multiple". Multiple legs, get it?

I usually have a plan for an illustration, do some sketches, figure out the composition and so forth. But sometimes, as with this one, I had no idea where it was going. They turn out to be the most fun. I started with just wanting to do something with it's eyes very far apart and that was the only thing I planned, the rest just showed up. I get lead sort of subconsciously through the whole thing not knowing what it is going to be in the end.

Well, I still don't know what it is, but it does have multiple legs.

IF: choose

FEED

If you happened to visit Feed on Wednesday, February 6th, then you saw this there. If you don't know, Feed is an awesome animation and visual FX blog from Stash Media that showcases cool work from that industry. I visit there almost daily with my kids and we check out all the cool videos they have posted. They also have an "ongoing art project" where you can design and submit your own Feed banner and the "most intriguing submissions will be displayed randomly across the top of the site".

Originally, I thought I would do one and send it in, but then I thought wouldn't it be wicked if my kids designed a banner and I sent that and they actually used it! Well, that's just what we did. I helped with the scanning and Photoshop, but my son and daughter (ages 4 and 2) did the rest. Now I'm not sure if the Feed people felt it was "intriguing" enough to use or if they just didn't want to disappoint little children, but either way using it made the day of those kids and their dad.

Thanks to Stephen Price.

My First Post

This is the very first sketch I did in 2008. Now it is my very first post on my blog. Yeah that's right, I have a blog now.