Building up my Portfolio on Behance

A quick post to let everyone know I'm uploading a lot of my past and present illustration and character design projects to Behance, a great FREE portfolio hosting site.

Here's the link to my portfolio.
There'll probably be a lot of my work on there that very few people have seen. I hope you like it.

What's all this stuff?

Regular visitors to my blog may have noticed a few Amazon gadgets appearing. I hope you don't mind.

I've decided to add these to help all the people who email me to ask about what animation or woodblock printing reference books I would recommend.

At the top of the page are a range of really good and easily available books on woodblocks, and at the botton of the page is a slideshow of animation books, DVDs and CDs which I'd recommend to anyone wanting to learn how to animate. These are all items which I own personally and feel should be a part of any animator's or woodblock printmaker's library.

There are also more obscure, and out of print books which I would also recommend, but the ones I've highlighted are a great start.

I'll be updating my choices as new books appear, so keep checking in.

Save Kids TV

Please have a look at this...

...and then spend a little time at Save Kids TV

Production of children's TV in the UK has been going through a rough time recently, and the muddy grey cloud of economic gloom hasn't helped either. Look closely at a lot of the shows around at the moment, are they really UK produced shows? There are a lot of obviously imported shows from the US and abroad, but there are a lot of kids shows that may look like they come from the UK, but are actually produced abroad. Just because the voices sound like they come from the UK, don't assume that all the animation or the animation production company comes from the UK.

Where are the UK made children's programmes and animation that ooze and smell of the UK? I'm ashamed to say that you won't find many, or any on the UK tv channels.

I love animation, and I love creating stories for our children. In the past UK TV company executives had the confidence to let creative programme makers get on with what they were good at. There was trust, and there was a feeling that it was important to reflect our little UK world to our children to make them feel more like a part of it. The daft things, the eccentricities of life on our little island, the weird little things we do here that no-one else in the world does. Not the big bland pan global beige stuff that saturate our screens.

Culturally significant children's animation shows are much more important to developing a sense of connection and belonging to your home country than most people realise.

Our view of the world and how we fit in is shaped by the things we're exposed to as a child, even more so now with today's children and the broadcast media they're exposed to. There's nothing wrong with viewing the big wide world, but it matters that a child knows the feel and smell of it's own doorstep. Children's TV in the UK should be the secure home doorstep from which they can look out on the world. UK Children's TV made wholly by UK programme makers is vital to our children's understanding of who they are.

Children's TV Campaign

This is a recent film to highlight the problem faced by programme makers by the Government's change of policy regarding advertising around children's television, and how children's TV, and in particular animation, has been affected by it.

Elmer Fudd & Bugs Bunny's ancestors

If you ever get the chance to read a copy of STRUWWELPETER by Heinrich Hoffmann you will be richly rewarded. Not only are the cautionary tales, originally written and illustrated in 1844 by Hoffmann for his 3 yr old son, amusing in themselves, but it becomes quickly apparent how much they have influenced popular culture ever since.

Where would Tim Burton be if it wasn't for Shock Headed Peter with his wild hair and long twig-like finger nails and Conrad, the boy who wouldn't stop sucking his thumbs and had them chopped off by "the great, long, red legged scissor-man"? (What Hoffmann's 3yr old son thought of that, history does not recall.)

But most interesting for me is the story of the wabbit... sorry, rabbit... who turns the tables on the hunter, a theme harking back to the Middle Ages and forward directly to the emergence of the Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny partnership in the late 1930's and early 1940's.

Struwwelpeter would have been a well known children's book by the Warner animators as it was translated into many languages, and not forgetting the large number of German immigrants who's children may have carried their favourite book across the Atlantic with them.

Like the Animal Frolic Toba Scrolls from 11th century Japan and the illustrations of Heinrich Kley (who I'll post about soon), humorous drawings of anthropomorphic animals say so much more about the human condition, satirising mankind's desires, weaknesses, irritations, injustices and foibles than a 12 page essay or pious sermon could ever do.

Park Post Christmas Animation

As promised, here's the Park Post Christmas animation, it's hugely compressed, but I hope you can see it well enough. The live action was shot and edited by Julian Kronfli (see my links in the sidebar) and the animation was produced mainly on paper (with a little extra in Flash) and scanned into Digicel's Flipbook for painting.

It's that PARK time of year again...

A quick note to look out for the latest Park Christmas adverts. The little pink fairy is up to her usual tricks in the pre Christmas campaign which is currently on air, to be followed by a much more slapstick post Christmas ad which, surprise surprise, will be on our screens after Christmas.

As usual, the commercials were produced by my old friends at Kronfli-Duliba Productions, and I supplied all the character animation, some of the special effects and keyed out (in 2D) the CGI elements.

Once the post Christmas ad is out, I'll upload a copy of it to view.

It's really good fun, a lot more physical humour.

The poor little fairy gets...

You'll have to wait. I can't say anything yet, but keep your eyes peeled.

Monkey Magic. Journey to the West

A quick mention of the new website for the fantastic Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett opera "Monkey: Journey to the West". I was fortunate to catch the opera, filled with acrobatics and sword skills during it's premiere performances in Manchester in 2007, and have been waiting ever since for the music to be released on CD, which it is just about to be.

Listen to 3 tracks HERE.

If you get a chance to see Monkey, don't let it slip by. The character designs, costumes, music and performances are great. I hope they've improved the subtitling design since the Manchester shows.

I'd loved to have had the chance to work on the animated sequences too.

Speaking of which, the BBC has commissioned the Monkey team to produce animated idents for their Olympic coverage. View it here. It's lovely to see some quality 2D animation fronting such a big event.

New Etsy Shop

I've opened a new Etsy shop to try and help those people who know me better when I'm wearing my animator's hat.

I've had contact from people who couldn't find me on Etsy because they'd been searching for my name.

My new Etsy shop address is http://markmason.etsy.com/

CuriouslyDrawn will remain open for the time being to help redirect visitors to the new shop.

A Blast from the Stone Age Past.

As a result of some online conversations about new developments in traditional 2D paperless animation and some of the very early pieces of animation software (Hands up; who had an Amiga computer and ran DeluxePaint and Take2 on it?) I received an email from Jerome Lorin who kindly included a link to a piece of animation I worked on with Billy Allison from Core Design in 1994.

Have a peep HERE.

It was a title sequence for the Sega computer game "Chuck Rock II". We had to work within the huge constraints of computer game memory at the time, and so the animation is rather limited in places. I thought I'd add it to the Blog purely for it's nostalgia value. At the time though, the title sequence received a host of 5 star ratings in computer magazines.

The "inking" and colour work was produced in DeluxePaint, on good old Amiga computers.

I continued to use an Amiga for animation pencil tests (Using the excellent Take2 program) up until the end of "Second Star to the Left" in around 2002. Amigas were great little computers with excellent graphics capabilities (2D and 3D) far in excess of PCs at the time. It's a shame they got left behind in the blitz of hype and publicity that surrounded the dull old PC that most of us use today. Amigas were happy computers.

New Animation Player Added.

I've added a new element to the bottom of my Blog page; a nifty little video player from the bods at YouTube. You can either press play and sit back and watch a run through of the clips of my animation, or click on the small 3 squares button to find pop-up thumbnails of each clip.

I hope you like it.

900 Year Old Animal Caricatures by Toba Sojo

Toba Sojo (1053-1140), Japanese painter-priest, who painted the Animal Caricature, or Choju Giga, scrolls, which are considered among the finest examples of Japanese narrative scroll painting.

Toba Sojo was a Japanese nobleman of the Heian period who became a Buddhist abbot. The famous set of 4 scrolls representing caricatures of animals and people (in the Kozanji, a monastery near Kyoto) are attributed to him, but modern scholars now believe that he was the author of only the first two scrolls painted during the second quarter of the 12th century, and the remaining 2 by an anonymous follower of the artist who worked during the early 13th century.

The Animal Caricature scroll can be viewed HERE. At the top of the page are a row of numbers in little boxes, numbered 1-18, in reverse order. Click on [1] to see the far right hand part of the scroll and work your way up to [18]. The scroll reads right to left.

It's such a beautiful piece of illustration. The linework is highly skilled and delightfully economical, the poses and actions of the animal characters are so finely observed and the pacing of the events portrayed give a real feel of a passage of time: the areas of landscape without characters add timing to the scroll, as does the monkey being chased by the rabbit, in effect "through shot" as the scroll would have been rolled right to left.

It's just beautiful, and produced around 1130AD! (I'd have believed anyone who'd said that it was produced today at 11.30AM.) How did Toba produce pictures that look so contemporary when drawings from Europe and the rest of the world in that period look so much of their time?

E. H. Shepard, T.S. Sullivant, Heinrich Kley, Beatrix Potter, A. B. Frost, Harry Rountree and Disney's Nine Old Men could all find a common connection with the animals in this scroll.

Like a lot of Heinrich Kley's animal illustrations, a lot of the finer satire is lost on us, but what we miss in 900 year old satirical comment is more than made up for in the subtle references to the timeless human condition and the sheer pleasure of the energetic animals wrestling, swimming and frolicking, all rendered in a free, humorous spirit which show Toba Sojo's mastery of brushwork and remarkable feeling for animation.

I've stitched all 18 images together as one long image which can be scrolled through to give the best impression of what it would be like to read as a scroll. It's too big an image to post, but it's an easy enough exercise to do in Photoshop, and well worth the effort.

New Animation production...

This is a visual I produced for Kronfli-Duliba Productions to illustrate the concept for a new set of TV commercials for Park, a major Christmas Hamper and savings scheme located in the UK.

I've provided the character animation for all of Park's commercials since they introduced the Pink Fairy 5 years ago. In fact I helped design the character too.

We have just started to produce the animation for 3 new commercials, due to run from Autumn this year and into next year.

I can't say anything about the content of the ads except that they'll be as entertaining and charming as ever. Julian Kronfli at Kronfli-Duliba Productions has devised a sharp and witty concept and his live action direction is second to none. The key point to directing the live action for these commercials is that his main star, the Pink Fairy, will be added later by me, so all the scenes have to be shot with the animated character just being imagined in Julian's head. He has to direct the actors to react to something that isn't there.

I've received the live action footage and Julian and I have discussed what the fairy has to do. We usually come up with some additional ideas regarding the character's performance, and throughout the animation process I will add to that to round out the emotional performance and the character's interreaction with the actors.

I'm not going to show any material during the production, but once the commercials are on air I'll let you into one or two secrets about the process of animating a 2D character in a live action world; or at least how I do it.

View one of last year's commercials at Park's website HERE.

"Where have you been?" said Florence.

Just a quick post to update on what I've been working on recently.
Remember "The Magic Roundabout", the children's series from the 1960's and 70's? Well, Dougal, Florence, Brian and the rest of the gang are returning to TV screens soon in a brand new CGI animated series. I've been part of the storyboard team and I'll be finishing my last episode in a week or so.
The series is being animated in France by Action Synthese, but the pre-production, scripts, storyboards and voice recordings are being handled by co-production partners Silver Fox Films in the UK, with director Graham Ralph at the helm.
I've 'boarded 8 episodes and they've been great fun to work on. (I'll list them in a subsequent posting, once the series is broadcast.) Graham wanted to capture the eccentricity of the original series, but develop the show to work within a 10 minute format for a new generation, and from what I've seen it all works beautifully. The storyboard artists were given a degree of freedom within the script to be visually creative and add elements of English eccentricity to sequences.
I used to watch the original series when I was small and to be given the opportunity to contribute to the continuing adventures of characters from my childhood has been a real pleasure and honour.

Animation Showreel goes live.

In the last day or so I've started to upload my animation showreel onto my new YouTube Channel: "ANIMAISON: The Home of Animation".
At the moment there's just one video, I've added it here to save the leap. It's a compilation of short animated clips from work I've produced of the last few years. Originally this compilation formed the opening of the showreel I'd post out to clients so it seemed like an apt opening online taster. It's a little compressed for my liking so I'll upload a higher quality version in due course, file size permitting.
In the coming months I'll add more clips, linetests and maybe even a few snippets of a new personal project I'm developing.