Over the past few years, I've become more and more passionate about motorbikes, riding, and racing. In my mind, MotoGP is the most spectacular motorsport out there. The circuits, the teams, and the riders are all incredible to watch, and every single race has me on the edge of my seat. It's worth watching, I'll tell you that.
A Tale of Two Cities is a segment of Neil Gaiman's Sandman: Worlds' End. Using the graphic novel excerpt as a script, towards the end of 2013, me and two friends (shoutout to Kirsty and Jamie :) ) captured all the dialogue needed to build a soundscape. I also created my own foley, and used sound effects from on-line sources. This is my version of the tale.
Over the past few weeks I've worked on a whole bunch of short animations, as part of my college course. They've been a whole lot of fun! Things started simple, with a basic bouncing ball sequence, and building up as I learned more about squash and stretch, weight, anticipation and reaction, and various other elements of animation. I made a short reel just to show you a little selection of what I've been up to; from bouncing balls, to Kerplunk, to a pinball machine, and a study of light vs heavy. Hope you like it!
Back in the first semester of college, we were tasked with creating a stop-motion animation inspired by a turn of phrase. I picked "Race Against Time," because there never seem to be enough hours in the day and I'm a (motorbike) racing enthusiast. I come from a family of petrolheads, too, so getting my hands on props for this project wasn't too difficult either. The helmet and gloves were my own, the steering wheel came from my brother's kit car, the overalls are my brothers, and the clock faces were given to me by an old art teacher who'd worked in an antique clock shop at some point.
I first started capturing images for this project one late night in a multi-storey car park in the city. It was a fun night out with my dear friend Emily, but ultimately ended prematurely, as it turns out taking photographs for a few hours there was frowned upon by security...
So, a change of scenery was called for! Thankfully, Emily's father let us loose in his office building for a night when no one was around, and it turned out great. In that one night, we spent many long hours moving things inch by painstaking inch, taking hundreds of photos, and making many a fresh cup of tea to keep us fuelled up. By three in the morning, we'd just about run out of steam, but we'd managed to capture everything I needed to string together a minutes' worth of stop-motion. What do you think? Was it worth it?
