Royal Television Society Awards - Midlands Centre

I'm really excited to announce that I have won an award for "Troubled", the short animated student film I made.

I'm really surprised that I won because I thought the other student films that were also nominated were really strong, well animated and beautiful pieces.

I have to give credit to a lot of people who helped me out on the making of this film.
Eoín Greenham, he comped all of the film, he stayed up with me until the wee hours of the night to have it finished on time. He did a real wonderful job!

Claire Perrin; she composed the music, titled "Accepted". She gave permission to use the song in the film. Multi-talented Graínne Quinlan (on the violin) , Elaine Brennan (great pianist) and Eoín Greenham (recording) recorded a new piece of music using the theme of Claire's Song.

Donata Pellizari helped me a lot with colouring in the frames (which takes such a long time believe it or not), she also checked my animation to catch somethings I didn't.

Jurgen Inghels; a good friend, helped me with pre-production of the film. At the time I couldn't draw because I broke my drawing hand. I had to submit storyboards but instead I submitted some shots of myself acting out what I wanted to put in the storyboards and then edited everything together to make it look like a short-film. It was very embarrassing but also very funny and helpful!

Bouldermedia and Wolverhampton; I used Boulder's equipment for the production of the short film. I owe a lot of my experience of animation to them because this was my first animation job. I started out a little weak and the staff were very patient with me, especially when I was learning.
After a couple of years in the company I decided it would be good idea to get a my degree in animation. I was lucky enough to be able to do distant learning from Ireland in Wolverhampton(which is in the UK). I'm forever grateful to everyone working in Boulder and my teachers in Wolverhampton, especially those who entered my film into the RTS.

Last but not least, my family; Vlad (Volodya), my love, definitely keeps me on my toes, he's the best thing that walked into my life. He listens to me, cares for me and is just the best guy in the whole world! My parents and sister are very understanding, I hardly had any time for writing e-mails and staying in touch. My friends hardly saw me during the college year, I was working full-time so socializing was out of the question. I'm so grateful for everyone in my life!

I just want to say thanks to everyone once again, you're brilliant! I'll post a photo of the award itself when I get the chance.

Thanks everybody!

Mothers.....

Again an old sketch I did for my mother, it's from an old photo of her.

Asian Ladies

This is a little drawing I did up bout two weeks ago, now that I'm home ill (food poisoning) thought I'd throw it up on the blog. I was inspired to do these after seeing some lovely drawings from Sandra's Blog!

Carter - Rob Cullen

Rob Cullen's fantastic show, Carter and Son!

Here's a little something I've been doing off and on. I wanted to challenge myself to do a character that's not my own, I give myself a lot of liberty when I'm sculpting my own stuff. I just thought it might be interesting to see what kind of problems I run into.....and I did run into a good few of them. It's still in progress. I need to fix the hands as they're totally off the model and sculpt off those rough edges. Will try to get this one finished within the next week or two :-)

"Troubled"

This is the rough maquette I made for my short film in Wolverhampton College this year.
The character is on the banner of my Blog. I never gave him a name though :-)
I will get round to posting the short on my Blog soon. I want to enter it into a few festivals, I read somewhere they don't take films that have been on the net. Let's wait and see.
The finished maquette will come, I promise!

The Legend of Fiog......continues :-S

Okay....where to begin? After finishing off that really bad version of my college film in 2001 (and still thinking that "I knew it all) , I stuck the idea away for ages. I got my first job in animation and realized that there's so much more to animation than what I thought. Besides all the fantastic drawings, painting, animation, line-tests, storyboards etc etc, there's that whole pre-production side of the industry which I just LOVE!

Okay, I admit I'm just a wannabe concept/story artist at this stage.
Sometimes I watch films or animated films and think, "gee, that could've been a heck of a lot more powerful/wonderful" if.......I dare not say what I think hehe, I know I would have a heck of a lot of people to answer to.

Anyways, not straying too much from the subject. So, as I mentioned before, my college film was a disaster but now with some professional experience I'm ready to give it another whirl. At this stage I'm just doing concept work on the character. Her name is Fiog. It's Irish for Maiden or Twigs. In my mind I sort of imagined this character to be connected with nature, sort of like an indian guru or a witch without the fantastic powers. I didn't want to create the typical sexy girl in rags, I want a natural looking girl, skinny, she has a family, the style is not cartoony but easy enough to be animated because I intend doing the animation myself (LOL)

Fiog's story is a tragic one, she re-lives her past everyday, her family was murdered by the neighbour village, she lives on an island (impossible for her to abandon), she lives off the land and remembers her family....she blames herself for her powers. Now and again people seek her wisdom...that is the only company she has. That's the rough story, pretty tragic, huh? I love it!

The drawings are mostly of Fiog, her mother, and lover. I started making a sculpture that I know I'll never be able to complete because the designs keep on changing, nevertheless I still like the rough outcome of it. It gave me some insight into keeping it simple again!

Concept Stuff

These are pretty straight forward, I found this little color studyI used for BG for the short "Chinchillas" I did a while back. Not really similar to final product but it helped!



The next is just a little drawing I did for my college film in Ballyfermot College. I thought I would stick it on the blog just as a reminder to keep things simple! My college film was a bit of a mess cause I wanted to do much in such a short time. In the end it just did not make any sense at all, it just looked like someone got a blind person to edit the film...but we don't call these mistakes, we call this EXPERIENCE! LOL