Series: The One Winged Bee Called Emily

Only one episode of this aborted series seems to be out on the Internet, which is the video you see above. In fact, three episodes were commissioned and finished; the two other episodes are lurking in someone’s hard drive, and although I could get a copy of it, I don’t think I’m legally authorised to upload it, regretfully.

All of the character animation in those three episodes were done by Brett Tunnicliff, save the titles, which I had done. Terry and I had been responsible for modelling and texturing the characters. I rigged, rendered, composited, and cut the the episodes myself. The direction of the first 2 episodes was headed by the boss. But by the third, its future prospects for its continuation waned — as did interest in it — and I was given the honour of finishing off the series oddment as a quasi-director.

Predicatably, the third was my favourite as I felt a bit freer to experiment; no one really cared enough to put their 2 cents into it by this time. So I tightened the storyboard to make the cuts fit in better, and began with a beauty pass timing animatic that I would get sign-off from the boss, and things proceeded smoothly from there. Brett commented that he particularly enjoyed the flow of the third episode, which is a nice thing to hear, as I enjoyed running my own small project.

No one would probably see that work, unfortunately. And sure, the end result might look dodgy to some, but to remember one of the reasons why I post these things: many jobs come with disadvantageous circumstances that affect the outcome, but if people knew just how much work was put in, they’d know it would have been a surprise anything came out of it at all. Most people appreciate only just the bells and whistles, or the polished gold trims, but I’m here saying that there is a hidden engine that powers all creative endeavours that should be recognised on equal footing.

Commercial: Orcon’s Daisty and Gav (Go Unlimited)

I consider myself a competent but frustrated character animator. I say frustrated on account of people’s bias of me as a technical person, I’ve too often been asked, instead, to rig characters. In this case, the characters of this commercial were completely in 2D, illustrated by Gareth Jensen, who also did a lot of the animation along with a few other animators.

The main difference was that the job was going to be done completely in After Effects, including the rigging. I’m not an AE rigger, nor have I animated a character in AE before. While I’ve seen what mind-boggling AE rigging tools can do, at the time of this commercial, I hadn’t seen any of them yet. So I basically had to do everything from scratch: learn Puppet Tools, create the workflow for swapping assets, expressions to switch drawings, etc.

Frankly, I don’t know if I want to do that again, given the powerful rigging tools available today. I think I’d prefer to animate.