This is one of my favourite Adrenalini episodes – partly because I got to sing El Boca’s song, but also because there’s so much going on in the story, and it all leads to a satisfying conclusion.
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The Adrenalini Brothers is coming to POP UK – Sky channel 616 or Freesat 603. Tune in from this Saturday 9-11am and every Saturday from now until the end of time! Or until the end of the licence. Or until your eyes wither into little raisins… whichever happens first
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I’ve found it… my Wacom pen is back. To prove it I have used it to draw this:
Actually I drew that with a mouse too.
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In this episode of The Amazing Adrenalini Brothers, they get lost in the forest and find a lovely little house with three steaming bowls of porridge on the table…
Trivia: Daddy Bear (who I voiced) was inspired by deceased cockney comedian Mike Reid and had a much lower, thicker accent. He originally said “We just needed an ‘oliday” but this was considered confusing for a non-UK audience. He also originally said “Ow, me bonce!” when he hit his head on the bus roof, but this was changed because the studio in Canada thought he was saying “Ow, me balls!”
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I can’t find it anywhere… since moving into our flat, for reasons I won’t disgust bore you with, my girlfriend and I have had to completely pack and unpack three times. I’m just realising stuff that’s been lost in the upheaval…
Guess I’ll have to draw with a mouse from now on.
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Here’s some nice graffiti on the wall near my girlfriend’s house.
And a nice message of appreciation from local people.
Nice!
The “bring back the horse” refers to the stencil-art horse that was there before.
The flower boy has come and gone a couple of times, like the horse before him – the last time it was blank (ostensibly because of an accretion of lesser, “cat-piss graffiti” around the image) somebody left a note cut out from a newspaper column asking for the artist to identify him/herself – so they might be given a larger spot to paint on.
Sorry about the crummy quality of the picture – my Nokia C7 camera seemed really keen to focus on the pebbledashing, not the note.
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I’ve been doing a lot of fairly intricate animation lately, for an online company called Espresso, who make educational software and tools for education. I did some banner animations for them at the beginning of the year where you could drag the weightless characters around a tall, narrow box in different directions and they’d react as they hit the sides, or if you did nothing they’d exhibit a range of actions from bored, to impatient, to distracted. It was basically a simulation of keeping children in a tall chimney in space.
There are seven characters in all, all carefully ethnically-balanced and including a dog and a puppy. The puppy’s easier to animate than the dog because he’s young and jumps instead of running, meaning that I only have to animate two sets of legs rather than four independent ones (those black-and-white Muybridge photo-series of animals and people running along in front of large grids help to demonstrate distinct gaits to four-legged creatures, but mostly they’re too difficult to animate quickly so we animators cheat slightly and treat them as two pairs of legs) as if he’s just jumping along, or constantly pouncing. It’s surprisingly effective, and is how I animated Sizzles, Marv’s creaky old sausage-dog in Charlie and Lola.
The tricky part of these animations is that the character has to end up in the right place each time, because the files are to be output as videos and joined up in different ways (called “hooking-up” in film terminology). If the character isn’t in the right place to join up there’ll be a visible pop. This also means that all the background and scenery have to hook up too – which means that if there are corrections to one part of the background that has to be copied and pasted exactly into each of the other files, and the further I get into this job the faster the files proliferate – it’s quite an undertaking just to open up all the current files and update them, not made easier by the fact that my computer is getting a bit creaky and that Flash CS5 is a bit overwhelming. But the animation’s fun and the characters remind me of working with Pesky, lo, these many years – the characters were actually designed by Claire Underwood and I first saw them about ten years ago when we were doing the first series of the <http://www.adrenalini.com”>Amazing Adrenalini Brothers</a>.
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I did a voice for a new preschool pilot made by Pesky, the same guys who co-produced The Amazing Adrenalini Brothers all those moons ago. It’s called Boj, and I play a Scottish horse, as you can hear if you play this video.
Boj & buddies – ‘Boj-elicious!’ (HD) from Pesky on Vimeo.
They’re taking the show to Cartoon Forum in a week’s time… good luck everyone!
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While sorting through the accumulated papers of (half) a lifetime I’ve found my first ever paid commission! It was a logo for the egg-boxes that were delivered to the surrounding area from the egg-farm I worked on, incorporating a caricature of the farmer Ralph. I’m quite pleased with how it turned out, considering this was 1997 and I had no access to computer or Photoshop and had to work in pen-and-ink. I’m pretty sure there was also a counterpart design (involving chickens and a coop silhouetted by the sun) for a decal on the side of Ralph’s van, but I can’t find it anywhere.
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Here’s a little animation I did just now of a Pygmy Shrew. I’m currently trying to figure out a small Flash game involving him, which I’ll post here when it’s done.
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