Walter Gloom

Head over to the Walter Gloom blog or to my flickr album to see more photos my newest puppet, Walter Gloom. Puppet designed by James Geard.

Check out Edna!

My new puppet:



Full details and more photos on the Watler Gloom blog:

http://waltergloom.blogspot.com/2010/06/unveiling-edna.html

Long Overdue News Update

Again I have been absent from blogging for far too long - sorry about that. This is just a brief update of noteworthy things that have happened since my last post.

First up, the music video for Smile by The Leano was released in January and I went to the launch night in London which was a lot of fun and involved a variety of great live music.
If you haven't seen the video, here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBuRbw-lIqI

Loads of animators from around the world worked on it, including Don Carlson and Mike LeTendre. The singing spotty alien blobs section is mine. I think the whole thing was a fantastic project and I love the end result. All profits from the album sales are going to a charity helping displaced kids in Sri Lanka, so it's for a good cause too.

Most people reading this blog will have already seen the finished international stop-motion co-op film 'First Time Parents', but for anyone who hasn't:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRfb7TrpGak

I am so impressed by it! Even though people from all over the world worked on it without having ever meeting each other, the whole thing is very coherent. All the puppets and props that Emily Baxter and I made for it fit in perfectly with John Hankins' sets and props, and the whole film has a very friendly atmosphere to it. John's animation is amazing as always, and the music is brilliant.
I am rather in love with this animation and the woolly family it features. Emily's Mommy monster is quite obviously a soulmate for the Daddy puppet I made and I am very glad they found each other.

I am still working on making things for Walter Gloom and I intend to update that blog very soon with puppet building photos. Until then...

Things are happening at the Walter Gloom blog...

Puppet building has started for Walter Gloom, and there are photos up on the Walter Gloom blog. Go on, have a look, you know you want to!

New studio!

Sorry about my long absence from blogging folks - it has been due in part to the mammoth task of moving house. Daz and I have one Hell of a lot of stuff (mainly comics, books, DVDs and art equipment) which all had to be moved the 100 yards to the new house by hand, mainly by myself as Daz has been working down south for the last few months. I now have a new studio (yes, another spare bedroom) which is not only much bigger than my old studio, but also has the advantage that it doesn't double as Daz's junk room like my old studio did.

Here are a few photos of my new studio space:




'Monday to Friday' has been put on hold for the moment, and I have started work on the puppets for the Walter Gloom film that I am working on with writer/director James Geard. I will be posting images of the process I have used to make the puppet heads for the film over at the Walter Gloom blog in the next few days. Now I have to be off again, the heads need another coat of latex...

Two woolly monsters emigrate to Hawaii...

Here are some photos of the two woolly monster puppets I made to send to John Hankins (castlegardener) as part of the international animation co-op. They are provisionally called 'Dad' and 'Toddler'. I'm afraid the lighting and focus in the photos is not great - I took them in a hurry under yellowish a light with no flash.

The Dad is a little smaller than my usual puppets, and is about 10 inches tall, the Toddler is tiny, just over 4 inches tall, and had to be made using miniature crochet with a 1mm hook.

Both puppets have aluminium armature wire and epoxy putty armatures which I wrapped with polyfibre wadding stuck in place with Copydex latex glue (one of the most versatile mediums in the world). The skins are made of hand crocheted yarn, acrylic and wool/acrylic blend in the case of the Dad puppet, and very fine angora/lambswool blend for the Toddler. The armature for the father had to be completed in stages after certain parts of the woolly skin had been sewn into place, otherwise the hands would have been too big to pass through the 'sleeves' of the skin.

The mouths are felt replacements, and other details are made using buttons and fluffy pom-poms. As usual I used french knitting (done on a circular four-pin bobbin) for Dad's fingers, which are threaded over latex and wool wrapped wire fingers.

The wonders of London

I am temporarily back from London after a longer than planned stay, but I'm going back on Monday for a few more days. Daz's company is re-tiling a pool down there, so he's renting a very nice 3-bedroom flat for him and the other guys down in Kilburn, a few miles from the city centre, which I get to stay in for free - woohoo! Usually I can only afford to stay in the cheapest 'hotel' in London, a very grim place in Earls Court which became the inspiration for my 'Grey Heights Guesthouse' animation. It's unlikely that I'll be able to afford to spend so much time in London again, so I'm making the most of it whilst I can.

I travelled out to Woking on Thursday to meet up with director James Geard and talk about our collaboration, Walter Gloom. He had some fantastic sketches and ideas and has put together a great storyboard for me to work from. To see some of his drawings and follow his pre-production work, check out the Walter Gloom blog.

The rest of this post is mainly going to be me enthusing about London, no stop motion I'm afraid...

I love living in the North-West, but I have to admit that every time I go down to London I fall in love with the place a little more. I have no interest in the nightlife or shopping - I avoid both of these things like the plague, unless it's shopping for books or comics of course! The main things I love about London are the excellent art galleries and museums, the architecture and the public transport system (yup, I'm a real geek). London now comes a very close second to Vienna, Austria which is my favourite city in the world (for very similar reasons).

Visiting the British Museum is my version of a religious pilgrimage. My entire purpose in life is Art, and the British Museum is a cathedral to the entire history of human cultural expression throughout the world (the V&A is similar, only with more emphasis on the history of design rather than history in general, and mainly focusing on the last 1000 years or so). I spent two full days in the British Museum, and now I have finally, after 5 visits in 3 years, managed to see everything in the permanent displays (yes it really is that big).

My favourite bits of the British Museum are Mexico, the Asia section (China, India, Japan etc.), Africa and the Lewis Chessmen. I'm also a sucker for anything featuring ancient methods of writing. I could quite happily pitch a tent in the central court of the British Museum and live there permanently!

As for the V&A, my favourite bits are the Islamic Middle East and South Asia, among many others.
The other great thing about both museums is the amazing bookshops.

And then of course there is also the National Gallery, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, The Wellcome Collection, The Saatchi Gallery, The National Portrait Gallery, The Natural History Museum, The Science Museum, and many many other galleries and museums to be inspired by.

Along with my passion for looking at pretty much anything that's in a glass case, on a plinth or hanging on wall with a little information tag beside it, I also love the London Underground. There are several reasons for this. The tube map is a work of design genius and all those interconnected coloured lines and dots fuel my autistic side (I like trying to work out the most efficient route between two stations by time, distance, number of connections and which route is most aesthetically pleasing on the map... ). I also like the efficiency and convenience of it all (anyone reading this in London is shaking their head now). Even with the staff strikes, signal failures, people jumping under trains and security alerts, it is still much quicker and easier to get around than in the Bolton/Salford/Manchester area, where nothing interconnects properly, you have to wait ages between each bus/train and everything is run by different companies that require separate day tickets so it ends up costing a fortune.

Despite the wonders of London, there is no way I could survive living there. Apart from the fact that even renting a tiny bedsit costs more than twice as much as renting a good sized two bedroom house in Bolton, I'd probably die of over-stimulation (if such a thing is possible). London has the same effect on me as large quantities of sugar and brightly coloured cartoons have on small children (or the effect that the London Forbidden Planet megastore and Orbital Comics shop have on Daz). Most importantly though, the tap-water down there is horrible lime-scaley stuff that forms a skin on top of your tea and makes it taste funny, and I could never live in a city where you can't make a good cup of tea...

Anyway, enough of my London related ramblings, by next weekend I should have two new woolly monster puppets to post about. Whilst in London I've also been doing some drawings for a little comic/artist-book type thing I want to put together and print a short run of, but I'll post more about that if and when I eventually finish it, so I can try to sell you all a copy!