"The Royal"

Another 4th year idea (and comic premise) I've been working on is "The Royal". A gang of almost vigilante-like criminals set in post war 1940s. The animation premise would be the 3-4 character I have so far to rob a bank, but getting betrayed by one of the members. After a shoot-out, they're arrested by their betrayer, only for this to have been the intention all along - the gang then racing off with the money in a stolen police car. Again, this is an idea I keep coming back to and working on in the background, but haven't tied too much down yet story-wise for the comic idea (which would be a serial or one-shot). More research needs to be done into the time period and using that to help assign the roles of the gorup, the vehicles, gun models etc. and help it be authentic in detail.

"Gone Birding"

'Gone Birding', created by Mike Maynard, is about a fish creature that 'fishes' for birds using chips from his upturned boat (a Birderfish or Birderman, if you will). The second it was pitched I knew it's the one I wanted to work on - very original idea, and very funny. This is the development work I have so far, and while my designs didn't get picked, they again proved fairly popular. However, my off-hand addition of the large seagull that terrorises the Birderman was taken on-board, resulting in the abomination that is Steven Seagull. A really fun project, and a great group to work with. Looking forward to finishing as much we can this year and then continue to work on it as one of our 4th year projects.

"The Fisherman"

Taken from a comic I worked on during my Adv.Highers, 'The Fisherman' is about a world where rising seas levels have given greater importance to the fishing industry - and the fish have gotten bigger too. I asked the writer (Christian Bogetoft) for permission to use this as my 3rd year idea and pitch it as part of "The World of the story" project, and he was more than happy to as he felt I'd added to the story plenty and he'd written all he wanted to tell, so any further work on it was for me to do with as I wished! Again, this unfortunately didn't get picked, but it was fairly popular, and definitely something I'll be coming back to when I can (both as a comic and animation). The following is a combination of development work for the 30 seconds I'd have animated and the original comic (unfortunately, due to other priorities page 6 was never lettered). The final animation would have shown and altered version of panel 3 on page 4 through to panel 3 of page 5. However, this did strangely relate to the project I ended up working on...

"All's Fair"

The following is development work for "All's Fair" - a pitch for a 30 second animation in which an alien invasion is found to be toys getting sucked into a hoover. Initial idea and story were worked on with Colin Dick, but all the stuff shown here are my development work for it. This idea was put on hold though to work on separate projects for the "World of the Story" brief we were given (more of which to follow).

Grand Debut - "Tasty"

As my first post in this blog, thought I'd add some design work from last year I did. This is Gus, a superhero with an amazing sense of taste - which often proves more of a hindrance than a help to him, such as finding very little food appealing and having to stick to what other people would find bland.