Robin Hood

Why you should sit through the final credits.

Ridley Scott’s new take on Robin Hood got me off the couch and into the movie theatre last night. It kept me entertained and at times mesmerised by the number of flying arrows, the amount of pitch poured down castle walls and the rocking boat scenes on an English Channel that looked like a hurricane was blowing through.

All well and good. It did what it promised to do, and pretty well.

It was when the film was over that I really sat up and took notice. The final credits are shown over the background of an absolutely steaming animation sequence by Gianluigi Toccafondo. As The Arts Desk blog put it, the “luminescent five-minute Rotoscope animated version of the myth is an impressionistic, utterly original blender-mix of Chagall, Bacon and Munch.” I completely agree.

I love, love, love Toccafondo’s work. Have a look at it here and see if you agree.

This week’s adventure…

..being a tour guide around some Glasgow studios (and a cemetery).

I’d like to think I don’t get complacent, but I do. I forget the wonders in my own back yard - in this case, Glasgow. That thing about tourists seeing more of a place than the locals do is true. I guess I am kind of a local in Glasgow now, and it has taken a group of students from my old art school, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, to make me realize I have missed a few of this town’s gems lately.

The MassArt crew gave me a mandate to arrange some visits with Glasgow designers, animators and illustrators - and I have to say, it was a great exercise. It pried me out of my comfort zone (the studio) and, as is usually the case when you depart the comfort zone, I had some eye-opening experiences and met some fantastic people.

It was excellent to visit Glasgow School of Art, check out what the Visual Communication students are up to (which involves some truly amazing multimedia work) and, for the first time ever, tour around the Mackintosh Building. Next we visited the Necropolis, Glasgow’s famous hilltop cemetery. It’s an atmospheric, strange place with fabulous views all around Glasgow.

The next day we visited the very entertaining animation company Once Were Farmers, who spared us time for a show-and-tell of their work even though they were working toward a huge deadline. Freight Design, a graphic design consultancy, let us traipse through their studio too, and look at their classy publishing projects.

The highlight was sitting around a big table that evening with Tom Green from Dangerous Ink magazine, comic artist Vincent Deighan, aka Frank Quitely, comic colorist Jamie Grant and comic artists Nulsh and Rob, looking at stunning original art and magazines.

I am still feeling inspired by all this, as I get back to my own work feeling refreshed and a bit more connected into Glasgow’s creative scene.

Granny O’Grimm

“Ireland’s Bitterest Granny” is up for an Academy Award.

I was browsing through this year’s nominations for Best Animated Short Film and came across Brown Bag Films‘ Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty. Two Irish animation studios have work nominated in the Animation categories this year, which is pretty good - the other is for hand-drawn feature film The Secret of Kells.

I liked all the Short Film nominations, but Grannie O’Grimm’s retelling of Sleeping Beauty is a cracker! For more of Granny, visit her website. The Academy Award ceremony is on March 7.

Kseniya Simonova’s Sand Animation

Happy August!

I have been closeted away working on top secret stuff and away from the blogosphere for too long. It’s tough posting new info when what you’re working on is top secret!

But seeing as my mission is also to inspire you with wondrous things, I can direct you toward this video, which I learned about through my colleagues at the Picture Book Artists Association. It’s a haunting performance by a young woman called Kseniya Simonova, appearing on the programme “Ukraine’s Got Talent”. Kseniya makes moving pictures with sand on a surface to tell a story. By the end of the clip, you will know what the story is about and have a pretty strong sense of the impact it has on the audience. I would argue that the theme of Kseniya’s work is still quite embedded in the Ukrainian national consciousness. Without saying anything else, I invite you to click here to see the video.