Creamers Kickstarter Campaign 2013

Whew wee what a ride... in the last week or so it has been a non stop social media frenzy to support and promote my Kickstarter fundraising campaign for Creamers. The only real way a project like mine can swim to the top of the shark pool is with a constant steady drip of reminders. Email, tweets, facebook you name it - anything that creates an online presence. The enjoyable aspect of  all of this is the great feedback and connections I make. Re-connections and new connections - its nice to have your solo pursuit float outside of your own little domain for a while. So if you have come to this blog through some other form of media - please check out the Creamers Film facebook page for more art than is here right now and more importantly my Kickstarter campaign. 25 days to go and counting!

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

What a long haul animation is. It makes me feel slightly better when I hear how long other independent shorts have taken: 8 years, 13 years, 7 years. After the first long break I have had from Creamers in a couple of years I sat down in front of my 50,000 plus files and really had to dig deep to open them up. There is so much energy involved in just keeping track of it all. Despite the fact that I dish out the KISS principle to every other artist/student I know, I have definitely NOT applied it to myself. I am my own worst enemy and all that. Why make it simple when you can make it complicated. Its a tired old cliche but amazingly enduring.

Still I am chewing away and have dropped an entire sequence thanks to the sage advice of a very talented artist Michael Mueller who is helping me out when he is not art directing games. So my bunny sequence is on the floor. It never really did make much sense and was more or less an excuse for me to animate rabbits. It was supposed to represent that time in the early morning when you have been working all night and anything and I mean anything can make you cry – well make me cry and I know I am not totally alone on that one.

Keep on trucking and try not to nap too much. Ester and I are morphing into one….

Art Marathon from Hilary Moses on Vimeo.

The Camera Move That Dare Not Speak Its Name

I have always liked the look of an animated camera move, not the static style rostrum camera moves that most animations have (that is a still camera moving incrementally over a single piece of art) but the dynamic shifting view that is drawn frame by frame. Tezuka Osamu does it brilliantly in the fantastical POV he animates in his film ‘Jumping.’ Instead of being restricted to the single stage view that a lone piece of art allows (no matter how inventive the art)


the animated camera reveals a more complete and graphically interesting understanding of the film’s environment. Unfortunately, like most animation eye candy it takes a long time. When I was working on an educational film for the NFB called What’s In a Name I was asked to animate realistic characters in a historical style. I decided an easy way of getting around drawing full anatomical bodies was to have the camera move continuously around the room. The moving camera would catch glimpses of the characters thus saving me the task of drawing their whole bodies. Well time saved in one task is often banked somewhere else. To make a long story short the sequence was done by rotoscoping a 3D camera move into 2D drawings. I designed all the props, room layout and created a schematic for the camera. 3D artist Lawrence Teng modeled the room and animated the 3D camera move. We printed out every 8th frame, I added the characters and then the whole thing was inbetweened, all 1500 drawings worth. The result is below.

CREAMERS -NFB Sappho Sequence from Hilary Moses on Vimeo.

Insanely I decided to do the same thing for the opening of Creamers. I wanted a comprehensive flyover of the whole studio so the audience would have the full picture of Ester’s working environment – in all its cavernous, lonely glory. Lawrence and I teamed up again and using a blocked out version of the studio.





and a schematic of the camera’s path...





we toiled away at multiple variations to get the movement right.

Creamers - 3D Camera Move from Hilary Moses on Vimeo.

The plan was to print out 3D reference keys as I had done on the NFB sequence and start drawing. Easy peasy right? In the lofty distracting haze of my swooping camera's carefully choreographed dance to the opening music track, I was blind to the heeUUUUGE elephant in the room. I had set myself up to draw and paint literally thousands of creamers, teapots, saucers and cups, all of them patterned. To top that off they were lovingly lined up on vertical shelves that not so much panned but strobed by in an epileptic inducing visual that would make even the most meth soaked episode of Pokemon seem tame.
Scheisse.

A few more months behind me and some new glaring truths…


1. This 1 minute establishing shot would take eons.
2. It would hurt peoples eyes.
3. This was not the way to start production.


Screech to a halt – what next?