Another Animex Festival has been and gone and, as ever, has lived up to it's growing reputation of attracting the very best from the animation world. And me.
Joining the usual suspects of speakers this year were such industry luminaries as Oscar winning producer of W&G Curse of the Wererabbit, Claire Jennings, and big bad bebop Hull-fop hippety hop beatboy JAKe, creator of Geek Boy and all round top hairy bloke. A nice touch this year was the award given to the evergreen creator of Acting For Animators, Ed Hooks, who received his Animex "Lemmy" at the end of festival dinner, to everyone's delight. Congratulations Ed, can't think of a nicer fellow in Animation.
The Cat maquette you see above was wheeled out during my speech (which was shockingly full of innuendo, smut, double
and single entendres I'll be the first to admit!). It was presented as an example of things one can do to help raise the profile of a project when looking to chase that greenlight. I asked Colin Batty some years ago to make me a maquette, and the talented sausage came up with this definitive sculpt.
The box was made by Chris Keogh at Mackinnon and Saunders. What you can't see on the reverse of it is the address to Castle Frankenstein, Oddsburg.
As well as an insight into the development of Frankenstein's Cat, I was also able to show the pilot of a "pre-Curtis" Bob The Builder as made by Ealing Studios many moons ago. This was by way of explaining the sometimes long and meandering path by which a project goes from page to the screen. The pilot raised many eyebrows in the audience as it's little known that it was ever made.
This fine collection of male specimens consists of (l-r) Dougie "The Mouth" Pincott, Professor Paul "The Stare" Wells, Curtis "The Tongue" Jobling and Chris "The Lobe" Williams. As you may be able to gather this was from the end of Festival Dinner after much swigging of dirty liquor!
Ahhhh, the lovely, divine, Claire Jennings, ex-Aardman (sorry Claire ;-) ) Poor Claire had to endure my company, dad jokes, inappropriate questions and general rants throughout the dinner. Watch this space as the Jobling endeavours to work with the Jennings in the near future!
Thanks to everyone at Animex for helping me, Emma and the kids to feel as welcome as ever and thanks to everyone who turned up, both at my workshop and lecture. If you came and listened, do please post comments - feedback always appreciated.
Bada Bling!
Been a busy couple of weeks post-Animex with Frankenstein's Cat production design work kicking up a gear. I designed a couple of episodes this week (a pet pageant episode and a Halloween one) and the scripts are providing lots of room for fun new designs.
