SHOWREEL! THINGS!

^That's my latest showreel!



^That's completed work I did for CBBC!



^That's me in front of the Channel 4 building in Lon-don!

Myself and the other chaps from Arcus attended the E4 Estings awards ceremony last friday which was pretty cool I guess.

We didn't win anything unfortunately (the grand prize went to the lovely Cyriak Harris of whom I've been a fan of for years now.) but there was a reasonably priced bar (free) and we got in pretty tight with the head of E4 who gave us a personal tour of the building. (He only wanted to show us how the main entrance looks like a giant cock and balls when viewed from the top floor.)

Sweet!

Here's something...

Something exciting and terrifying! Tomorrow my Esting goes live and shall be broadcast on national TV for a year or so. Hurrah!

Now, that's all rather splendid but it's not actually the exciting and terrifying thing I talking about...

I got animation work! For potential legal reasons I cannot say exactly who I'm working for so all I'll say is that their initials are B, B and C. We've been commissioned to create some animation for them and it's definitely going to be broadcast nationwide and then put on their website! So that's the exciting part but here's th- OH YEAH we get paid aswell- here's the terrifying part:

We have been given until the 20th of this month (now only 1 week from now) to deliver to them five 45 second 2D hand-drawn cartoons at a broadcast standard. I'd imagine a larger studio with many animators might just be able to handle such a request, but we are literally just a couple of bedroom animators, that is to say, the very talented colleague James and myself. Just the two of us with dodgy computers, and although James is very talented and I can just about wield a graphics tablet proficiently enough, we haven't actually yet worked on anything together before this, so this mammoth task is really our ice breaker into the whole production process. Ooer.

Still, it seems to be going pretty good. We've been working 15 hour days for best part of a week now and our target of completing a cartoon every two days seems to be holding out so far.

Here's a background wot I dun drew that has been dubbed "That Princess Mononoke Shot:"

(because the camera moves forward through the shot all pretty like.)

Dreamleak update

After nothing for best part of a year, strangely, I get two whole emails in the same week from (as far as I can tell) two completely unrelated people. They asked about my old webcomic 'Dreamleak' and whether or not I'd ever be continuing it and if so when.

To be honest I was pretty surprised to find out anyone even remembered about it after all this time. However, I was even more surprised to discover (according to the stat counter) that I was still getting a fair amount of hits each day. I like to think that there are a whole horde of die hard fans religiously checking every single day for an update, waiting with an undying faith that one day Dreamleak shall return and with it, a second age of badly-drawn-barely-enjoyable-but-curiously-enticing comicery will come. Or it's just some bots.

Either way I don't think an update would hurt.



Basically I've gone back and actually written the thing this time. I have a massive script all written up and spangly looking and I've started roughing out the pages. There's a few of rough panels hidden in this very post! Can you spot them?



Being pretty busy with work these days I don't get much time to work on Dreamleak, but it's coming together slowly but surely. It's quite different from before but I'm certain it's for the better. It may not blow your socks completely off, per se, but maybe it'll loosen them from your toes a wee bit. As for when? How does early next year sound?



No? Well tough! :D

Another exciting update:

1. House move went OK. The only casualties were two of my favourite chunky tumblers and my bank balance.

2. The business is now on hold for a few more months until early next year, due to one of our team getting a temp job writing for CBBC the lucky bugger!

3. Because of this one of my new house mates, who is a founder of animation studio Polygon Fiction has invited me to work with them for a few months. They've been working on a stunning looking rotoscoped short for best part of a year now and I'm really looking forward to being a part of it! Check out this clip of theirs:



4. Out of over 700 entries to the E4 Estings competition ours was one of the 15 finalists! Hurrah! This means our work is now going to be shown on national TV for a whole year and we stand a chance to win the prize of £5000 and a contract deal with E4! Even more hurrahs!

5. I finally figured out a perfect ending for Dreamleak today after two years of it eluding me! SUPER HURRAH!

"But Greg," you might be thinking, "Everything seems to be going really well for you at the moment. What gives?" Well actually to balance it all out I have no money and I've just attended my first Job Seekers Allowance interview and it was just about the single most depressing, degrading and downright unpleasant experience of my life. And I have to do it every fortnight from now on.

GOOD TIMES

Update!

I can't believe how often I keep forgetting to update this thing...

1. So the pitch went well. We did indeed manage to get the full £16,000 grant to help set up our very own animation studio! Hurrah!

2. I finally went back home to Scotland for a couple of weeks and it was lovely and rainy. (I still went camping though!)

3. Whilst at home I made very good and exciting progress with Dreamleak so it shan't be long now 'til I can get cracking with it again!

4. Found a new place to live next year and although it's in a terrible area of Newcastle it's great 'cos it's dirt cheap! (And it actually is a rather nice house)

5. Just completed animating our entry into the E4 Estings competition! (still haven't been to bed though)

6. Here it is:




7. ALSO BONUS: Here's the short teaser animation thing we pitched with:

Twitter?

I'm not usually one to go along with these social networking things because I do infact hate everyone I've ever met. Ever.

So you may be suprised to find that I went and got a Twitter!

http://twitter.com/GregtheFraser

I've even put it on the side of the blog!

GOSH!