The Story...

I have been pondering over different ideas for the narrative of my book and after thinking of countless movie like ideas and different scenes etc. I decided that trying to recreate a film within a book isn't very readable or simple.


So I have decided to go with something ultra simple that flows across the pages quite well, here are some rough sketches to show the start of the story:

Page 1 - POV shot of boy tuning in to his "MONSTER MOVIE HOUR" show on TV.

The T.V starts to bug out and malfunction causing radioactive waves to shoot out towards the boy and suck him into the movie inside the T.V.

From here on out you see the warped boy floating across the pages through various horror movie scenes, narrowly escaping death.

I haven't thought of the specifics or an ending yet but its a start!

Horror film NERD

I have been playing around with designing a young male character that is obsessed with horror films, kinda like and young version of me! I will continue designing this character as he could be used as the main protagonist within the book. Again, I need to think about the construction and simplify the design of these illustrations seeing as though he may have to be animated.

MONSTERS!

I have spent a lot of my time doing what I love doing and sketching monsters! I focused mainly on the classic B-movie monsters such as the Wolfman and Dracula etc. and tried to sketch them in many different ways. I'm still not yet happy with the style in most of these. I need to simplify them!

Horror Fonts & Poster Designs

These are some horror style font designs and poster designs I made earlier on in the project. I enjoyed experimenting with my own font designs for made up horror films but also trying to recreate design work for films that already exist. However I felt as though they lacked purpose.

Inspiration

Here are some illustrations by various artists that play with the same theme I want to work with:

Scott C's monster illustrations:

I love the way he can add such a cute innocence to these nasty creatures. I want to have a bit of this within my monsters.

Project Change!

I have been making fonts and designing horror posters alongside my BBC work and kinda felt like I was just imitating work without any real purpose. So I decided that I wanted to give my project more meaning and more direction, a proper goal at the end. So I decided that I would create an old style horror illustration book, where I could have my narrative play out but keep the style and quality of still illustrations.


I then noticed that there are countless illustration books now that are using the characters and artwork of the book to make a simple short animated trailer for the book;

BBC Animation Stills

Here are some stills from my BBC animation:

I have arranged the frames of character movement together from when the mole gets scared to show how I used a smear to add more exaggeration to it. I think it came out quite well.

This still pretty much sums up the piece and is my favourite still from it. Shows off the character interaction quite nicely.

BBC Animation finished.

BBC "Boo" Animation Complete!


I have finally finished my BBC animation! There were quite a few minor issues with export but these were all cleared up after a few head scratching sessions with the master of compositing Ian Friend and the wonderful Rebecca Hahner.


I am very pleased with the final outcome. I did have issues during the first couple of weeks of the project, with it seeming to not really progress at all. But once I made the decision to get fellow animator Harry Slinger-Thompson involved with animating the Fox character, the work really started to move faster and materialise.


I will post up some stills of the animation frames, but for now here is a little extract from it:

"Boo!" Animation (clip) for BBC Radio 4 'More than Words Festival' from Oliver Hamilton on Vimeo.

Time to move on with my developing practice stuff!

Proposal

For this module, apart from the BBC work I am doing, I have decided to concentrate on developing my skills in certain areas of 2D digital animation, mainly the design side.

I am a huge fan of classic horror movies and the poster art for them and after seeing some work by Kevin Dart for The Amazing Adventures of Kid Cole & Klay which has an old B-movie style to it, I have decided to try and create something similar.

I propose to replicate the old B-movie artwork and style with an animated children's series twist. I aim to create backgrounds and fonts, characters and eerie sounds and hopefully culminate all of this together into a grainy horror movie style trailer.

This work will fit in well with my Visual Culture research as I am writing about tastes in Horror film for that.

Here are some examples of Kevin Dart's work: