Why the long face??
One of a series of Panda Idents Animated by Paul Donnellon and Satchiko nita for the World Wildlife Fund. The brief was to take the famous logo character and to animate him in a way to bring out his character while retaining the integrity of the original design Logo graphic.
The challenge was to make him feel alive and move in a three dimensional movement while not breaking the flow of the simple logo, this took quite a lot of testing and designing.
The character only exists as he is drawn for the Logo, there is no other angles designed for this character so the first part of the job was to create a model sheet to work out how he might look in profile, behind etc
A short clip i animated for the author Angela Clarke for her debut book Confessions of a Fashionista. Publisher random House Jan 17th 2013.
London International Animation Festival
Last Saturday i was one of the speakers at the LIAF workshop on film Title sequnces. It was held at the brand new cinemas at the Barbican, very nice they are too with plush seats and good screens.
The other speakers were Nic Benns from Momoco, and Maria manton,founder of Slinky, and now at Munky. Even though it was early on a saturday morning the audience were enthusiastic and it is good to get feedback and questions which make you think about your own work in new ways.
I enjoyed it, its good to get out into the real world instead of hiding out in our studio!
Channel 4 came to VooDooDog with a tight deadline to produce titles, bumpers and strings for their latest program ‘The Audience’. The sequences where directed by Paul Donnellon, designed by Andrew White and produced by David Z Obadiah. The production uses a mixture of Flash animation combined with Cinema 4D whilst being comp’ed in After Effects.
Paul Donnellon on the process:
Q: What was the brief from Channel 4? How did you go about developing a response?
The brief was a very fast turnaround, we had 10 days to put together a 20 second title sequence. The idea was to base it on 1950’s poster artwork from America… those Amtrak posters, it had to be minimal - with a basic colour palette and simple graphic characters.
Myself and Andrew pulled together references out from that era and put together a moodboard which we sent over to the client. They liked this, so I put together a storyboard with loads of different ideas and panels, I was working quickly using the iPad, eventually this formed the basis of the animatic.
The story line was 50 strangers following this individual in making a life changing decision. These people were constantly following and listening to conversations of the main person, and kept popping up in unexpected places like their bedroom or bathroom. Originally the main character was a woman, but eventually this changed to a male character.
We worked with a really limited colour palette, using red, black and whites. We wanted to keep that 1950’s structure. We animated the characters as silhouettes, we didn’t want them to have specific faces or personalities. They stayed as Mr Nobody, Mr Anybody.
Our next challenge was typography. The programme had been shot, but there was no design for a typeface. We wanted the type to be an integral part of the title, so in a way we worked backwards, designing a new typeface for the project, which we then made the characters fit in, almost like a stonehenge effect, with the audience moving around the typeface.
We also had to make a cut down version, it was quite difficult to get this down to a 10 second version, as we’d designed it for 20 seconds. This was a challenge, as we wanted the story to still work with 4 shots. In the end it worked very well, and looked great in HD on TV.
The limited colours work really well, and it’s a strong piece of work, done over 10 days.
Stop Motion film for Lloydstsb bank,we created this using cut out animation, it was all laser cut from 2d animation files and re shot in a set. The lighting was a low key moody look and the whole feel of the piece was of paper and hand crafted in style. The whole piece was shot in camera with only minimal post work.
