Giles Timms’ Blog

The above is a still from one of the animated sequences I illustrated and animated for Jeffrey Blitz’s new documentary, Lucky. Lucky premiered at Sundance 2010. I was fortunate to work again as an animator and illustrator with Bill Barminski from Walter Robot on this production and it was also great working with Jeffrey Blitz. I found Jeffrey to be a very intelligent and challenging director. The sequences were animated in After Effects, with the illustrations drawn and colored/textured in photoshop.

The reviews of Lucky have been positive and it seems people also liked the animated sequences, as this review from Scott Weinberg testifies “with nifty animated interstitials full of interesting jackpot stats.” You can read Scott’s full review here:

http://www.cinematical.com/2010/01/27/sundance-review-lucky/

I’m excited to see the full film. Please leave a comment if you’ve seen the film and let me know what you thought, thanks.

Another cool shout-out for my animated music video, ‘Dead All Along’ and work in general. I was featured as “an emerging filmmaker to watch” as part of Film News Briefs November Filmmakers to Watch newsletter. The archive of the newsletter is here: Film News Briefs: November Filmmakers to Watch

Big thanks to Jessica Kantor :)

I was really excited and honored to be the Featured Graduate Student Accomplishment in the UCLA Graduate Quarterly. My work on my animated music video, ‘Dead All Along,’ was the featured accomplishment in the Fall 2009 Issue, Volume 19, Number 1. You can download a pdf copy of the issue here: UCLA Graduate Quarterly, fall 2009

Many, many thanks to Mary Watkins at UCLA :)

My animated music video, ‘Dead All Along’, performed by Ceri Frost, is featured this week on Channel Frederator on their Frederator Show along with an interview on the Frederator Blog.

Channel Frederator YouTube Feature: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiLMnSFHY0k
Channel Frederator Show Feature: http://www.channelfrederator.com/frederator/episode/CFR_20091110
Frederator Blog Interview: http://frederatorblogs.com/channel_frederator/2009/11/12/giles-timms-dead-all-along/

Channel Frederator is the ‘cartoon central on the internet and features original cartoons.’

Thanks ever so much to Bailee DesRocher and Bobby Miller :)

This is the animated video I completed for the UCLA Anderson School of Management for their home page video and call to action campaign. It’s an animated video of Max Ohlendorf’s original audio application for the MBA program at UCLA. The production company was Fraser Communications.

Hand drawn, Photoshop and TVPaint elements with compositing and animation in After Effects.

Manifestations, my animated short film, is an official selection of the Rockport Film Festival. The RFF looks like an awesome fest – would love to visit Texas for this one (have never been to Texas). Below is the screening information.

When: Sat, Nov 7th at 7:30pm
Where: Main Street Arts, 902 E Main, Rockport, Texas 78382
Film Link: Manifestations, Rockport Film Festival, 2009

Big thanks to John Aasp and the rest of the Rockport Film Festival crew :)

Manifestations was made at the UCLA School of Theater Film and Television

‘Manifestations – An Animated Tale of Love’ is screening at The Other Venice Film festival, here in Los Angeles, Oct 15-18th.

When: Sunday, October 18th in the 2:30pm to 4pm, ‘Abra-Cadavers’ Shorts Block #3
Where: Beyond Baroque Theater, 681 Venice Blvd Venice, CA 90291

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This should be a great fest and I’m really excited as ‘Manifestations’ is playing in the ‘Abra-Cadavers’ Shorts Block #3 which features Tim Burton’s, ‘Vincent’ short.

Music by Ceri Frost
Manifestations was made at the UCLA School of Theater Film and Television

‘Dead All Along,’ my animated music video, is also featured on Boing Boing:
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/07/dead-all-along-gorey.html

Big thank you to Xeni and David and the rest of the crew at Boing Boing!

Performed by Ceri Frost

I thought I’d explain the design process for my characters from my animated music video, ‘Dead All Along.’

In the image above you can see the original character design drawing, top left. All the characters for ‘Dead All Along’ started on paper, first as blue pencil drawings, then as pen and ink. I scanned the drawing into photoshop and tweaked the levels so that I the texture of the paper is visible – I really wanted to make the ‘Dead All Along’ world seem as if it was a paper world, almost as though an Edward Gorey inspired book had come to life.

Once in Photoshop, I ‘cut out’ each part of the character so that it can be animated in a cut-out animation style within After Effects. This character didn’t have to animate too much so it only has 9 separate bits, including 2 heads for the blink (eye open, eye closed). You can see the separate body bits in the bottom right of the above image. I cut and separate the body bits using the polygonal lasso tool in Photoshop creating a loose outline of the body part.

For coloring, I like to color in Photoshop. I use Photoshop because I can easily combine textures with the original character drawing and also because I like to be able to experiment with color ideas. I typically use textures in my coloring process and the characters for ‘Dead All Along’ were also colored with a lot of textures. I keep a texture library of textures on my computer that are scans and photographs of textures, patterns etc. One of my favorite set of textures is a book of origami paper that I scanned in – I used several of these origami papers to color and texture the characters in ‘Dead All Along.’ I’m also fond of the Maxon collection of comic patterns, and I have several of these scanned that I use. Below you can see a screen-shot of my texture library (top), a screen-shot of the textures and layers of the coloring process in Photoshop (middle), and a sample of the texture palette I used for the bird (and yes, that is a wallpaper pattern from the 1970’s :)

My latest project, an animated music video, ‘Dead All Along’ is also featured as a Motionographer.com Quickie:
http://motionographer.com/2009/09/28/dead-all-along-a-gorey-esque-short-film-by-giles-timms/

Motionographer.com features motion graphic, film and animation work from studios, freelancers and students.

Big thank you to Motionographer.com!