Giles Timms’ Blog

I created several of the animated sequences for ‘Lucky,’ a documentary that aired on HBO last month.
The documentary, by Jeffrey Blitz, aired on July 19th as part of HBO’s summer of documentaries. ‘Lucky’ focuses on “chronicling the many, and often sobering, effects winning a big jackpot can have on a person” (Television review: ‘Lucky’ on HBO by the Los Angeles Times).

The above character design is Miss Lotto. She was one of the characters that never made it into the final cut. Miss Lotto is a very simple cut-out character composited and animated in After Effects. Miss Lotto was drawn in Photoshop with a Wacom, lightly textured in Photoshop, cut out and then all her girly bits were imported into After Effects.

Lucky premiered at Sundance 2010.

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.