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My name is Paul Greer, I work full time at BDH, making computer animation for the telly.
This is my main blog with news, work updates, new drawings, stories, comics, notebook pages, how tos, animations and link dumps. My more impulsive internet scrapbook is here.
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How we made the sound for “Toad”

Aside | | Paul Greer

I haven’t been well the last few days, mostly sleeping and dreaming.

One day I was remembering an old friend of ours, who still is very dear to us, but to whom we haven’t spoken for a long time.

Around the time we hung out, I was trying to make a film about a Toad that sat underneath a giant tap to keep itself alive.  I needed a soundtrack, so I stealthily rigged up the old Juno and programmed it up with a crazy organ noise. S’ was out at the previously mentioned friends house and came back in a rather chilled mood. Unprompted, she sat at the keyboard and straight out played this, I had the 4-track ready to go and caught it.

Many years later I finished the film, and here it is.

I watched it a few days ago and realised that behind the toad thing it’s a concealed love letter from us, to our dear friend.

This post is for her.

Animated Journal (Long Version)

Video | | Paul Greer

I’ve been keeping an Animated Journal over the last year.

I’ve always liked the picture a day format, video diaries etc, and animation is, traditionally a long drawn out, painful process, this is me trying to free it up and make it a bit more ephemeral.

Stan Brakhage said that he considered what he did to be his home movies and these follow a similar vein.

I generally capture whats going on around me and funnel it into 250 frames.

Art doesn’t have to be a career objective, or a total obsession, or something you make money from, or even something that other people will like.  It can be just something you make for yourself, in the cracks of your life, and if you put it up somewhere and other people connect with it, then that’s cool.

It’s made using a variety of software & techniques including Maya, flip book drawings, After Effects, old cameras, roll film, digital photography and so on.

Journal Whisper

Journal Light

Journal Rose

Animated Journal on Vimeo by Paul Greer

Still From Animated Journal No.4

Animomento No 3 270709

Still From Animomento No.1 030709

Still from Animated Journal

 

This is Huckleberry.

Image | | Paul Greer

…He was the “work dog” in that he was part owned by one of the bosses and spent time a lot of time at work wandering around the building.

I grew up with dogs but I wasn’t as close to him as a lot of people were, and over the ten years I knew him, we mostly kept a respectful distance.

One particular afternoon, I had had a few of bits of bad news one after the other and was struggling to keep it together, the people I would normally talk to either couldn’t to talk to me or were unavailable, so I sat in the corridor for a few minutes as I felt the world sliding away from me.

Huckleberry came into the corridor and stood looking at me for a few seconds, then after checking the coast was clear he came over and rested his chin on my knee.

Huckleberry passed away on Sunday, he was 13 years old, he had a very aggresive tumour and he died in his sleep on the operating table.

We all miss him very much.

(T)