28 February 1995

“Do very hard things, just for the sake of it.
(A way of doing something original is by trying something so painstaking that nobody else has ever bothered with it. […] Then the question arises in the mind: ‘Why are they going to all this trouble?’ I like this question. I like any question that makes you start thinking about the ‘outside’ of the experience – because it makes the experience bigger.)”

Brian Eno

The Crashing of Tides.

Copying the final few CGI render frames of a prehistorically massive project which has been keeping us extremely occupied for the last few months. I'm very tired and may spend some time sleeping very soon. https://instagram.com/p/2jOzTMHy-1/
Copying the final few CGI render frames of a prehistorically massive project which has been keeping us extremely occupied for the last few months. I’m very tired and may spend some time sleeping very soon. https://instagram.com/p/2jOzTMHy-1/

There is a interesting confluence that occurs in the brain when it’s been focused on a project so singularly and for such a long period of time, and then that project ends. After a space of quiet all the thoughts you didn’t have for the intervening months suddenly crash in from all angles. It’s a very fruitful and provides great perspective, but can be over very quickly.

I’ll will post something about the job in question when it gets released, but for now I would just say We had the good fortune to work with animator Rosie Ashforth who turned around several of the miracles we performed to get the job done on time.

So I’ve had a couple of days off to recover, and to remember what the outside looks like.

It looks like this:

outside time. https://instagram.com/p/2n1Cu5ny9w/
outside time. https://instagram.com/p/2n1Cu5ny9w/

There’s a lot of catching up to do here as I missed out so much time but that will come. As the country recovers from a pretty dark election result and a new compassion less Britain, and summer struggles to get itself into gear. But there’s no need to mourn.

Currently reading this book:

Look what I found. https://instagram.com/p/0oALE-Hy1C/
Look what I found. https://instagram.com/p/0oALE-Hy1C/

I’ll feedback on that in due course.

Some of the thought tsunami concerned comics, which is always troubling. I’m re-reading Ivan Brunetti’s Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice:

Useful tools:
Paper
Pen
Life
…all else is vanity.

So we’ll see how that plays out.

The animation world lost the marvellous David Anderson, his film Deadsy was very intrinsic to the way I think about animation in general.

Check it out.

This Is Everything I Know: A 24-Hour Comic About Comics. »

by spikedrewthis:


on comics

(read full version here)

“Hey, all. This is a comic I started on 24 Hour Comic Day, but I only managed to complete 12 pages on that day. That makes it a technical failure, but I decided it was worth finishing regardless of that.

“I sold copies at APE, but I didn’t anticipate the demand and ran out of them pretty quickly. So, I promised to re-post the mini on tumblr when i got home, and here it is.

“Some further reading, if this kinda thing is up your alley.

“I hope someone finds this helpful. I may put a print-rez PDF up for sale, if any interest is expressed.

Enjoy!”

 

Books are Sharks

“We were talking about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was something which resembled an iPad, long before it appeared. And I said when something like that happens, it’s going to be the death of the book. Douglas said, No it won’t be. Books are sharks.

And I must have looked baffled at that because he looked very pleased with himself. And he carried on with his metaphor. He said, Books are sharks … because sharks have been around for a very, very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs. And the reason sharks are still in the oceans is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark is.

He said, Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in them in microseconds. They’re really good at being books, he said, and books, no matter what else happens, will always survive. And of course he’s right.”

Neil Gaiman, giving the Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture 2015