My name is Paul Greer I work at BDH Design and Direction in Bristol making computer animation for the television and other formats. I live in the West of England. I am married with three children.
In my spare time (distant laughter) I draw, write and play with animation.
I started this blog nearly ten years ago as a mixture of a scrapbook of internet things, a log of my professional work, and an archive of my more personal art and drawings.
My main interests are animation and investigating different ways of telling stories with pictures. I also like to post about music, tech, film, friends, politics and comics.
This is a very exciting time with regards to story telling and the ways those stories are disseminated so I would like to connect with people who have a similar interest in radiant experiments with media, and who might like share what we can offer to that project.
As well as this I would like to use this blog as a research station and personal feedback loop to reinforce and encourage my creative life, hopefully providing a resource and point of encouragement to readers as well.
Here is a gallery of the some of work I have been part of or have been fortunate enough to make myself.
“They said in the Eighties that painting was dead, well, painting hadn’t even started. It was such a narrow minded period of time, the conceptualists really tried to get rid of painting completely.
In other words what my generation does I would like to see another younger generation come and step on that and make that one step further into wild abstraction, to compound the poetry, make it lyrically remarkable.”
“Whenever I’ve had to write prose I always find writing the description is really frustrating, because I think I could just draw this. And also there’s always so much more content to a drawing than to a prose description. I feel like there’s always so much more to be done with that. Plus when you’re writing prose you’re competing against Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and it’s very difficult to do anything that would be ultimately satisfying in terms of really differentiating yourself. At best I could write a halfway decent novel. That’s all I could ever hope for and that would be quite an accomplishment.”
“It sometimes seems like that’s the overriding trend in comics right now, beautiful drawings and empty stories.
I can’t tell if that’s just the result of a generation of kids who are raised with this different form of receiving media. Is it that or is it just that they’re coming out of the art world more than they used to? I don’t know, but there is something very strange about that. It doesn’t seem to be attracting people who just want to create stories and aren’t that visually oriented. You would sort of think that would be a part of the comics world that was opening up. At least I haven’t really seen that. Or they could just be doing stories I’m not very interested in.”
Two things coming up recently regarding powerful rich “artists” making kudos and money from the hard work of whom they can only consider to be lesser mortals.
First you should know that Richard Prince has been “re-photographing” since the 1970s. He takes pictures of photos in magazines, advertisements, books or actors’ headshots, then alters them to varying degrees. Often, they look nearly identical to the originals. This has of course, led to legal trouble. In 2008, French photographer Patrick Cariou sued Prince aft..er he re-photographed Cariou’s images of Jamaica’s Rastafarian community. Although Cariou won at first, on appeal, the court ruled that Prince had not committed copyright infringement because his works were “transformative.”
“Speaking of grudges: Have you forgiven Shia LaBeouf?”
“I don’t know. No, not really. I mean, I don’t hold a grudge. I don’t think about it that much. But I don’t think what he did was really forgivable. I don’t know that it matters that much if he’s apologizing or whatever. I just hate the idea of anybody doing that to some young artist who couldn’t hire legal representation. I’m sort of the one guy who could deal with something like that, and it would be really possible for somebody with his amount of money and power to just crush some poor young artist if that happened to them, and I would hate to see that. So I don’t think it’s something that needs to be forgiven; I think it’s something that always needs to be thought of as just a horrible thing to do.”
Difficult for me to comment on this without falling into ranting, which is how I am supposed to react.
Let’s cleanse ourselves by reading about the true artists who Lichenstein “homaged”, in Deconstructing Lichtenstein.
Finally an article addressing a parallel issue of the popular misconceptions around the creation of CGI for big budget features:
As the debate surrounding what visual effects are worth rages on, it is clear that the studios themselves have an interest in perpetuating the myth that VFX are the product of clinical assembly lines and the results are equally lifeless and mechanical. Blaming computers for the dumbing down of movies has become a journalistic trope that is bandied about to squeeze the one part of the Hollywood machine that has no union or organizational skill to push back.
“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.
Patreon is the new kid on the block; not quite up to scratch as of yet, but full of possibilities. Search “comics” to find a number of creators using it to draw a page rate from their fanbase.
“I hope someone finds this helpful. I may put a print-rez PDF up for sale, if any interest is expressed.
“We are very saddened to hear of the death of artist Brett Ewins.
“Throughout his years of working for 2000 AD, Brett was responsible for some truly unmissable art – from Judge Dredd and Anderson Psi Division to Rogue Trooper and his incredible work on Bad Company with Peter Milligan and Jim McCarthy.
“He was also a hugely influential figure in British comics thanks to his founding of Deadline with Steve Dillon in 1988, something that changed the face of the industry forever.
“Our thoughts and deepest condolences are with Brett’s family and friends.”
Brett’s work had a huge influence on me in the way I saw comic story telling. I actually wrote an essay on this very issue containing ‘The Haunting of Sector House 9’ when I was studying.
Ah, January, with your sobriety and need for useful activity. I suppose we better do you.
I have a list of overlong posts to make, I got backed up a little with various things happening towards the end of the year, I’ll make it easy for myself by starting with a Round Up Of Things type post.
WolfandFox posted this clip from Judex. We got shown this film at art college and it had a profound effect on me. This sequence stood apart somewhat, it’s like film from another planet, doesn’t try to explain itself too much. I like that.
This clip from Paul Mason, an off the cuff rant on his frustration with another banking corruption story, from someone who follows world finance as closely as he does. It won’t stop happening, despite what they say.
I spent a bit of time in South Shields during November. It’s a lovely place.
Social media offer a single profile for our singular identity, but our consciousness comprises multiple forms of identity simultaneously: We are at once a unique bundle of sense impressions and memories, and a social individual imbued with a collectively constructed sense of value and possibility. Things like Facebook give the impression that these different, contestable and often contradictory identities (and their different contexts) can be conveniently flattened out, with users suddenly having more control and autonomy in their piloting through everyday life. That is not only what for-profit companies like Facebook want, but it is also what will feel natural to subjects already accustomed to capitalist values of convenience, capitalist imperatives for efficiency, and so on.
The magnificent Billie Whitelaw past away, Samuel Becket’s Perfect Actress. How can you not watch this and be transported to another place. (#FilmFromAnotherPlanet)
Bill Kartalopoulos wrote a great piece on why comics are more important now than ever, in which he refers to Professor Maryanne Wolf‘s idea of the bi-literate brain. It includes an interesting breakdown of this classic page by Windsor McCay.
via Huff Post
“Robert Frost famously described poetry as the thing that gets lost in translation. It’s not hard to imagine the story of Little Nemo’s galloping bed adapted into full blazing CGI, and certainly much would be added. Digital texture artists would show us what kind of wood Nemo’s bed is made from (oak? teak? cherry wood?); the wind would ruffle convincingly through Nemo’s hair as his face registered every gradation of delight and terror (the recent cgi Peanuts trailer suggests some possibilities). But what would be lost in this translation from one form to another would be the poetics of comics: the aesthetic experience of simultaneously experiencing a comic’s form and content so harmoniously that the contours of the comic’s theme can be read in its architectural blueprint.” (via)
Matt Fraction wrote this about why he is easing off Twitter. It’s a sobering read. Encourages me to want to post on here more.
I have been keeping a Winter 2014 playlist. It’s already quite long as I feel I have been catching up with autumn. (There’s a more comprehensive version on Whyd, but that doesn’t seem to embed here.)
All thru the gateway now, yes? Happy New Year, Planet Earth! Arbitrary time for restarts but goodness knows a few of us could do with one. x
Adam Curtis made this chilling short film for Charlie Brooker’s round up of last year. It definitely should’ve gone out instead of the Christmas speech.
Not sure how the embeds are coming across in different reading applications, but to be honest I don’t really have that many readers that it matters. If it does, and you’re missing stuff let me know.
Paul Greer 