The Old Duke Jazz Festival

You’ve gotta love the Old Duke pub on King Street, finest purveyors of squeaky Jazz and Blues Noodlings. Every year they put on a free outdoor jazz festival over the last Summer bank holiday weekend, and it rocks! Last years highlights were ukulele maestro’s the Rinky Dinks and the amazing One man blues machine and Old Duke Sunday resident Eddie Martin and the Little Big Horns. There was even a cameo from DJ Derek singing with Eddie, nice.

Mr Wolf's

I can hand on heart say I witnessed something I’ve never seen before at a Jazz Festival. During Eddie Martin’s encore track there was a spontaneous mosh pit. The middle of the crowd opened and the people inside went mosh-mental! If it was a punk, metal or hardcore fest I could understand it… but the blues? nice.

The Human Centipede – My Story

Having been a bit of a horror fan when I was growing up, when you see a movie advertised with claims of “most horrific film ever made“, “the ultimate video nasty“, “so gross you’ll spoon out your eyeballs and feed them to the neighbours cat” (OK, I made the last one up…) you can’t help but take notice!

The Human Centipede, Dave C Style!

Being a lover of noodling on the Twitter-pipes, I noticed that Bristol’s Watershed cinema (twitter.com/wshed tweet: @wshed) ace purveyors of art house films (and from time to time, vile degrading filth) were showing The Human Centipede. On a whim I took it upon myself to draw this silly little picture and tweeted it at them. Turns out this little sketch went down so well in their office, they used it as part of their promo materials in their display cases and offered me 2 free tickets! Thanks Watershed :D (more on the significance of these x2 tix to follow…!)

With Pete Jackson’s seminal zombie splatterfest ‘Braindead‘ having long been my favourite film, which incidentally just like Tom Six‘s ‘Human Centipede’ got past the censors without a single cut, how could I possibly resist? I’ll watch it so you don’t have to! Read on to find out what happened…

Fishboyfilms Showreel 2008

This is the last professional animation showreel that I put together before starting EvansFinch Ltd in Summer 2008. I got sick of seeing so many dull showreels that I thought I’d try and do something a little bit different – a concept showreel if you will! :D I took AC/DC’s Rock classic ‘Back in Black‘, edited it to 1 min 30 secs and went to town!

I re-branded my freelance animation business as ‘Fishboyfilms‘ after the leaving the kids animation industry in 2007 to move away from traditional Broadcast media into the online world… and the rest is history! :D

Mouks_REMIXED

This is still probably my favourite independant film I’ve produced to date. It was created in 2 weeks flat from artwork that took me 5 years to make! I’m a big lover of video mashup culture and this is my homage to the likes of Hexstatic, Coldcut and all those cut-up artists out there keeping the freak flag flying…

The soundtrack is a white label bootleg called ‘In and Outta Space’ – No clue who its by but its a breaks mix of Prodigy’s ‘Outta Space‘ that samples the legendary reggae cut ‘Chase the Devil‘ by Max Romeo. Incidentally its from a 70 minute party breaks mashup mix called the ‘Mouk Town Mashup‘ I created under my DJ/Producer pseudonym ‘DJ Cropmaster Flex’

‘Mouks’ – The Money Shot!

Everyone has a labour of love in their life – this was mine! 5 years in the making (!) and weighing in at a girthy 3 whole minutes. Created in my spare time to keep me sane from animating teddy bears waving day-in-day-out in my day job! This really is what years of working in the kids animation industry does to someone. Officially deemed ‘too strong for Aardman‘ – not sure what to make of that little claim to fame… enjoy (I did!)

It was fully animated from start to finish in Traditional 2D, then scanned and traced in Adobe Flash. It is what it is, but I can’t tell you how much this stupid little film means to me. The SFX and music was a joint effort from Darren Lambourne (who came up with the gruesome baby noises and visceral crunches) and Robin Stout who dragged it up from the gutter!

Dennis meets Christopher Kennedy Lawford!

As part of the WHAD (World Hepatitis Awareness Day) 2007 Campaign for Rubberductions I also created this 30 second sting. Again featuring our hapless hero Dennis, this time meeting Christopher Kennedy Lawford – John F Kennedy’s nephew (!), who is a Hep C sufferer himself:

Again, I had lots of fun making this spot. It was a very quick turn around, created in under 5 days using Adobe Flash. I really enjoyed hooking up the 2D animation/Live action mix, and the SFX supplied by Robin Stout at Medinasound (who also created the SFX and Music for ‘Mouks’) rounds it off a treat. Short and sweet!

Trying to Catch Hepatitis C?

Told you I wasn’t a single issue guy! Lets talk about Animation! :D

I’ve spent most of my professional career as a professional 2D animator – both traditional 2D and digital 2D. I come from a background of pegbars, lightboxes, rostrum cameras, inking, cel paints, 16mm film, Steenbecks, studio lights and dope sheets. Over the years I’ve learned to love Adobe Flash and consider it ‘my backyard’ – its allowed me to create high quality quick turnaround content, like this:

Meet ‘Dennis’ – he’s trying to catch Hepatitis C! I designed, storyboarded and animated this spot for Rubberductions in 2007 using Adobe Flash. I really loved this job, it was the first project that I managed to get off the back of my independant film ‘Mouks’. Everyone from the agency right the way through to the Hep C sufferers who saw the film loved it! Big piles of win all round :D

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