Teaching at AUCB and City and Guilds

I had the chance to do some more teaching this year back at City and Guilds of London Art School, with their Foundation students. I first taught them for a week in September 2011, introducing all the new students in their first week of college to different drawing exercises. We mainly worked on line and movement, while their other teachers concentrated on shading and structure.

I went back to teach the Design group twice in December 2011 and January 2012. It was a great pleasure seeing them again but also seeing their progress and their drawing evolving into their personal styles. We worked with wonderful models Zoe and Lydia, to create compositions around the themes of nature and childhood. The students were asked to bring props and to decorate the models and the environment that they then had to draw. We had 4 fun days of tea cups, high heels, balloons, skulls, roses, lacy dresses, cupcakes, bicycles, and The Cure.

In February i was invited to The Arts University College in Bournemouth, to give a presentation of my work to the students, teach them life drawing and give them tutorials with their final year BA and MA projects. I was so pleased to meet such an enthusiastic group of students, who are producing very professional and organized work. Their show is on Friday morning at the Bfi in Southbank, and i can't wait to see it!

Here are some pictures from the life room at City and Guilds. Thank you girls for such a wonderful class!

 

Crane TV feature

Last year, we were asked by Crane TV if we would like to make a little film as Moth Collective to feature on their website this February. Dan, Dave and I drove down to Dungeness with the lovely crew of Crane Tv, and had a beautiful and creative day out, taking pictures, filming, and doing some stop frame animation. The day ended with a well deserved fish and chips dish, and a short stop in Rye, where we met our good old friend Silas! The final piece is a live action documentary about our collective, however we added some animation in some of the shots. I animated some creatures coming out of some abandoned buckets we found on the seaside...

Worldwider Art Project

A few months ago i took part in the Worldwider Art Project, a project set up by my dear friend Sean Davies. Worldwider is a network of collaborative art projects between artists from all over the world, that hopes to explore different cultures, views and opinions through various forms of art, and to break down barriers such as distance and language. I was sent a sketchbook, where every page was illustrated by a different artist and where i had to continue the story they had created. Here is a link to their website, and the illustration I made for them. http://www.worldwiderart.com/ 

Bolivian Instruments

I was asked to make some drawings of traditional Bolivian instruments, to accompany the text of a book written about Bolivia. Here are two of them that i liked the most.

TIQ London Animation

Earlier this year, i collaborated with my friends Sara Muzio and Daniela Negrin Ochoa on an animated promo for Lend Lease, promoting their new development, The International Quarter, in the London 2012 Olympic site. Dani and I worked on storyboarding, designing (characters and backgrounds), and animating the film, while Sara wrote the script and directed the project. Here is the final piece, some designs and a few pages of an early version of the storyboard.

 

 

Natural History Museum

 

I went back to the Natural History Museum a couple of weeks ago to do some drawing. Here are two crows from a series of three, arranged one underneath another, to show the evolution of the species depending on their geographical location.

Work at Studio Aka

I had the pleasure to be in Studio Aka from July till October, where i had the chance to assist Kristian Andrews and my dear friend David Prosser with projects they were directing. Firstly i worked with Kristian on The Meth Project films which you might have already come across this week as they were launched on their website. The Meth Project is an organization that concentrates on informational campaigns about crystal methamphetamine. The six short films produced by Studio Aka use real interviews and lovely animation to tell the tragic stories of previous meth addicts. I worked on 'Bernadette', 'Oriah' and 'Kara', doing hand drawn animation in Photoshop.



Director: KRISTIAN ANDREWS
Created For THE METH PROJECT
Agency: ORGANIC INC.
Produced by Studio AKA.
~
THE METH PROJECT (methproject.org) is a large-scale US prevention program aimed at reducing first-time Methamphetamine use, particularly among teenagers.



Director: KRISTIAN ANDREWS
Created For THE METH PROJECT
Agency: ORGANIC INC.
Produced by Studio AKA.
~
THE METH PROJECT (methproject.org) is a large-scale US prevention program aimed at reducing first-time Methamphetamine use, particularly among teenagers.



Director: KRISTIAN ANDREWS
Created For THE METH PROJECT
Agency: ORGANIC INC.
Produced by Studio AKA.
~
THE METH PROJECT (methproject.org) is a large-scale US prevention program aimed at reducing first-time Methamphetamine use, particularly among teenagers.

After my work on these three short films, i started helping out Dave with hand drawn Photoshop animation for a Statoil advert. Although the animation is all done in 3D, Dave wanted some 2D elements in it, which would connect the 3D to his initial drawings for the pitch. I worked on two fish sequences, one which appears on 00'27'' and the other one on 00'33''. I also painted them and artworked on top of the 3D characters to give them a more hand drawn look!

A stunning 60 second spot, Directed by Studio AKA's David Prosser for the Norwegian oil and gas company Statoil. Commissioned by McCann Oslo, the piece is a magical combination of 3d animation with traditional 2d line work and beautifully artworked elements.

Set to music composed by Johann Johansson (of VARMINTS fame), the piece is set in a girl’s bedroom at storytime. As the father tells his story, his daughter starts her fantasy adventure on a journey through an animated underwater world to find treasure. The story ends back in her bedroom as the father says good night.

Client: Statoil
Agency: McCann Oslo
Director & Designer: David Prosser
Sound Design: David Kamp
Live action company – Trobbel Film
Music composer: Johann Johansson
Produced by Studio aka

Strawbale animation

I just finished working on a lovely project with my dear friends Sara Muzio and Daniela Negrin Ochoa! The film, commissioned by MAKE architects and the University of Nottingham, is a short informational film about modern straw buildings. After Sara wrote the lovely script, she contacted me and Dani to create the animation for the piece. Although we had a tight schedule, we very much enjoyed working on something so different to our personal work, but mainly working together again, after a two year brake since we both left Kingston University to go to our MA courses.

An old pitch!

I have been quite bad with posting work on this blog since this summer, but i am convinced to catch up this week! Here is an old pitch style frame from July that i just remembered of!

Business+Strategy

This is an Illustration i made for the Business+Strategy magazine in the US in May, based on an article about Transformational Trends. The article talked about the 10 broad global waves which will shape the business world in the next 15 to 20 years and how these affect and interact with each other.  I never got to finish the illustration, as the article didn't get published in the magazine in the end, but i enjoyed the project as i learned a lot about business that I previously had no idea about...!

'My Mother's Coat' goes online!

...and is kindly received well by various websites. I was happy to see it in Motionographer on Friday, as well as Cartoon Brew and Short of the Week.

 

 

Night Thoughts

I just finished working on this short piece, based on the short story 'Night Thoughts' by Helen Simpson, for the new issue of Granta Magazine. The story is about a man who cannot sleep at night, as he is being tortured by all the thoughts about his marriage.




Design and direction: Marie-Margaux Tsakiri-Scanatovits
Animation: Soyoung Hyun
Commissioned by: Michael Salu at Granta magazine.

Comment by Natalie Wilson on Ms.Blog magazine:

Greek-Italian filmmaker Marie-Margaux Tsakiri-Scanatovits puts us inside the mind of the male narrator, showing how he feels his wife Ella crushes his heart in her hand while stabbing him in the back. Yet he still longs for connection with her, imagining her naked body one minute and being reminded of her constant badgering of him the next. These “night thoughts,” both in the story and in the animated short, offer an illuminating reversal of life as we know it, suggesting that “matriarchy” would be no better than “patriarchy”–that a binary reversal is not what we should be seeking, but rather an explosion of the night/day, male/female system altogether.

 

 

 

 

It's Nice That @ Pick me Up!

I was drawing as part of It's Nice That collective last month, in a beautiful exhibition called Pick Me Up at Somerset House. I spent two days drawing alongside lovely illustrators, like Ian Wright and James Graham and produced some line drawings based on skype conversations and some colourful collages based on synchronized swimming. The drawings that weren't sold got offered at Egaku exhibition in Jaguar Shoes, the following weekend, which got set up as a fundraiser for the Japan earthquakes.

Wagon Christ music video

I recently assisted Celyn Brazier with colouring and some animation for his new beautiful music video for Wagon Christ, in Nexus Productions. Here you can see the full music video.

'My Mother's Coat' wins in Estonia!

My film 'My Mother's Coat' won the 'best film' award from the Estonian Academy of Arts animation students' jury in Animated Dreams festival in Tallinn! Part of the Black Nights Film festival, Animated Dreams celebrated their 12th year in the festival. You can see the full list of winners in this page:
http://anima.poff.ee/eng/Animated-dreams

Seeking Asylum

These are some drawings i produced towards a pitch for an animated documentary about asylum seekers.

Jöns and the Spider

My new film is finally finished! A short film about a boy and a spider, whose friendship develops around the making of violins.

Co-directed with Soyoung Hyun
Sound design by Tom Lowe
Royal College of Art 2010

Second Skin

Double spread for Slashstroke magazine.
http://www.slashstrokemagazine.com/