A quick follow up to the previous video I think it was where I mentioned choosing animation over live action. While I don’t have the budget of Disney and I do know that animation tends to be a lot more expensive to do than live action.

There’s another reason why I didn’t just get carried away because I was amongst so many fantastic animators and visual effects people. A little bit of personal history. In the late 90s when I was doing my Open University degree I took a module in CAD and computer animation, computer design, computer modeling or whatever, graphics modeling.

Because I had an interest and I’ve been doing CAD and graphic design, technical drawing, sketching, drafting because of my engineering background. So I thought I’d love to do that. And at the same time this wonderful new thing that come out called POVRay, Persistence of Vision is a ray tracer. It’s the old school constructive solid geometry building blocks that comes up with a fantastic, real, very realistic image. And I love that and I did explore that.

Now back when I remember this is late 90s the tech was a bit slow. I then decided to go a bit further and actually produce some moving images. So I wrote a lot of C programs to move the camera around and eventually I mean a long time of processing afterwards I’d have hundreds of frames that I could stitch together and create an animated film of a 3D environment which was cool.

The same time as that I was also getting into painting and I had some success there with exhibitions and selling my artwork and yeah, I’m a creative kind of guy. All on a few years back into the early 2000s and the wonderful product that we all know and love as Blender was created. It’s that old. And this revolutionized some of the animation process with a massive learning curve of course which I thought was worth it.

So I created a few still scenes in Blender then managed to create the animation sequences. Obviously we’re then into the time of the talent of Pentium 4’s and Core Duo so still a lot of processing and a more complex environment.

I built leftover machines from the office, well a company where I worked at I was sort of management, IT management, so I claimed some of the machines after a PC refresh and built a OpenMOSIX cluster as my rendering farm. Had about half a dozen, the small room became very toasty I have to say when there was an animation was being rendered and that allowed me to produce a few animations and I really enjoyed this.

Then the kids came along, I lost my studio and the render farm for their bedrooms and put it all to one side 20 odd years later I have rediscovered the love of animation again. The kids like watching animation and to be honest I do too. It’s so much fun. And obviously Crash [festival] changed my opinion that it is within the realms of possibility so I picked up some software, OpenToonz and started to give it a go.

I’ll talk more into this process a bit later but I just wanted to say the animation choice or the choice to do animation wasn’t just on the spur of the moment like doing a live action film was because that was there is history behind making this decision and yeah I thought I’d just clear that bit up because you know some people think the ambition could be heading for disaster so this sort of soothes the possibility that this could be viable.

Anyway catch you all later. Bye.