While I’m on the subject of influences, anyone lucky enough to have experienced my amazing powerpoint slide show may be familiar with this Venn Diagram of where I get my crazy ideas from:
For a more in-depth exploration of my psyche here is a playlist of all my youtube favourites:
By the way, if you see any of my own videos on that list, its just my way of bookmarking things of mine that are on other people’s channels. I’m not that vain, honest!
I was doing a talk recently for Confetti Industry Week in Nottingham, and one of the questions I was asked was about my animation influences. I grew up at a time when kids animation was weird, and grown ups animation was even weirder.
Children’s tv shows like Ivor the Engine, Bagpuss, Magic Roundabout and Chorlton and the Wheelies all had vaguely nightmarish qualities, and if you stayed up late you might have been lucky enough to catch some surreal arty animations on BBC2 or Channel 4 that were seemingly sneaked into the schedules to fill a gap that no one else wanted.
So, because this is a question I am often asked I decided to make a youtube playlist of some of the few that I could remember. There are many more that I can’t, but hopefully this will give some kind of insight into the development of my style, and if I do remember any more I will try to add them to the list.
I made a couple of title sequences recently so thought it would be a good idea to mention it, and then I remembered a couple of other titles I made over the years, so here is a title sequence bonanza.
This was a four part comedy drama for E4, involving misadventures in parallel realities. They gave me a bunch of footage to work with and this is what emerged.
A Netflix comedy show from Bob Odenkirk and David Cross. Unusually they asked me to make the music for this as well.
This the UK version of the show, made for BBC3 back in 2012. The show is about making people do silly things, hence the puppet theme in the titles.
Dave Gorman’s BBC2 show, I made these titles in 2009. The show was about thinking up of unusual ideas to make the world more interesting.
I decided my site needed a complete update, what with people looking at the internet on their phones now. I also wanted to strip out all the old crap and keep it fairly simple, but I will keep the old version online in case anyone is linking to old pages or whatever.
I never really bothered updating my site much, since everything I make goes on youtube, and everything I say goes on twitter, but I figured if I had a blog that isn’t specifically for my videos then I can use it for other interesting stuff, and maybe it will encourage me to keep updating it.
Maybe..