20 June 2013

New Showreel

This week I've had a little break from Bristol to come to stay at my parents house up north. I've spent most of my time hanging out with this little dude:


But I've also had some time to work on getting myself a career and have found a 3 month Certificate in Character Animation course at Aardman Studios through the NFTS which sounds like my idea of heaven and would be an amazing opportunity to improve my technical ability. I've been working on my application and today I finished my showreel which can be viewed here:


I would love to specialise purely in stop motion animation, but after exporting my showreel I realised I definitely haven't had enough practise, which is why I believe the course will do me the world of good. During university, the first year and a half was dedicated to character performance in hand drawn animation, which was great for learning movement, timing, squash and stretch, but my characters would always unintentionally morph and I would get bogged down trying to keep the shape, loosing the fun of the animation itself. In my second year, we had 5 weeks of stop motion practise with Rhodri Lovett and I found it so refreshing just focusing on movement and found the art of lip syncing especially captivating so from there have been working predominantly in stop motion.

Eeeep!! I hope I'm accepted onto the course so I can get animating again. I'm so excited I cannot even possibly begin to imagine how amazing this would be!

17 June 2013

Three quick doodles:



Follow me on Instagram: @jeswaino

18 April 2013

Last night I went along to the Show Me The Animation, Animation Night with Peter Lord at The Cube Cinema. It was a 'behind the scenes' type presentation (always hugely fascinating) of Aardman's latest feature film, The Pirates, in which Pete discussed everything from the storytelling, script writing, character making, set designing, animating and CGI-ing.

Peter Lord explaining the mechanisms in Captain Pirate
Four out of hundreds of Captain Pirate's mouth shapes
Whilst there, I bumped into Joseph Wallace, who graduated from Newport the year after me, and we had a good old catch up. I have been waiting a year and a half to see Joe's graduation film, The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling and he finally released it online a few days ago. I always enjoy obviously handmade aesthetics and I come away from this film with a completely non-obtrusive, feel good interpretation.

Joe Wallace // Peter Lord
These kind of events always give me a good shake up and I come away buzzing and itching to animate. It's also a really easy way to meet other animators, swap stories and contact cards. I feel well an truly feel out of the loop right now, so I will be keeping an eager eye out for future events.

Dan Emmerson // Ben Mitchell // Joseph Wallace // Kat Michaelides




15 October 2012

As annoying as it is to find Christmas stuff in shops before Halloween, if you're looking for a unique, personal and lovely gift for someone for the festive period, please check out the sewing side of my creative abilities here.

springjingle@rocketmail.com   //   www.springjinglecrafts.blogspot.com

springjingle@rocketmail.com   //   www.springjinglecrafts.blogspot.com

springjingle@rocketmail.com   //   www.springjinglecrafts.blogspot.com

springjingle@rocketmail.com   //   www.springjinglecrafts.blogspot.com

springjingle@rocketmail.com   //   www.springjinglecrafts.blogspot.com

springjingle@rocketmail.com   //   www.springjinglecrafts.blogspot.com

springjingle@rocketmail.com   //   www.springjinglecrafts.blogspot.com

06 August 2012


Last weekend I took a trip to Bristol and whilst there, visited the museum with my sketch book to draw some taxidermy. It feels like I hardly every draw since leaving uni so it was lovely to just sit in the quiet and put pencil to paper. These are some of my favourites:
Ocellated Turkey (Meleagris ocellata)  //  Swinhoe's Pheasent (Lophura swinhoii)  //  American Darter (Anhinga anhinga)


Domestic Fowl (Gallus gallus)  //  Golden Pheasant (Chrysolophus pictus)

Indian Peacock (Pavo cristatus)

11 May 2012

I finished the wall mural!

It was actually finished about a month ago, but I'm not too confident about mixing indoor lighting with photography so it took me ages getting round to taking photos. Apologies to anyone who may have been sitting on the edge of their seats waiting to see the finished product, but here it is!

Right wall (please excuse my cheeky little nephew!)
 
 
 


Back wall



Left wall
Mr. Eel is definitely my favourite

Although I didn't see the school children's reactions, my nephew, Jack's, pointing and 'oooh'ing and fish impressions were good enough for me!

I've really enjoyed painting on such a big scale and, hopefully, I'll get the chance to do it again one day. As I completed more and more of the mural I became a lot more confident with size, spacing and the actual painting of each character. I'm much happier with the left wall and did a lot more free hand drawing rather than using the projector as I had done on the right wall and I can definitely see the progression and improvement from when I first started back in October.

Anyway, let me know what you think!

01 April 2012

 It's been a long time since I posted any photos of the wall mural I've been doing for my old primary school. Progress has been really slow as I could only sneak a few hours here and there, then I was working and now I'm not so today, I've spent a good solid 5 hours painting.

I'm hoping it will be finished before the Easter Holidays are over. All that's left is to find something to fill one last void and to paint detail on the right hand wall and on the jellyfish.

Anyway, I will stop babbling, here are some photos: