MattJonezAnimation

Paris Exhibitions

2008-06-21T04:35:00.000-07:00

Before Annecy I caught 3 really good exhibitions in Paris;

The hot ticket in town right now must be the 'Hokusai' show at Musée Guimet. When I went it was packed & appeared to be most popular with ladies over 50-there were scores of them! I was jostled & bustled by stubborn old dears straining to see the Japanese Master's detailed work up close. Frustrated by French ladies who'd just met at the gallery to gossip while not really looking at the picture that they were standing right in front of. Then trapped in the hordes of menopausal tourists fawning over the postcards in the boutique!

I was gobsmacked by this drawing above. I've only ever seen Hokusai prints so it was quite something to see an original. Look at how he delineates the knee & the back of that leg with big juicy brush strokes & then delicate little lines to describe the back of the joint; the soft mass of hair against the empty expanse of the cranium; the facial features dashed in with sharp ticks; while the feet are portrayed with mere squiggles. The show is full of bravura draughtmanship like this . . . & old ladies. Who knew the 'old man mad about drawing' would prove so popular with the blue rinse brigade?!

I also went along to the impressive Cinémathèque Française to see the new exhibition on Mélies. It's a beautiful collection of ephemera relating to the great magician's life & screen work. Sketches, maquettes, cameras, costumes, diagrams, projections all help to recreate the magic that Mélies was famous for.

The museum has another floor dedicated to cinema history.
There's a nice collection of production drawings by Eisenstein. Apparently during the 60s there was an exhibition of hundreds of his drawings at the Cinémathèque-that would have been something to see. Perhaps there's a book or a catalogue out there?

Poster for Fritz Lang's M & below a design for his METROPOLIS

Lastly I caught the Kiraz show at the Musée Carnavalet in the Marais. It's a splendid location to honour one of France's most prolific & successful illustrators. It was a joy to be in a room completely surrounded by Kiraz paintings but it made me realise he's been depicting the same big eyed, long-legged Parisiennes for 40 years. It's the colour palettes he employs that capture my attention more than anything I think . . . and the gags are good too.

Annecy 2008

2008-06-16T05:35:00.000-07:00

Bibo & François made a presentation at Annecy as part of the 'films in production' forum. They showed lots of artwork & test footage & the reaction was very positive. I spoke with some who saw it & they seemed to really dig the style & concept. There's been a ton of gorgeous artwork generated for this project & I'd love to see it all compiled into an 'Art Of Monster' book nearer the films release. For now here's a better quality version of the poster that Seb, Aurelian & Carlos made for the Cannes Film Festival.

Had a blast at Annecy last weekend. It was a late decision for me to go this year as I didn't plan it & expected all the hotels to be booked up. But at the last moment I was lucky enough to find a central hotel with cancellations & bagged a room. I drove up from Nice on the Thursday & returned Sunday afternoon.

I hooked up with my old pals from Uli Meyer's studio in London. I hadn't seen Uli in a year-look how he's grown!

Out on the first evening I bumped into an old friend, Jakob Schuh, director of Studio Soi & teacher at FilmAkademie. We started sketching on themes of dinosaurs & French tarts! Uli carries a tool kit like Laurence Olivier in 'Marathon Man'!

The day after we caught a morning screening of Gabriele Zuchelli's fascinating documentary on animation pioneer Quirino Cristiani. The boys were feeling a little worse for wear.

I was educated & enlightened by the film- Cristiani created what is now considered to be the earliest feature length animated film in 1917. He worked with only Emile Cohl's primitive work as a precedent to learn from, inventing new techniques to realise his first satirical masterpiece 'El Apostol'.

Cristiani made his films for a mature audience,cartoons weren't for kids in those days. Animation was perceived as part of an evenings' entertainment & no cute talking animals appeared in Cristiani's films. His background in illustration & newspaper cartooning informed his film-making, they were satirical & political with a strong emphasis on caricature. One can't help but wonder what the situation would be today in feature animation if the medium had followed Cristiani's path & not Disney's?

Next day we went para-gliding where we chanced upon Cartoon Brew's Amid Amidi. He was just dropping in from NYC to research his new book 'A guide to what not to eat before jumping off a French mountain'. Animation doesn't get more rock & roll than this. I'm ashamed to admit though that when my pilot began some high speed sky acrobatics the extreme g-force made me scream like a little girl! See Uli's flight here.

Driving up on Thursday afternoon I missed the organised Sketchcrawl around Annecy. So, on the last day, we took things easy & made our own belated crawl around the old town. Paul, Jakob, Jean-Paul, Sean & I drew around the picturesque canal & the old town.

All the sketches from the official Sketchcrawl event organised by Bannister can be viewed here.

Here are mine:

The old prison is a sketchcrawl must.

Le Munich Restaurant where we met every evening before dinner.

Cannes Natives

2008-06-04T01:48:00.000-07:00

I've been working up drawings based on some of the characters I saw at the Cannes Film Festival.

6. 'The Wannabe'

This dame was dressed up to the nines hoping to be 'discovered' despite looking like an over the hill, transexual prostitute. Or perhaps 'she' was an over the hill, transexual prostitute?

5. 'The Mystic'

This fella was dressed like a Buddhist monk & hung around the Croisette sleeping rough at the foot of a palm tree. He was very tanned & very dirty. The first time I saw him he was carrying a stuffed panda & pontificating about Chinese politics.

4. 'The Usher'

Even the staff at the festival are movie fans. I drew this usher reading French Premiere as we waited in line for the Indiana Jones screening.

3. 'The Promo-Girl'

Dark Dog Energy Drink had hired a gaggle of promo-girls to totter around the Croisette in search of photo opportunities. They were soon mobbed by hordes of tourists & locals who swarmed around them to get a shot, like hyenas around a herd of gazelles!

2. 'The Geek'

Outside the Palais many people without a festival pass would wait with signs begging for a ticket for that nights premiere. This guy, obviously a fan of genre movies was looking for an invite for Indiana Jones.

1. 'The Bum'

Every morning I would find a parking spot at the far end of the Croisette near to Palm Beach. This old boy would be sitting close by in the same spot every day. He looked like the ghost of Orson Welles trapped in movie limbo. Somehow he had a different jacket & a different chair each time I saw him. He would hold court as other homeless, alcoholics & junkies gathered around him on the ground. He had swollen legs & red skin from sitting in the sun all day drinking.

Documentaries

2008-06-01T06:07:00.000-07:00

It seems we're in a golden age of the documenatry film with more than ever finding cinema distribution & winning major awards. In the previous post I mentioned two great documentaries I saw at the Cannes Film Festival -'No subtitles necessary: Laszlo & Vilmos' by James Chressanthis and James Toback's 'Tyson'.
There was a market screening of 'Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson' but I was unable to get in. I hope to catch it on DVD later in the year. You can see the trailer for the film here.

Another one that should be good is 'Trumbo', about the life of legendary Hollywood scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo. He was denounced as one of the 'Hollywood 10' in the late 40s & blacklisted until Kirk Douglas gave him screen credit for 'Spartacus' in 1960. Throughout his 'wilderness' years he continued to write under pseudonyms, even winning an Oscar that remains unclaimed. He fought the injustices against him through his writing & to retain his integrity.

One of the best documentaries I saw last year was 'King of Kong'-super nerds battle for the title of Donkey Kong World Champion. It's not as dull as you might imagine! It's masterfully edited & the battle of wills between the two main opponents is really entertaining.

I've posted my reviews of the all the films I saw at the Cannes film festivalhere & here you can see some of the various animated projects that were being promoted in the film market.

For a while now I've been on the lookout for Edie Ichioka's film on editing guru Walter Murch. It looks like a great complimentary project to Murch's excelent book 'In the Blink Of An Eye'. More info here:
http://www.studioichioka.com/

And the Palme d'Or goes to . . .

2008-05-25T07:36:00.001-07:00

. . . a bunch of French schoolkids! 'Entre les murs' is the first French film to win the top prize in 20 years & it was great to see the kids getting to be stars for a night. It was an appropriate choice for a subdued festival with most films in competition focused on social issues. My favourite films were two terrific documentaries-'Tyson' James Toback's portrait of the troubled boxer & 'No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo & Vilmos'-the riveting story of the great cinematographers Laszlo Kovacs & Vilmos Zsigmond who escaped the Russian invasion of Hungary & became the D.O.P.s of choice for the new Hollywood of the 60s & 70s.
But where is my prize for surviving Steven Soderbergh's 4 & half hour biopic of CHE?

It continued to rain all week. Sales in the film market were reportedly just as poor as the weather & most execs were packing up by Friday & heading home.

There was one sunny day on Thursday so I skipped a screening & spent the afternoon drawing on the 'festival only' beach behind the Palais.

The yachts that drop anchor in the bay & the port are unbelievable. Just as you think you've seen the biggest boat ever built an even more immense vessel sails into town! There was one bigger than the car ferries that go to Corsica-up on the poop deck there was a rock band performing on a concert stage.

The chap above was shooting my favourite film critic Mark Kermode reviewing movies on the beach.
The main hall of the Palais des Festivals.

Views from the café terrace.

The International All-Stars Pétanques Championship.

Some of the freaks,geeks & nutty folk who make the festival such fun.

Encore Cannes!

2008-05-20T13:01:00.001-07:00

Once the red carpet frenzy begins every evening it's impossible to get a glimpse of any celebs or film-makers; they're surrounded by a wall of photographers. Then behind them are a sea of tourists, curious locals & invitees struggling to get close to the Palais. It's a real circus & once everyone is up the famous steps the mob instantly disperses!

The daily VARIETY had a nice double page spread yesterday for 'A MONSTER IN PARIS'. The artwork was made here at the studio in Nice; layout by Seb, painted by Aurélien & Carlos.

I saw the hotly anticipated INDIANA JONES & THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL but I'm disappointed to report it doesn't warrant the buzz. After almost 20 years you would think they could come up with something better than quicksand, ants & waterfalls . . .and gophers! What's with the bloody gophers!
Sure these perilous obstacles (except the gophers) were staples of the classic serials that originally inspired the series. However even the pre-digital fx original films offered much more inventive cliffhangers & set-pieces. For all of Spielberg's insistence that digital fx were used sparingly 'SKULL' plays more like a film in the 'MUMMY' series with its nuclear explosion & ant-swarms, even those Indy influenced films restrained from cheap gags such as using a stretchy rubber snake as a rope! Skull is a parody of the Indy series- & not even a good one. The jokes aren't funny, the new characters are under-developed, there's no suspense. They should have made this 10 years ago when everyone involved still had some fire in them. Apparently Lucas stubbornly insisted on the 'skull civilisation' macguffin & rejected all other scenarios. I would love to read Frank Darabont's draft on which he worked for a year & was reportedly a cracker. The story Lucas preferred is more like one of those lightweight supernatural Indy novellas that have been published in the intervening years.
Even with his considerable cinematic genius Spielberg couldn't save this-it's arguably his worst film. Towards the finale someone laments 'so much of human life is lost in waiting' with which after 19 years, 2 hours in a queue & 2 hours viewing I regretfully agree.

After the turgid 4th Indy film creaking under the weight of it's overblown nonsensical script it was an utter relief to be blown away by Jean-Stephane Sauvaire's 'JOHNNY MAD DOG'. A 'platoon' of young soldier kids roam the Liberian countryside killing, raping & terrorizing villagers before besieging an un-named city. The brutality of their atrocities is outweighed by their apathy & callousness. Their adult general has brainwashed them to think of their guns as their parents & any sign of parental longing results in execution. They have been stripped of their childhoods & their humanity allowing them to act without empathy or guilt.
The camera-work is frenetic & intense, the soundtrack blisteringly loud, the young cast totally convincing. It will be hailed as this year's 'CITY OF GOD'.

More from the Croisette. . .

2008-05-17T00:22:00.001-07:00

Pleuvoir sur le croisette-quel horreur! It's umbrellas & plastic macs this weekend as the festival has been drenched & queuing in line ain't so pleasant. The cafés are more packed than usual so it's hard to find a spot to draw but I did this one from the ever popular Caffé Roma. Caught a couple movies yesterday-my reviews can be read on film critic Mark Salisbury's blog. Here's one animation related:

WALTZ WITH BASHIR

It's encouraging to see another mature themed animated project in competition after last years' PERSEPOLIS. Contrary to Marjan Satrapi's autobiographical memoir of being raised amid Middle Eastern conflict, it's an account of Ari Folman's quest to remember what happened to him during his days in the Israeli army.
Folman has said he chose animation as his medium because he had no other option-it would have been just talking heads if in live action & there is little video footage of the Lebanon war from this period. Instead he illustrates the war-time experiences of his comrades as they relate their memories in voice-over. Stylistically the artwork is just as bold & graphic as Persepolis but more realistic, similar to Linklater's WAKING LIFE or A SCANNER DARKLY but not rotoscoped.
A talented team of artists evoke the surreal horror of war expertly & often poetically.
It's a moving & gripping account of one man's desire to understand how he came to be part of one of the worst massacres of the Lebanon conflict.

Folman plans to use animation for his next project-an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's 1971 sci-fi novel 'The Futurological Congress'.

Festival de Cannes 2008

2008-05-15T13:10:00.001-07:00

I can't believe a year has gone by already & I'm at my second Cannes Film Festival-I'm well on my way to the special recognition award given to longtime festival goers of 30 years or more!

I caught the first screening of KUNG FU PANDA & Dreamworks have set a new gold standard for themselves with this picture. Right from the 2-D opening sequence you know this is going to be a winner. In fact the title sequence by James Baxter's studio is so good one almost wishes the entire film was done in this style. It's limited, Flash style animation but with gorgeous textures & flourishes of full animation. Despite its meagre premise (fat panda masters kung fu) the film dazzles with its magnifecently orchestrated action sequences. Character designs are excellent & will have you yearning for the inevitable action/plush toys.
Expect this flick to be HUGE this summer, although how Dreamworks will squeeze the paper thin scenario for their desired franchise remains to be seen. This one however will defeat all box-office challengers with its 'awesomeness & bodacity'!

It's only Day 2 I'm already feeling fatigued but I'll be back in Cannes tomorrow to see more movies & make more drawings.A bientot mes amis. . .

Road rage

2008-05-09T05:01:00.000-07:00

Motoring in France is always an adventure. Drivers here are just a touch more intense than in the UK. Most seem to think they're participating in the Monte Carlo Ralley & will risk their lives, vehicles & licences to gain that extra couple car lengths in traffic.

I recently had a close encounter with the charming family above who were unhappy about having to let me pass ahead of them on a roundabout. The matriarch was leaning out of the window & banging the side of the car like a frenzied baboon!
I'm driving to Lago Maggiore in Italy this weekend so I'm planning to stick to the slow lane & avoid trouble!
Bonne weekend-report from the Cannes Film Festival in a weeks time. Ciao!

Oktapodi

2008-05-05T11:13:00.003-07:00

Back in February I blogged about my talented colleagues Olivier & François-Xavier winning Best Animation at the Imagina CG Forum for their graduation film 'OKTAPODI'. The film is still not online due to Les Gobelins/festival circuit obligations but the team have updated their site to include an entertaining 'making of'.
Rush there now for tentacled sweetness-http://www.oktapodi.com/
Bonne chance a Siggraph les mecs!

The Big Red One

2008-04-16T10:29:00.000-07:00

Early last summer I found this thick, A4 size sketchbook in a local papeterie & figured it would be perfect for café drawings. It has about 200 pages of rough, low quality paper that actually has a nice bite & adds texture to pen lines. I wasn't worried about spoiling a nice Moleskine or leather bound sketchbook & started bashing out gesture drawings to loosen up for the day.

I started it last July & just finished it in March. 200 pages with an average of around 20 figures per page makes that approximately 4000 people (& dogs) observed & sketched!

It would take forever to scan every page but I'll post up some of the better pages. It's interesting for me to see how I changed over the 9 months trying out different techniques, looking for different things;conversations, expressions, faces somedays, other days street scenes. It became a good discipline that helped me grow as an artist but I dread to consider how much money I spent on cappucinos!

Here are some of the cafés & brasseries where I would sit outside & sketch. The winter in Nice was just mild enough to sustain 'terrace sketching'. Some days the fingers did get a bit numb.

Apart from the odd street scene I concentrated mainly on les passants-passers by. I tried to capture different walks, body shapes, ages, attitudes etc. Sometimes my attention would be drawn by particular outfits people wear. The Riviera set can sport some pretty outrageous clobber, especially in the summer!

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More to come soon . . .

Aurora y Balaban

2008-04-08T09:26:00.000-07:00

Raja & I watched 'The Orpahange' recently & we were gripped. We were clutching each other tightly in the cinema, watching it between our fingers! It reclaims every 'haunted house' genre convention with feature debut director Juan Antonio Bayona pulling all the right strings. There are a couple of moments that are real heart stoppers!
I made this drawing inspired by two great characters who show up half way through. Aurora & Balaban are 'paranormal investigators' played by Geraldine Chaplin & Edgar Vivar. They reminded me of the scenes in Poltergeist with the parapsychologists & the medium Tangina Barrons (Zelda Rubinstein). Let's hope Senor Del Toro sanctions a spin-off movie featuring these two.

Sketchcrawl 18

2008-04-03T10:23:00.001-07:00

March 29th was the 18th World Wide Sketch Crawl & once again our small ensemble headed back in time to sketch another medieval hill town. This time we hopped across the border into Italy. I'd found this picture of Cerriana in a book of old photos by Jean Giletta & thought it looked really great to draw & it's only an hours drive from Nice, in the mountains above San Remo.

We rolled into town to find it deserted & populated entirely by 3-wheel Piaggio mini-vans. The streets of the old town are too narrow for cars so the residents use these to get around & transport heavy goods.

This month's sketch-crawlers were Carlos, Emma, Francois-Xavier & myself.

We found a great spot over-looking the town & set to work.
I warmed up with a sketch of F.X. drawing the old Roman church.

The architecture of the town is stunning with the ancient buildings somehow fused with the rock. There's an entire absence of town planning where houses have been built on top of each other at every angle!

I wanted to loosen up a little & went straight at the next one with diluted ink & a fat brush.

The locals were inquisitive & asked me why I was drawing the town-my Italian only extends to 'Bella, bellisima!' but they got the point.

An old lady with a hairy chin gave me a tour of the old Roman church, of which she was the guardian.

I ended the day with a drawing made from the same angle as the Giletta photograph.

Another fine sketchcrawl in glorious surroundings fine weather. Can't wait for the next one . . .

Everyones sketches from the day can be viwed here.

Paques a Paris

2008-03-27T11:09:00.000-07:00

I spent Easter weekend in Paris & as usual there are countless exhibitions of interest but not enough time to see them all! There are several shows based on drawing so I was spoilt for choice. I just missed Lautrec's drawings at Musée D'Orsay & had to pass on Goya's engravings at the Petit Palais. The BNF is celebrating the bicentenary of Honoré Daumiér's birth with a collection of his lithograph work. As an admirer of Daumiér's drawing I was very keen to see this exhibition.

The venue, the Richelieu site of the Bibliotheque National Française, is suitably grand & 200 of Daumiér's finest lithographs are on display in the main hall. Was it Shamus Culhane who wrote that he thought Daumiér would have made a great animator? His posing, staging & depiction of facial expressions is impeccable. I was also struck by how solid his forms are, especially his caricatures. He was also adept at sculpture which seemed to inform his drawing & vice versa. The exhibition can be viewed online here.

We checked out the latest blockbuster expo at the Louvre-'BABYLONE', an exploration of the fabled city of antiquity. Ironically none of the exhibits actually come from modern day Babylon as Iraq is too unstable to warrant transportation of priceless items & the insurance costs proved prohibitive.
Since the show is newly opened the space was heaving with bodies making it difficult to see anything & after the twentieth depiction of the tower of Babel my interest waned.

Far better was the collection of tribal masks & artifacts at the 'Africa Océanie' exhibition at the splendid Musée Jacquemart-André. On a more modest scale than the collections on show at the Louvre or Quai Branly, it contains some beauties from far flung islands I've never heard of; ritual objects from the Bismarck archipelago, ornaments from the Torres Strait, effigies made by the Batak & Pakpak people of Toba Lake etc. I made some sketches of those that caught my attention-

Zoo 2

2008-03-21T11:45:00.001-07:00

Last weekend I returned to the zoo on Cap Ferrat for more animal quick sketching . . .

Persepolis

2008-03-19T03:21:00.000-07:00

I finally saw Persepolis & was thoroughly impressed. Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Paronnaud & their team have created an exceptional work & all involved in the production should feel proud. It's a shame it didn't win the Best Animated Feature Oscar-it would have helped to consolidate the market for more adult animated fare at least in the eyes of financiers. But it's won so many other awards I'm sure it has helped raise the profile of 'alternative animation'.

The style is elegantly simple & really takes advantage of the medium. In the 'making of' Marjane relates how they tried animating vehicles in CG but the results didn't mesh at all with the simple graphic style. That approach was abandoned in favour of remaining faithful to the hand drawn aesthetic.

The history of modern Iran is incorporated into the narrative effectively & certainly illuminated me on the revolution & the Iran/Iraq war. The silhouette soldiers in their gas masks are quite chilling.
I really hope the success of Persepolis makes it possible for more esoteric stories to find funding. France & Japan certainly offer film-makers the opportunity to explore more mature themes. I've heard Joann Sfarr is planning a feature adaptation of his bande dessinée 'Le Chat du Rabbin' & Nicolas De Crécy has contributed to Studio 4°c's 'Genius Party'.

Painters on film

2008-03-12T04:27:00.000-07:00

A while ago I blogged about the trailer for 'Nightwatching', Peter Greenaway's film on Rembrandt & his masterpiece 'The Nightwatch'. Well last night I saw the film & my suspicions about it were borne out. Visually it's spot on, as to be expected from Greenaway, but the cast & the acting let the film down awfully. Physically Martin Freeman appears to be a perfect fit for the young(ish) Rembrandt but he just can't carry off the role with the requisite gravitas. He plays it like a boorish football hooligan, screaming obscenities & cracking innuendos.
It seems Greenaway wanted to portray the common miller's son as a coarse, cocky, comedian but it just doesn't rhyme with the sensitivity found in Rembrandt's work. Who knows, perhaps Rembrandt was an asshole but Freeman doesn't do justice to the man-his reaction at Saskia's funeral is laughable.
The real man of the match is Greenaway's D.P. Reinier van Brummelen, who manages to evoke the lighting & compositions of the Master's work impressively, particularly the bath-house scene.

Later at home I chanced upon another biographical artist film-Andy Garcia as 'Modigliani'. Directed by Mick Davis, it's human story was more accessible than Greenaway's cold treatment & Garcia infinitely more believable than Freeman. However it still has that faux feeling feeling that many artist bio movies suffer from. It's at once enjoyable to see actors as famous artists & to spot them through the film but often ridiculous too. Picasso is portrayed in the film but he's too fat & he's played by Omid Djalili & Eva Herzigova is Olga!

Artists lives portrayed on film is a delicate balancing act. If the film-makers treat the artists lives too reverently it becomes pretentious, too 'normal' then it's laughable. Usually the artists estate refuse to co-operate resulting in a peculiar absence of art in the film (Surviving Picasso). This problem however actually resulted in one of the better artist bio-pics in 'Love is the devil', John Maybury's account of Francis Bacon & his relationship with George Dyer. Maybury was forced by necessity to create images that became Bacon-like. It's very effective as a portal into the tortured psyche of Bacon, of course bolstered by a killer performance by Derek Jacobi.

Here' a clip from 'Modigliani' where he's taken to visit Renoir by Picasso!

Zoo

2008-02-23T05:03:00.000-08:00

Last weekend's expedition was to the Zoo Parc du Cap-Ferrat which is possibly the smallest & most expensive zoo in the world! We we there on an overcast chilly Sunday so there weren't too many kids & parents harassing us or the animals. The cold meant no time for messing around with watercolours, it was straight down to action with quick pen gesture sketches.

I haven't sketched at a zoo for over a year so I was feeling rusty. I warmed up on the 'easier' creatures-starting with the elegant flamingos.

The capybaras, emus & wallabies afforded some great character studies; their feeding hierarchy, the strutting emus, the horny male capybara trying to get it on!

The lemurs always look startled with their huge, black-ringed eyes. The poor ruffed lemurs were so cold they sat with their heads tucked under their legs!

The coatis lead a perilous existence living in the bear pit. There were a couple of raccoons in there too. There were two grumpy black bears who, when not growling at each other, sit up on their backsides & beg for food .

The laid back wallabies were taking it easy, grooming & scratching themselves.

The goats were fun to draw & we could get into the pen & sketch them up close. True to their reputation they try to eat anything you leave lying around including my fold-up chair, plastic bag, coat & sketchbook!

The big-cats looked pretty miserable in their relatively tiny enclosure. The cheetah tucked his paws & tail beneath his body & stayed in a corner to keep warm.

The Mandrills were challenging to draw, they move around a lot but have great expressions & they all seemed to have colds! The male I drew above had no shame!

Eze

2008-02-14T02:20:00.000-08:00

The next official SketchCrawl is next month but we couldn't wait that long! Carlos, Seb, Melanie & I headed up to Eze-a medieval village perched on the cliffs high above Monaco. It's a stunning location & we had perfect weather conditions for sketching.

Similarly to St.Paul de Vence, Eze has labyrinthine narrow streets with lots of grotto-like shops to discover. I love to draw the ancient architecture which seems organically fused with the rock foundations.

Planes fly in low over Cap Ferrat in their approach to Nice Cote d'Azur airport.

This ancient, gnarled tree makes a perfect natural canopy when the sun gets too hot. It dominates the terrace of my favourite café in Eze- 'Le Nid d'Aigle' the Eagle's Nest.

We finished the day sketching amongst the cacti in the jardin exotique that crowns the summit of the town. There are great views of Cap ferrat to the West & the Italian Riviera to the East.

The others should be posting their sketches on their respective websites soon. Our next trip is to the zoo!

Imagina 2008

2008-01-31T09:31:00.001-08:00

Last week I went along to the Imagina Computer Graphics Awards in Monte Carlo. Prince Albert kicked off the proceedings wisely escaping soon after to the bar before he had to endure sitting through the industry & architecture nominee films. A man dressed as a tea-pot compered the evening with a barrage of flat gags, unfunny in French or English.

The art department on 'A Monster In Paris' is crewed by graduates of Les Gobelins & Supinfocom schools. Their impressive short films not only secured them professional work but also win prizes at major animation/CG festivals. The guys were nominated not in the student category but in Best Animation. Carlos was part of the team that made 'Al Dente', competing against Olivier & François-Xavier with their film 'Oktapodi' which won!
The films are stunning but unfortunately aren't available online yet.

Framestore won Best Music Video for this fun spot:

My favourite nominee in that category however was this:

Stunning short 'Bolides' won Supinfocom, Arles the Best School prize.

It builds to a frenetic climax which seems almost like a parody of the trend for rapid chase sequences in French student films.

'Dji vou veu volti' from Belgium won Best Short. Extract here.

However, I was hoping to see a win for 'Dog Days', French animation genius Geoffroy De Crecy's latest freaky extravaganza:

Unsurprisingly 'Ratatouille' won Best Film & 'Pirates 3' Best Special FX.