The Last Train
A short film made in collaboration with animator Ross Hogg as part of a Lux Scotland programme with BBC Now & Next. In 2020 Ross and me got nominated for a Scottish Bafta for it, which was especially great. You can watch the whole thing here and I’ll explain a bit about the process here ↓.
For each scene I would draw keyframes, which are just drawings of individual moments in a sequence - like a posh storyboard. Next, Ross would take these keyframes, space them out on a timeline and then draw all movement in-between the key frames: 12 drawings for every one second of the scene.
Ross would do these in-betweens (which they are known as in animation circles) with the single-minded focus of a robot attack dog, or maybe some sort of animation monk.
After that, Ross would send me all his inbetweens & the keyframes and I’d then draw over them to get the nice one colour look. Over the whole film there were about eighteen hundred frames so I was doing this over most of the 2 month production.
Amoungst many hours of podcasts I mananged to get through the audiobook of Steven Kings The Stand, which was excellent.
I then gave Ross back the finished drawings and he stitched them together, added some grain, the background colour and a bunch of other animation secrets these types have in their back pockets.
Glasgow Open House Arts Festival
Art direction for the 2015 & 2017 Glasgow Open House Art Festivals. GOH is a grassroots, biennial arts festival inviting artists across the city to exhibit work in their homes, and it’s a good laugh. You can find the website for the 2017 festival here.
