casino royale

Casino Royale has a delightful opening animation, seeming quite simple with great use of flat colours and the playing card theme looks cool and appropriate cool and original intro suitable for the 21st century bond.

airside MTV ads

Airside design has made these stings for MTV’s mobile channel they are quite simple with use of characters into live action recording check the link for the rest.
"http://www.airside.co.uk/work/casestudy.php?project=mtv&num

tokyoplastic

Tokyoplastic are an award wining design group (lots of awards) the website is
fantastic, although I feel its slightly over animated its an achievement in that. The little fella character was shown at pictoplasma.

studio soi

Studio soi are a german animation group who oftern work with London based studio aka. They produce tv series, short movies, commercials and mtv idents.

pictoplasma

Pictoplasma animation festival was held this November in Berlin. Over 250 animation were shown by artists off all kinds of disciplines and backgrounds.

bbc three

bbc three stings are some of my favorite. the silly little blob things saying daft stuff with little or no relevance to the program.

channel 5

Channel 5 idents are very different to E4 stings because they generally don’t use characters in the animations sticking to professionally developed stings instead of the any-thing goes of E4. The Christmas ident looks very si scott at the end.

E4 stings

E4 has some of the most creative stings in television right now, this is due the website running an ongoing competition allowing entrees to have the best animations commissioned, this results in some incredible and original stings made by all sorts of creative minds, I like the characters.

Persepolis

I saw Persepolis at Leeds film festival, I was impressed by both the animation and the story. Basically it’s an animated biography of the life of a girl from Iran, dealing with issues such as immigration and nationality as well as informing viewers of Iran’s history and people. It was animated in a way that was true to its comic book roots (two-dimensional, limited colour use) although I found it to be much more accessible on screen as the comics panelling isn’t wonderful. It had an incredible opening sequence.

scottie young

scott young is an artist i have noticed more and more over the past year. i find his style of drawing to be very graphicaly interesting his covers for cable and dead pool have being amazing over the past year and the last issue of new x-men looked amazing. he draws in a very stylized illustrative way with a really good use of proportion and posture it gives a real sense of movement and size in his panels everything looks very COOL.

phil collins gorilla

wonderful concept makes perfect sense bet everyone did about this.

mouse guard

baisically little mice strugle to survive in the world of 1149 as little kingdoms they battle against preadators and other mice to survive. cute and brutal it is very readable and moving. written and illustrated by david peterson.

joel priddy

joel priddy is an illustrator and comic artist who is a great influence to me. his first comic 'pulpatoon pilgrimage' shows his crisp graphical style and surreal storytelling and use of type. the story is about a group of three very different creatures and friends who are journeying to some unknown place, it shows their backgrounds and their reasons for partaking in the journey, all in joels wonderful style. i find his rendering of trees in pulpatoon pilgrimage to be one of the most interesting qualities as they are given great textures and forms making them seem very organic. my girlfriend has a tatoo of his character 'ironhide tom' who is a very tough pirate described as a 'sea-ape' who is pretty much drawn as a hunched peg-legged stick man.

the influence of animals on my work

When I was 4 years old I was asked what I would like to be when I grow up, my reply was ‘a Tiger’ followed by a mess of orange and black berol drawings. Since I have wanted to be an archaeologist, super-hero, barbarian, painter and finally an illustrator.
I still find the indigenous beings of this planet to be a fascinating and wonderful source of inspiration to my work as a designer, when I recently visited the capital on a ‘cultural’ trip, with intentions to wonder around a lifeless art gallery for a few hours. I instead headed to London zoo, to see the monkeys. The result was 200 or so photos of the zoos inhabitants and an enthusiastic inspired mind. I did the same thing on the college trip to Berlin last year spending one day wandering and the other two in the zoo and aquarium drawing hippos and scary fish.
Most recently I visited Chester zoo with a small group of fellow students and I have come to the conclusion that I can stare at as many books, galleries and websites of design but the thing that motivates and inspires me the most is animals of all shapes sizes and species from pigs to piranhas, but mostly monkeys obviously.

hippo

My hippo character derived from the hour or two that I spent watching the group at Berlin zoo, although I only started drawing it during my first year. one of these hippos spent most of its time swimming laps in the pool emerging only briefly to spray an immense shit over one of the younger hippos who was attempting to follow it, another hippo seemed to spend the majority of its time staring around in a daze and occasionally opened its mouth and made a noise. These two creatures as well as my own inner dim-witted persona formed the foundation on which the ‘hippo’ was formed. The hippo walks on two legs to represent its humanisation, if it had a job it would work in a call centre. It is also drawn without pupils in its eyes to represent its blankness and prevent the audience from empathizing with him. its nature is as a pariah of sorts surviving with very little in the way of wit or instincts among society.

marcel dzarma

its not like me to like one of these gallery type fine-artists, but dzarma is an exception his work is very character driven and although he goes out of his way to make his work mean nothing it is still quite good. marcel dzarma creates lots of costumes of his characters as well as short films such as 'the lotus eaters'. i like to see characters as costumes because it makes them 'real' to an extent, i admire his ability to take his creations off of paper in this way.

grant morrison

in my opinion grant morrisons work should be an influence to all in any artistic profession. i am a long term fan of mr morrisons work which i first became aware of during his fantastic 'new x-men' arcs where the well known characters were taken to new perspectives and he took new characters even further, charging into issues suck as teenage drug abuse and pregnancy to the rejection of facism in the new world order. i have activly seeked out more graphic novels by him most recently coming across 'we3' a tale of animal cruelty and a dark military future, again touching on issues of facism.
although i enjoy to read grants work on mainstream titles such as 'new x-men', 'jla earth2' and recent 'superman' run, his best works are in my personal opinion his own creations such as 'we3', 'the invisibles' and 'animal man'. in his own titles he realy manages to go to town with the characters and manages to say alot more about soceity oftern attacking governments, and always giving his characters flaws which make them all to real in the minds of a reader. morrison likes to break the rules and do new things for example in 'animal man' he makes a comic hero aware of his ficticious nature elevating the writer to the place of a god, this is probably a result of his guilt for killing of so many characters in his sterling career.
grant morrison oftern works along side artist frank quietly, who has a realistic and detailed style, he delivers odd layouts and really gets the reader into the visual narrative of the story.

monkey comic

The star of the monkey comic was based on no particular monkey but the generally curious and food-motivated behaviour of the countless groups of monkeys I have observed over the years unlike the hippo it lives by its sharp wits and instincts.
the comic is set in barren future in the wake of some apocalptic event, the monkey now travels this world searching for food alone. he discovers the 'key' when wandering the woods in search of food and then embarks on a kind of odessy wherin the hero is driven, perhaps out of his own control towards the ruins of a human city, wherin the story concludes.

Tom Gauld

tom gauld is an illustrator and comic artist, he works using line drawing techniques in very simple and effective ways often showing simple characters in detailed enviroments. i own some copies of his work my favorite of wich is the 'guardians of the kingdom', a story of two medieval soldiers who work as the garrison of a collosal wall much like the great wall of china, it details their lives together and conversations among wich my faveorite is when they are trying to remember which side they are defending. tom gauld publishes his work with 'carbanon press' alonside simone lia at this site
http://www.cabanonpress.com/index.htm

jeff brown

the indie comic king jeff makes comics documenting 'his life experiences' in titles such as 'be a man', 'clumsy' and 'unlikely' as well as his 'cat stories', 'big head' and 'minature sulk' making jeff an all around indie ace. his art is simple and quite scruffy looking from first glance but this is among the qualities in his work which when combined with the narrative and characterisation give his comics the everyman kind of feeling that allows most of his audience to relate to him and his stories.
my favorite of jeff browns publications is called 'i am going to be small' and is a collection of 3-4 panel stories and drawings making it very different to his other works. i like this book the most because it is a practice i have become acustomed to in my notebooks over the past year, its really funny too.