Break achieved!

Woo Roseline and I finally had time to take a break.... actually no we didn't have time and now I'm working 3 times as hard to catch up... freelancing sucks.

Anywho I'm jumping the gun a bit. Before I left I hammered out this animation for loopdeloop in about 3 hours



Basically I had finished packing and I had a spare few hours and the deadline was that night so I came up with this short. The theme was 'spooky' and this is something that really bugs me(scares the crap out of me) when in a horror/suspense film a character walks backwards down a dark corridor.

"I KNOW SOMETHING IS GOING TO JUMP OUT JUST DO IT ALL READY!!"

I hand drew all the animation frames and background in separate layers on my scribble pad (10x15cm white pad). The wall was a google image search wall. I scanned and cleaned the drawings and set them up in photoshop and then brought them into toonboom animate. I also for the first time imported the images and vectorised them and I was very surprised by how clean toonboom handled that. Once I timed out the animation I added some after effects gloss to punch a little more mood into the animation. I then hit my 'Existence' sound folder for the sound track.

Next months loopdeloop theme is 'Condoms' to tie in with World Aids Day on December 1st. I'm wondering what to do with that one haha

The day after I made this loop Roseline and I were on a boat headed to the WA holiday island Rottnest. Named after these guys who inhabit the island which they thought to be rats ('Ratnest')

These bros aren't rats though. They are quokkas and they are so gentle and innocent. I've never met such a mellow wild animal before. They were very cool

Also what was cool was how beautiful the beaches were.

Our beaches in WA are really something special. It's only when I go away and visit say Hobart with it's dirt grey sand and ice waters or St Kilda in Melbourne with it's polluted smelly waters and beaches that I realise how lucky we are over here... although I should point out the first day we were there all the beaches were locked down due to a shark attack and we had shark hunting helicopters flying all over the island.. SO THERE'S THAT...haha

What was great was we hired bikes (as there are very few cars on the island) and rode around the whole island. I haven't been on a bike in years and boyyy it took some getting used to and awww man there were some hurt muscles that haven't been used in years. It was good to feel that pain again since the last few years I've been trapped trying to make this animation thing work. Roseline has done a better job at keeping her fitness up (she killed me on the bikes) and I only seem to get a good walk in every now and then. A lot of my friends do the gym thing but that isn't for me. I definitely have to work and keep up my fitness though. I've been having the worst kind of trouble with my back over the last few years and honestly once your back goes animation is the hardest thing in the world.

Well enough old man Merks gripes. While I was over there I found some time to get some drawings in. I posted a bunch of these on my twitter (facebook and g+ as well) via my xperia play smart phone which was a new fun experience. My younger self loves all this new technology. I'd love to travel back and show the super mario world game that awed me as a kid that I can now play on my portable phone I carry in my pocket. I did at one stage flirt with being a purist, antitech, prefer it all original person but seriously this stuff is amazing. Take a smart phone, how many minds, how much history, evolution and genius is behind the technology it floors me.

Enough with the words here's some of the pictures I drew

I wanted to do more studies of the environment but I was enjoying just being there. Roseline has done a whole bunch of great ones and a lot of the time I just loved watching her work

This was her late at night doing a water colour pass on a sketch she had done.

I wanted to loosen up my drawing arm and draw some full scenes. I only drew 2 pictures but I'm pretty pleased with them.

I drew that last mountain scene picture at the dome cafe on the last day we were there. 2 cups of coffee (you can see some coffee stains at the bottom) and a whole bunch of time to spend on it. I thought of it as a platform game and just started from the bottom left and worked up.

and one last scribble featuring the Bacon Bros

Well the rest was great and as soon as we returned home we had work phone calls and emails immediately to take care of. It's good to be a busy freelancer I guess but dang that Quokka life looks appealing.

post 100 WOO

So I had these plans to update on Sunday with something amazing and new. Except I really felt like relaxing this weekend.

On Saturday Roseline and I decided to go for a walk to Sandy bay to get some sweet breakfast. We chose an indirect path from our place cutting through every alleyway we could find.

Tasmania is a great fun place to go exploring. We came across some interesting parks, funny old houses, lots of different cats and we even spotted someone doing a nice piece of street art under a bridge.

After our long walk we ended up in a Dome cafe where I bought myself a big breakfast (negating any form of exercise that I had just done).

Both Roseline and I are big fans of a cooked breakfast. I'm now making myself hungry thinking about it. mmmmm eggs and hash browns

Well when we left Dome we headed for Salamanca to do a little bit of shopping at the markets. We took a little detour because Roseline had spotted some ducklings the week before and forgot to take along our camera. So we went to see if they were still there to get a photo.

Here they are. Terribly cute aren't they?

If the photo was a bit wider you would see all the coke bottles and other parts of rubbish that they swim in. You would think they'd clean up after themselves.

Well there is something a little under half done that I had been working on. I hope to finish that soon. I did finish one piece of creativity this week. I think I did this on Monday

I really like that picture. It all started with me messing up some eyes colouring them in and turning it into a skull. The rest of the image formed around it. Free drawing at its best.

Well that's all

Leaving Mt Stuart to Launceston

Well it has been a few months since leaving Hobart and I am slowly finding time to sort through my photos and digitally tweak them.

This is the last photo I took of Elizabeth street. Roseline and I used to walk down here all the time to buy our groceries, noodles, subway, coffees, muffins and other pastries. This photo was taken on the bus just as we were leaving for Launceston.

Before leaving we of course had to clean the unit and organise sending our 7-8 months collected stuff back home to Perth. This was hell stressful. We were cleaning the unit right up until we had to jump in a taxi to go catch our bus. Oh and the people who were meant to pick up our luggage decided that they weren't going to show up at the arranged time and were planning on getting there after we were supposed to be on the bus. We called them up and they made some excuse that they called us and left a message, which was a lie since Roseline's phone doesn't record messages and there were no missed calls. Good news is after I said to them directly "I don't like being lied to" they made sure that they were there before we had to catch our taxi.

I will miss that place. It was a beautiful home that overlooked the city, it was close enough that we never needed a car, it had a lot of space and character. Roseline and I have many good memories there such as eating noodle soup and watching 'Ulysses 31'.

We booked a room at the 'Penny Royal' in Launceston. It's quite a quaint little hotel with its European design. The rooms were all named and ours happened to be called 'Elizabeth'. We thought of this as a good omen (we would question this later in Melbourne) as Roseline created a little rabbit character called 'Elizabeth' .

I found out that my parents had stayed at this hotel and they told us that we had to check out a miniature museum that they had. We were later told at the reception that since the hotel was being managed by a Sydney company, the bosses over there did the numbers and decided to close it. It's always sad to hear that.

The taxi driver who took us from the bus station to the hotel told us that we had to check out the Cataract Gorge. Giving us very loose instructions on how to get there we decided to walk there after we dropped off our luggage at the hotel. He told us that there was a restaurant in the middle of the park so we thought it would be a nice place to have dinner. Due to the crazy rushing around we did that day, getting ready to leave and the lack of sleep from worrying, we hadn't eaten anything and we were super tired. So we weren't prepared for the 2hour aimless wandering we had to do before we reached the Gorge, and then to find out that the restaurant was booked. I was grumpy as hell and just wanted to go home, Roseline however was in awe by the gorge (which in hindsight was very pretty) and managed to take a few nice pictures even with me grumbling and hurrying her along.

Launceston was really quite an interesting city. Polar opposite to Hobart, which was like a quaint country town. It seemed to have something of a Melbourne vibe to it. There were these two interesting bits of graffiti I came across as we were walking around the town that I liked.

In the Launceston central park there were monkeys. Japanese monkeys. I thought this was pretty crazy. When we had our lunch these monkeys were running around crazy, but when we went up to photograph them they were sitting still and just sleeping. Dam monkeys.

There's also a monkey bank. People seem to throw money into the moat in the monkey cage. I can't see that as wise investing but Roseline says I'm not very good with that sort of stuff anyway.

The park was quite nice, very green and it had a lot of old sculptures and water fountains. There was an art gallery on the edge of the park that had a lot of woodcrafts in it. Probably a couple of rain forests used to produce the work, but really interesting stuff. I liked the business card holders.

One of the highlights of our trip back home to Perth was our visit to the radio museum. This was actually in the Launceston park and we were a little hesitant to go into the building but the two people looking after the museum were so friendly and they really enjoyed showing us all these wonderful old radios. I did a great job at photographing everything out of focus. Hopefully Roseline took a few good ones that she will put up soon. What was really interesting is that the radio station is still running and it is apparently in the Guinness book of records for the longest running radio station. Pretty good for a community radio station.

The final place we saw was the umbrella factory. Roseline wanted to visit this place as she wanted a locally made parasol to take home. When we arrived there we found out it was no longer a working factory, they only had a small display of antique umbrellas and when Roseline asked where one of the parasols that was available to buy was from the lady answered, "It was probably made in China". It was priceless to see Roseline screw up her nose when she said that. Now that was a photo opportunity missed haha.

Well this ends the Launceston part of Roseline and my journey back home. Next up we go to Davenport.

Oh if you haven't read it already Roseline did a nice post about a trip we did in Hobart.

Tahune Airwalk

Well on Saturday Roseline a few of our fellow Blue Rocket friends took a trip out to the Tahune Airwalk.



It was about and hour and a half out of Hobart. So It was good to see some of rural Tasmania.



Richard (Toonerfish) had to turn around at one point and we came across this large lot of blackberry bushes. All these little grey rabbits rushed off and hid inside them. They were too fast for my camera so I drew an angry little rabbit.



Along the way we stopped by Geeveston Bakery. They had these hand carved statues out the front. They're kinda creepy. The good news is the food was great and so was the coffee. All the people working there had to dress in old timey clothes which was a nice touch.



The air walk was worth the long journey. There's one of these type walks out in Warpole. I haven't had the chance to visit that yet, I'll probably do that when I get back home. I didn't manage to take any photo's of all of us running from the constant attack by bees (no one got stung they were just welcoming bees).








On the way back we visited 'The big tree'. Suprisingly it doesn't seem that big. Anyway here's the whole group infront of 'The big tree'



It was a nice day that finished up with me eating pizza and the others eating fish and chips. We started watching 'felix the cat' but that was crappy so then we watched 'Thumbsucker' which was pretty dam good.