The Good Watching

Hey y'all,

I haven't used that inspiration label for awhile now so I better put up some of the stuff that is inspiring me at the moment.

Lets begin with some new series from Japan

An anime series directed by Hiroyuki Morita (The Cat Returns) based on a manga by Mohiro Kitoh.

I've only seen the first two episodes of this series but it so intrigues me, right from the get go.

This is from wikipedia:

During a summer camp, 15 children, 8 males and 7 females, find a grotto by the sea. Deep within they discover working computers and some electronic equipment, and later the owner, a man called Kokopelli. Kokopelli claimed to be a programmer working on a brand new game, in which a large robot has to defend the Earth against fifteen alien invasions. He persuades the children to test the game and sign a contract. All but one of them signs, barely a moment later they mysteriously awaken on the shore believing what happened was just a dream.

That night, two giant robots appear suddenly by the beach. The children then teleport into the black robot. They find Kokopelli already inside and controlling the black robot in order to defeat the white enemy robot. During battle he gives the children a brief tutorial on how to pilot the robot as he destroys the enemy. Once he has finished he tells the children that they are on their own now and sends them back to the beach. As the children are teleported out, one child observes Kokopelli whispering "I'm sorry".

That's how the series starts, how the second episode ends however is why I'm hooked

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
Break-Through Heaven Gurren Lagann
An anime series directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi (Dead Leaves and FLCL) from that great studio Gainax.

Ok I don't know if you have seen 'Dead Leaves' you may have seen 'FLCL' but this is what you call fun animation! It's a kinetic style where it's very loose, explosive and pulp.

Best I can describe the story (wikipedia didn't even try) is a group of humans live their life underground. Our reluctant hero, the young Simon, is an expert digger his friend the (awesome headstrong Kamina) plan to escape their underground life and journey to the surface. Their plan is foiled (riding a herd of giant moles was never going to work) and by orders of the Leader Kamina is locked up. Simon goes back to digging and stumbles across a giant robot head. He then drills into the prison Kamina is kept in and breaks him out to show him what he has discovered. As they are making their way to the giant head a earthquake happens and a giant robot smashes through from the surface. Everyone runs and hides except for Kamina who takes away the leaders giant sword and stands infront of the giant robot monster. Kamina then monologues what a mistake this robot has made, the robot laughs but then shots are heard from above. Something else drops in from the surface, she is Yoko. A bikini wearing, large rifle wielding girl comes in dramatically attacking the giant robot.

Ok that basically gives you the setup of the 3 main characters. My favourite character is Kamina, he is just so dam funny, he's like half Han Solo half Yakuza punk.

(As they are running away)
Yoko
"What the hell are you doin?"
(after Kamina gets in the way of her shooting the robot from behind)
Kamina
"A man fights face to face"
Yoko
"I'm a women"
Kamina
"A woman shouldn't stick her nose in a man's fight"
Yoko
"I'm the only one doing any fighting"
Kamina
"I like what you say, I'm impressed woman"

The rapid fire delivery of lines is hilarious. Kamina has these great rants and he believes every word in what hes is saying. "Defy reason by doing the impossible" is his motto.

I love this series and I keep rewatching the episodes because it is so much fun.


A DVD series I've recently finished watching is Ghost in the shell: SAC 2nd gig


This second series is brilliant. Where the first series got bogged down in philosophy the second series is more character and plot driven. Oh and the animation is truly astounding! I really don't know how they could afford to do each episode.

Director Kenji Kamiyama (who also writes a heap of the best episodes) really made this series just as suspenseful as an episode of 24.

Check-check that out

and finally some web animations for you

Here's a brilliant new cartoon by the Homestarrunner. The dial in this episode is one of the best.

and this brilliant short animation by Graham Annable. This is dam funny



And finally here's something very old that brings a tear to my eye



Ok well now I've got this out of my system I can go back to putting up my own work. Hope you enjoy all the above stuff as much as I am.

lata
Tim

Vicious and Faust 23

Well with this issue I thought it would be cool to put up images as I go along at all the major points. I hope you'll find this interesting.


Ok this is the starting sketch. Usually I thumbnail my comics out first but with this one I wanted to do it in a graff art style and just attack my page. The trick to doing this graff style for a comic is in controlling your lines. Done right the lines will direct the viewers eye to where you want them to be looking. Also it must be one image not a whole heap of separate things. Overlapping patterns and shrapnel can tie your stuff together.

This is the first time I've really gone all out in this style so I dont know if it is quite there yet but I do like it

The inked piece. Inking is something I think I'm getting better at (I only really started doing this last year). This was all done by hand, using a light table, ipod on shuffle, good inking paper, a 0.1, 0.5 and a brush pen. Inking is really an art form in itself. Using the right line weights can really bring stuff off the page or push it into the background. Also you can be dynamic with shadows and be a little loose with your light source. Adding dirt scratches to white areas also softens the image. I'd love to do some of the cool tricks Tim Townsend does but I need to practice a hell of a lot more.


Ok before I started colouring I had to clean up my lines. Fix some overflows and areas not completely coloured black. I then had to fix a typo. This is always a pain but doing some cut and pasting it's a 5 minute job. I based Robot's colours on the best robot of them all GIANT ROBO. I'm using a pinkish background to make it a bit more fun. I'm not too sure about that gradient, we'll see if it stays or not.



Not much done today as I'm busy doing Porcelain stuff. The bright colouring is working pretty nicely. Before I started this comic I watched "Dead Leaves" for inspiration. Man that's a good film. there's a few colours (Go!, numbers and shapes in the 3rd panel) that I'll be wanting to add some glows too later on. I may flatten the image and copy and paste those areas out. I'm not too sure yet.


(click on the pic above to head on over to my webcomicsnation account)

Ok it's done. I copied out all the colours I wanted to glow on an above layer then gaussian blurred them and set the layers to Add. I dulled the opacity a bit to control the glow. I then used Faux film filter and adjusted the temperature and added some grain and added a slight glow. I then went into Hue and Saturation and dropped the saturation a bit and tweaked the hue. As I was about to save I thought I'd try (my favourite filter) sunset and twilight this puts a coloured gradient over the image. I liked how it made the bottom half have a blue tint and brought the top up to being more yellow.

So this image didn't have too many tricks to it and I coloured it pretty flat with no highlights or shadows. There's bits I'd like to change (like the edges) but it's best to move on to all the other things I have to do

Vicious and Faust 20




So this gives you a brief idea on how I approached the layout and effects. When you are working in flash you get used to working in layers. For this comic I tried working in an analouge way and drawing individual layers by hand. I'm quite happy with the results. Also you may notice my use of real images (the stars and the background in the bottom frame). This comic is for me to try out new things to apply to my films and possible future comics. I enjoyed pushing the colour in this ep.

If you want some specifics on any effect hit the comments and I'll break it on down.

Rock ‘N’ Roll Boot Sale

Peabrain Volume 01 is on sale this Saturday!


When: Saturday 7th April.
Where: The Bakery ARTRAGE Complex, 233 James St, Northbridge
Times: Stalls run from 2pm – 8pm. Admission from 2pm – 5pm will be gold coin (just like a swap meet) and from 5pm when the bands begin it will be $10. Bands will play until late.

Images from Roseline's comic
Images from my comic

Mr Gough Comic

(cover final ~ paint by Roseline Lau)



(cover sketch)



(page 1 sketch)


(pages 2,3)


(pages 4,5)


As I mentioned before, Roseline and I are working on a new comic for you to buy and hold in your grubby little hands. The comic will be about 48 pages in length. You can read a little about Roseline's story and see some of her pages here. (I've seen her roughs for her complete story and it is very, very awesome.)

As you can see my comic will be mostly double page spreads filled with crazy little details. I've tried to put a lot of effort into designing the creatures, props, scenes and the landscapes to take you into a 'Mr Gough' world.

le petit pappilon bleu (2000)



This is a film by Allan Lunardi. Through a friend by the name of Joe Gievano (who co-wrote this films script) I was invited to help out and give advice for the animation. The film was put together at Curtin university using a video camera connected to a PC with Adobe Premier.

It's a funny little film which is really rough around the edges. Enjoy

Director
Allan Lunardi
Story and script by
Allan Lunardi
Damian McDermott
Joe Gievano
Animation by
Timothy Merks
Allan Lunardi
Damian McDermott
Robert Lee
Peter Tarman


New Vicious and Faust

Here is the new "Vicious and Faust" comic and the original pencil sketch. You can tell it is an original by the typo on mission :P

Clicking on the bellow comic will take you over to my webcomicsnation page. Down the bottom of that page you can click back to my blog.





It took me a while to work out how to get a cool ghost effect. I did it by making the ghost layer a movie clip adding a green glow effect (in filters). Then I made the symbol a "screen" overlay. Then under the ghost layer I created a green to black radial gradient that I made into a movie clip and used the "overlay" option and adjusted the alpha till it was about right. Flash 8 is pretty nice to do some of this tricky stuff.

lata
tim

Get your own nuts (1999)

This old film was made by myself and my very old friend Robert Lee.



I was doing my 3 year Film and Tv course at TAFE and my animation lecturer was really cool and let us borrow the Umatic machine over the weekend so we could produce this film.

I used an all wire armature for the main character but we had the problems on working on the first shot of the wire snapping in the arm. So being the geniuses we were, we replaced his arm with a tentacle arm. The smoke was done by drawing chalk onto a vinyl blue folder (you can see the edges of the folder on one shot). We had heaps of fun putting as many sound effects as possible and often just throwing in crazy ones to make it funnier. I'd love to do another animation and treat the sound in this way. (Space Monkey I guess was pretty close) The song in the background was the films temp track that we never got around to replacing. It's Tom Waits 'Chocolate Jesus' from his 'Mule Variations' album (a great album you all should own)

We were big fans of the video game "The Neverhood" and it's all plasticine look. So this is our own version of that style. Actually thinking of that reminds me of a story. There was a follow up to this game called "Skull Monkeys". On the weekend we decided it be a great day to hire out this game since neither of us had played it. We were at Rob's place in Rockingham at the time and we checked out every video store around Rockingham and none of them had Skull Monkeys in store. Determined that we were going to play this game we drove over to my place in Gosnells (a 45minute+ drive since the freeway wasn't finished yet) and we started looking at all the major video stores in Gosnells but still no luck. We then furthered our search checking every video store from Gosnells to Cannington (about 20minutes from Gosnells) but nothing. At this stage we had practically given up and we were driving back home just as we were about to reach home I remembered just near my place (like 2 minute walking distance) there was a small privately owned video store. It was so small they wouldn't have something like that ....NO THEY DO! So something that begun at about 10am finished up at about 5pm, we could have been playing that game probably 3hrs earlier had we checked the store closest to my house but then it wouldn't had made it that rewarding of an adventure. heh

Well I'll finish up saying goodbye, safe trip and all the best to my pal Rob as he journey's to England for work as a writer for some tv production team. Of course if he tries to leave to country with my copies of "taste of tea" and "izo" he'll be leaving in a box! haha. Goodluck Rob!

Some cool NEW stuff!

Well I guess I should post up some new stuff. Posting just these old animations looks like I’m not doing anything productive just living in the past (man!).

First up Roseline and I have just finished (pending client approval) a mobile phone worker recruitment animation that is intended (I believe) for the web. The storyboards and character design were done by my ex-animation lecturer and fellow ‘Dogstar’ employee Todd Millias. For a short web animation it was a little bit more complicated than we were expecting. Especially the opening shot that is a track down from the city into a dungeon where there are a whole heap of these ‘bean’ characters working. I think Todd threw that in to give me a challenge haha.


(camera moves down from city to bean worker word)

Roseline and I split the work up so that I would do the backgrounds, effects and the animation in the dungeon scenes and she would do all the character animation in the cloud 9 scenes. Working for the web it’s really important to reuse as much as possible and after spending a year working on ‘Dogstar’ it was hard to change our wasteful ways of creating millions of new symbols. Rose did some really beautiful character animation of the main ‘bean’. He looked like a character out of those old 30-40s informational cartoons with his wide happy smile. My ‘beans’ looked more like my ‘Mr Gough’ stuff with their dopy spaced out eyes.


(my dopy beans)

(Roseline's beans in Cloud 9)

Speaking of ‘Mr Gough’, Roseline and I attended another comic ‘draw-off’ with fellow comic artists that took part in that 24hr challenge that happened last year. It was supposed to also be another 24hr comic but I wanted to do something a bit more planned and executed than ‘Kinetic’ and Roseline also wanted to bail early for her own reasons. So we both did about 3-4hrs which was a little weak on our part I hope the other guys did better (sorry yo!). Anyway Rose (check here) and I are doing two separate comics that we are going to combine into one AWESOME!!! large comic. My comic will be about ‘Mr Gough’ it will loosely follow where the short animation finishes off and it will all be done in full page and double page spreads. With this comic I’m putting a lot of effort into the design aspect and trying to make a ‘Mr Gough’ world. I’m taking some of my influence from what I remember ‘Super Mario World’ being like and also a bit of ‘Dr Seuss’ surrealness. There is one spread that Roseline and I co-wrote where a couple of characters (a fisherman and a frenchman) do a little song and Roseline is going to guest draw this as she will draw the singing poses very funny.


(first page)

Another comic that I’m sure you thought I have forgotten about ‘Vicious and Faust’. Since the webcomicnation comics have now caught up to where I left it here on the blog, there will be new issue put up every Saturday over the next few weeks (I’ll probably stick to only doing 13 episodes per series). I’ve already pencilled out 2 eps and it’s now a bit more character comedy like the first season. I’ve been reading John K’s blog a lot and he did a post a little while back about how artists seem to always be doing the same expressions that they should try and look for more interesting faces. ‘Vicious and Faust’ has always been my comic to experiment and try new things so I’m giving this a go and I’m pulling funny faces in my mirror and trying to sketch them.


(issue 17)

(issue 18)

And finally ‘Porcelain’. Roseline and I are pushing to get this film out of the way. We’ve got a whole heap of stuff we’d like to move on with but we can’t touch that until this film is done. That isn’t to say we are going to rush out whatever, we’ve spent ages on this film and it has to be worth it. Hopefully by next week we’ll begin putting all our work into flash and I’ll start posting some more progress on this film.


(layout for scene on bridge)

Well there’s an update on what I’m up to. I hope you enjoyed all this new stuff. Tomorrow I’m going to put up a very old stop motion film Rob and I put together so stay tuned!


Tim

Opening Doors (2002)



The first indy film by Dean Swanton and Timothy Merks!

It is a 'very' first film. The animation and continuity is terrible. It was all drawn with a mouse (which I'll use as my excuse) and animated in flash.

Winner of the ScreenWest award for writing at the Sunset Cinema's 'Grassroots' competition.

Runner (2003)



I’ve been resisting writing about “Runner” for awhile now because it was a film that left me pretty sore about a lot of things. Since these are the last days that it will be here before disappearing into the archive I better put something down.

“Runner” is the first film that received funding. A lot of people thought that I got funding all the time because I had produced 4 films beforehand but they were all self funded where I had complete control over everything. At the time it was only costing me $50 to make a film and that was money spent on minidv tapes, minidisk tapes and competition entry fees.

I used to apply for every funding grant that ScreenWest and the AFC had. I got knocked back from all of those with only a letter (I wasn’t doing any interviews at this stage). It was a little frustrating but like I said my films were cheap to make so I would go out and make my own film and put it in a festival. I had been winning a few awards here and there (I won heaps of fti memberships and short courses) and people at the festivals seemed to really enjoy my films so I felt I was doing ok and was still feeling pretty inspired. Finally it seemed a funding grant for me had just turned up. It was called “The Fly Initiative”. It was co-funded by ScreenWest, FTI and the ABC to produce a collection of short films up to 4minutes in length for the now defunct ABC digital FLY channel.




When Dean Swanton and I heard about this we got in contact with a few of our friends from our old animation course and suggested we co-create something with them. At the time they were in the middle of producing their own film so in the last week before the applications were to be submitted they sent over and email saying that they feel like they don’t have enough time to come up with something new and decided that they were going apply with the project that they were working on. Dean was a little bit sorer than I was about it. I didn’t mind as the project they were working on was looking pretty cool, unfortunately it was rejected later by Josh Reed (the funding overseer from the ABC) as he didn’t like that sort of film (the problem with people who like animation is that they aren’t very broad in what they like. Quite narrow minded on what animation should be and what it can’t be). So anyway Dean and I were left to come up with something fast. I decided that I would do a variation of the ‘Opening Doors’ film but make it darker like ‘Maggie and Tony’ and add in some action scenes. I then scrapped together whatever art I had to apply plus the usual show reel and cvs of all the crew and submitted it on the last day at the last hour.



So after a few weeks (maybe a month) we were called up and told we were short listed. (It was interesting to find out later that a lot of people thought since it was FLY tv it should be about flies but that just got your application tossed out) For some reason we didn’t do the interviews but we had two guys hired by FTI who pitched our ideas for us. We had to do a short meeting with them and give them any new images or whatever. Looking back on this now I would have argued this approach but at the time I was very excited thinking we were finally ‘making it’.

In another week or so later (making films through funding are about 3months of sitting on your hands) we found out we had been selected to produce a film WOOHOO! It was great to call Dean and tell him the good news. There was one problem though they thought it would work better as a 1minute film so we had pending script approval on our project. 1 minute to do a drama … are you crazy!?! Dean and I laughed this off as we were pretty arrogant with the success of our previous films that we were sure we could change their minds.

So later on there was the first big meeting all the people selected were sitting around the room with some mean egos (more the male filmmakers). There was this awesome competitive vibe back then. Dean and I used to compete quite bitterly with the “Davison Bro’s” as they used to take our awards. Heh we still compete a bit now but it’s more just friendly competition (If you thought we were taking too long with ‘Porcelain’ those guys received funding in the same round and they are still finishing their film). This day we saw who else was making films for this grant.



Ok so now begins the script amendments. From this experience I will never ever do any from of script writing by email. I’d rather have red pen underlines and notes in the margin plus some face to face with the person I’m working with. Josh Reed was the one I had to work with, I’d seen his film that he’d made. It was this stop motion that had these Rats in a prison. It was pretty stylish, a little crass here and there, but all up it was quite polished. We were two very different types of film makers and like I said before he had a very strong opinion on what works in animation and what doesn’t. With my stuff I’m not afraid to put drama into it. I don’t think animation should only be jokes and humour. At the time with all the south park and web cartoons that were everywhere I was really bored with all that immature, crass humour and I was really into reading indy comics about 20 something relationships and living in everyday life. This was something Dean and I shared an interest in, we thought well if it works for comics then there must be a market for this in animation. With a really great response from the audience for when we screened ‘Opening Doors’ we felt we had proved that point and wanted to develop it more. Now Josh and I sent the script back and forth a couple of times most of our arguments were about the drama lines he wanted them cut so it would get to the action quicker and I wanted them in to flesh out the characters more. The script began to lose its dark edge because when I get annoyed or frustrated my mind goes more absurd. (In ‘Existence’ Rose and Starehe had to stop me from changing the action fight scene into a Benny Hill chase scene) I finally got to a stage where I couldn’t take it anymore and I basically said “thanks for the opportunity but this is as far as I will go” Josh conceded and said that he really loved my art style and that even if he didn’t like the script I could go with what I wrote. I don’t really like what the film became through this process. I liked the original scripts feeling a lot more. I felt that I cut too much out of the character ‘Mike’ that he became quite plain. ‘Porcelain’ I hope will most likely be the film I wanted ‘Runner’ to be.

Something else that was taking it’s time was that our contracts weren’t coming through. We didn’t know at the time but FLY tv was on the chopping block, due to impending budget cuts to the ABC (There was speculation at the time that the ABC was being too anti-war which is why it received this budget cut). Finally (after the head of FTI put some pressure on) the contracts came through along with the news that FLY tv had been axed. It sort of took the sting out doing the film a bit because now they weren’t sure where the films would be screened. Another major problem for all the filmmakers was when we started we had around 6months to turn over our films after the waiting for these contracts we ended up with only a month and a bit. I think a few film makers had to pull out because of this. However what made matters worse for me was Dean my co-animator was leaving the country. In the original schedule we would have finished the film before he left but the schedule kept getting pushed back and back while we waited for the contracts. So in the end Dean was only able to do about 1-2 weeks work, he was also at the time doing 3 part-time jobs to earn money for his trip (a crazy working machine). He did an amazing amount of work in the time he had (he did nearly every shot with Sarah in it) but I was still left with a lot of work to do.



Recording the voices was a lot of fun. The person I got to play ‘Mike’ was a FTI class mate who I just thought was perfect for his character. Mike’s best friend was fun to cast Phil Jeng Kane who had been a great supporter of my films from the beginning and he also is a really good person to shoot the breeze with. He suited the slacker character he played haha. Adrian and Regan make another cameo in this film doing voices in the office. Adrian does that voice at the start when his computer has an error ‘god, why!’ if you look close you will notice it is hotmail that crashes his computer, this is an in-joke to our tafe animation course days. I always enjoy recording voices. I usually do a lot of takes and nearly always choose the first or second take.

During the day I was doing an animation course at FTI and at night I would be working until I couldn’t hold my WACOM pen no more. The backgrounds were probably the hardest. Each background took nearly a day to complete. I wanted everything to look like a real place so I tried to add in heaps of details. There are a lot of hidden references in my films to other films, comics and things that inspire me. I used a no outline style for this film as it is easier to animate with as you don’t have to worry about your line work as much and inbetweening is just moving blobs of colour around. The scene where ‘Mike’ has to dodge the staples was my first bit of extreme action animation. This gave me the confidence for ‘Existence’. I did plan to do a heap of after effects filters to this film but time didn’t allow it. The opening shot was put together by a new friend through the FTI animation course Daniel Pita. I drew up all the buildings and he put together and composited the camera move and the opening titles.

Near the end of the films completion when I had to drive down to Fremantle to attend my course I could only hold the wheel with my palms as my fingers were in pain. Sometimes now on cold days my hands hurt again, I really pushed every limit I had to get that film done on time. I’m pretty amazed at how much work I did with such little time.



Another person I really need to mention is the wonderful Perrina Bozanich. Another tafe animation course friend of Dean and me who had been doing all of our editing on our previous films. She was someone who was also badly affected by the contract delay. Her money job was working at burswood casino and she would work all kinds of weird hours and since we were running very late sometimes it would mean after she’d finish a shift at 3am and I’d be driving over there to give here the latest files or to pick up the latest edit. She worked so hard and lost way too much sleep. It got to the point where she was falling asleep at the dealing table. With us both tired we were getting a little short with each other but we pushed through it and got it done. Also thanks to Craig as I’m sure I upset his sleep as well with him worrying about Perrina. ‘Runner’ was the last project we did together also the last project I did with Dean, it is almost like a band splitting up to pursue our solo careers. We took a bit of flak about being auteur film makers that need to learn to work in a team but our team was dam strong and that’s why we produced such great work.



I also have to mention Adrian Tolman who recorded a lot of the sound effects and did the first sound mix. Adrian was really hindered by what he could do since he was the last of the last people to get stuff. Through the grant we had Richard Mahoney from Toad Hall studios doing the final sound mix. It was a great and fun experience to have him work on my film. He had a great bag of tricks and he was very direct with what worked and what doesn’t. It really bought some scenes out a lot more. He had to do something on every film some films he did from scratch, an amazing amount of work and all of it very high quality.

Oh the music! I was suggested a group to check out called ‘K’ they were this cool jazz group. Adrian and I went along to their show and really enjoyed it I caught up with one of the members during their break and asked if they were interested in scoring this film for me. They seemed really happy and wanting to do it. That’s what is cool about Perth is there really is a lot of great talent around and most of ther people are pretty friendly. They were also a bit rushed but even still they produced a great score. I did have an interesting trip home from their show I was caught by a booze bus (by an American policeman) and had to sit in the big bus and was retested, I was still over the second time so then I went further into the bus and was retested by this crazy looking machine the senior officer did all these math calculations and I got my printout at being 0.049 just under enough to get off. The American cop was pretty cool and we even laughed about it. Adrian on the other hand got a good telling off by the female policewomen for letting me drive. Funny night!



So after the film was handed in we were told that they were going to make a DVD (I think it took nearly 2 years before we got those dvds) and eventually screen it on the ABC before RAGE. We had to do a little spiel in front of the camera about our film. I was so tired at the time, you can really see it (I should upload that footage at some point).

After finishing this film I wasn’t happy with it. When it played I used to cover my eyes and one occasion I walked out of the cinema as I couldn’t even watch it (except for when it was on the ABC that was kinda cool). For a long time this has been the film I liked the least, my biggest regret. I’m not allowed to say this anymore because this is the first film of mine that Roseline saw. After seeing this film she saw me as someone with depth and emotion and to her it is quite a special film and I guess for that reason it has become quite special to me.

The egos between the film makers that took part in this Initiative seemed to lessen after all the films were done. There was a great respect for everyone who survived the harsh deadline. You would enjoy sharing your war stories and laugh about how crazy it was. The real shame is the closure of the Fly channel. This could have been a recurring event and some of the film makers could have gone on and started making a TV series. 1 step forward 2 steps back it seemed. It did promote the talent of the WA animation industry and by bringing people together it showed that there is an industry. There is hope though with people beginning to watch the digital channels more and ABC now has its ABC2 channel maybe something like this will happen again. I’d be ready to do it all again.



Runner
directed by
Timothy Merks and Dean Swanton
written by
Timothy Merks
Mike: Reuben Herriman
Sarah: Gillianne Richards
Ed: Phil Jeng Kane
John: Phillip Biggs
Music by: Graeme Blevins and Grant Windsor
Sound effects by: Adrian Tolman
Edited by: Perrina Bozanich
Opening Titles by: Daniel Pita
Funded by: "FLY TV INITIATIVE" ABC, ScreenWest and FTI

Monster From The Hill (2000)

Well here's a very old film by me. My third year student film, "Monster From The Hill".

Through the course I was exposed to German expressionist cinema and that had quite an impact on me and SBS was running Hammer horror films ever Saturday night. So when I got my chance to make my film it was definitely going to be an old style studio horror film.






Ok like I did for "Jim" here's some behind the scenes notes. Most of my friends just remember it as a blur (this film is about 6-7 years old) so I guess I'll just tell you what I remember hopefully they will correct my mistakes:
  • Adrian Tolman (who now does the sound for all my films) was my offsider on this film. He basically did all the jobs I didn't want to do. Most of that was asking the head of Tafe for more money. He was pretty dam good at this as we were never turned down a single dollar (I heard that Tafe went well over budget that year, although that I believe was another filmmakers fault who was a jerk)
  • One of the most major influences for this film was the fact that we had all seen Tim Burton's "Edwood" and we shot this film very similar only using one take for almost everything. This was more due to the fact that we were shooting on film and we only had 2 reels to use. We did rehearse a lot before we shot. Oh and the Lugosi line "Let's shoot this f**ker" was said for nearly every take.
  • "The Monster" was played by Jason Rado. A very old friend of mine who was living with me at the time. He was brilliant. He studied the part hard and was very pro about it all. One of the things that I found out as we were rehearsing was that he had problems saying "th" sounds instead he would say them with an "f" sound. I'd known this guy for years and never realised that he did that and to top it off nearly every sentence contained "mother" or "father" in it. Credit to Jason however because he continued to practice everyday until he got it right.
  • The brick walls were these brilliant flats that were lent to me from "Plumb Construction". I was doing work experience there (which I got through a wonderful teacher who taught me art direction at TAFE) working on some "Powerball" commercials. This was so much fun even though I was positively useless with power tools. While I was working there I was telling them about this film and they pointed me to these 3meter+ (guess) wall flats and said they would be perfect. This was exactly what I needed but at the same time I had to work out how to transport them to the TAFE studio. They were too big for a trailer (which we found out didn't we Adrian?) so instead we used a large trolley and had to wheel these very real looking walls across Perth (comedy gold). It was harder to get the walls back as about the start of our journey across the city a nut fell off one of the wheels and we had to do it very slowly. I remember one girl feeling compelled to yell out "you guys look stupid". Still to this day I have not been able to think of a good comeback... dang it
  • The film was shot on 16mm B&W and the cinematography was done by Geremy Rouse. He with his team was really very good and they spent a heap of time making sure everything was lit well and framed well. I think we spent a lot of the time wanting the other to work faster but at the same time we wanted the best. It was a pretty good combo I thought.
  • I do remember the day we did the test shoot I had to call Geremy up and tell him to shoot without me as the train I was on ran over someone. This day I just happened to be wearing "The many deaths of Kenny" t-shirt. I haven't worn that shirt since that day.
  • The "Monster's Claw" was made from a welding glove, some op shop belts, and this really cool bendy metal we found. I'm not too sure what the influence was for this. Maybe Joe Mad.
  • I'm a huge fan of Doug Tennaple and I loved the game he created called "The Neverhood". In this game everything had this plasticine texture to it that I thought was pretty dam cool (Rob Lee and I even did a very heavily influenced animation based on this style which I'll post soon). We used this style for the outer walls of the Laboratory.
  • The laboratory was built by Michael Lewis. A good friend of mine who I left in charge to build the 1.5meter laboratory based on this crazy little sketch we did. This madman worked non-stop digesting only coke and caffeinated ice-cream for a week straight (maybe longer). You may notice the little spikes on top of the Laboratory and the very wonky base. The top of that Lab contains a good amount of Mike's blood.
  • The laboratory is still standing today (of its own accord) in the corner of my room. Masterful craftsmanship!
  • The street sets were built by me and this more resembled the German expressionist film "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari". I built the set out of cereal boxes, masking tape, black plasticine to round the edges and I had a foam base to help with keeping the stop mo characters upright. When I brought the set to the TAFE studio, I did the mistake of leaving it in the car and all the plasticine melted. Due to the fact we were shooting at the time and Mike couldn't do anymore work because of the coke and caffeinated ice cream for a week, I called in Rob Lee to take over and repair the set. This added the Rob Lee style to the set and I think it was better for it.
  • The animation was probably the only thing we shot twice and that was due to the bolex camera chewing the film. This was quite heartbreaking but the news was delivered well by Will Jones who said "Hey Tim, I've got some bad news the film in the bolex was all chewed so yeah ...OH OH SPAGETTIOS!” (South park episode where they sent up Jar-Jar). I couldn't be mad after that instead I got Adrian to ring around (see I told you I got him to do everything I didn't like) the other film makers and try and get whatever leftover film they had. We reshot the animation using the frame capture on the Arton (since I didn't want to trust the bolex again) this function is more for capturing slates so when I got the film back I had to digitally process every frame and add lightning over the top to smooth the transitions.
  • The films score was composed by Chris Cobilis. This is my favourite score for all my films. I had so much stuff to choose from. It had this really dark and wonderful, edgy style. The end credits are extra long so I could fit in the entire last song. I used to listen to the tape all the time. I gave it to Adrian years ago to convert it to Mp3. One day he will get around to it.
  • There’s a special track that only a few have heard. One that will get stuck in your head for years. I hope to be able to post that at some point.
  • The film had to be edited twice due to it being deleted off the Media 100s at TAFE. I was really broke at the time and had to work down in Manjimup and could only come up on weekends. Mike did quite a lot of the re-editing while I was in Manjimup. I never credited him for this because I was too lazy to re-render the end credits.
  • I did no animation on this film due to having very shaky hands. I regret this but it was good to have so many friends to help me out
  • My friends used the last bit of film to hold up a big white sign saying “Tim sux” do some crazy dancing and pull finger signs. Haha thanks guys!









Kicking back in 98

So my cpu has a busted motherboard and I need a new one. So for the moment I'm back using my old cpu. It feels so clunky!

Anyway I found this picture on it and I kinda like it. Oh there still will be a new film on Tuesday. It's a good one!




lata
Tim

Check out:

  • The anime "Eureka 7". It has some really beautiful character design and wonderful facial expressions and animation. Done by studio Bones who produced the Cowboy Bebop movie.
  • Music "The Roots: Game Theory". A very cool album. The song that suprised me was "Atonement" where they sampled "You and whose Army" by Radiohead. very cool
  • The movie "The Fountain". It was very cool. Although I must admit I really wanted to see more of the spanish soldier story and the future story had some cheesy moments. All up though it was a great trip.

EDIT: This doesn't deserve a new post so I'll drop it in here. For "Porcelain" progress check here on Roseline's blog. She's been posting up some of the cleanups. I'll start posting images when we start putting stuff into Flash.

Jim (2004)

Ok this film needs an introduction. This film started out as a satire of films being made at the same time (from what I was seeing at festivals and my own films :P) where the main character would v/o how miserable his life is and if only his achey heart could heal and at the end some pretty girl would turn up change his life or something. I hated that, it felt like writers were living out their fantasies. So this was an anti film to that. Also I was dragging in elements from around me with my friends and myself whinging about how bad everything is. So I decided to give this film a message "shut up it's not so bad you could be being mauled by a bear" which I think is a great message they should give it out at gift stores, put it on the back of cars or whatever.



Some interesting production notes where:
  • The piano music composed by Alison Derby each song title was variations of "Tim is poo", "Tim likes poo" and "Tim eats poo". Such classy titles for such beautiful piano loops. This is what happens when you don't pay your crew.
  • This contained my first time using traditional hand drawn animation. Mostly I draw straight into flash but for the sequence where Jim was running inside I used pencil in paper (of course I coloured it all in flash)
  • The movie stubbs for their first date was for the movie "Raging Bull".
  • I designed Jim's apartment with a Dutch cultural Nick knacks. Such as the plates on the wall of windmills and the Porcelain figurines on the TV. (The chairs from Africa... I don't know what I was thinking with those)
  • The Bear was based on my amusement of Yogi bear. I loved how they gave the bear a collar so you wouldn't realise they were replacing the head when they did lipsync. Also hats and ties on bears is funny. This bear is making a few appearances in the Cat and Rabbit universe
  • The bear sounds were stolen (gasp!) from a nature doco. I don't know what one I'll have to get that info from Adrian.
  • Perrina did all my scouting for voice talent and would send me audio clips and I would judge who I wanted. When I went over to record the voice for "Jim" I came to realise that the actor had recently had a partner who had left him and they had planted a tree together. So I got to say that was a real awkward experience (Thanks Perrina! haha)
  • Another thing about the actor was during takes he ...uh had a few drinks. Amusing times with the line "A beer? A BEER!"
  • The film was screened for the last Sunset Cinemas "Grassroots". Possibly the greatest festival that WA had. Unfortunately that company lost the rights to the Kings Park venue which is now been take over by Moonlight cinemas who don't hold a short film competition. I should be more annoyed by this but people in WA know how to fuck up a good thing.
  • My favourite comment about this film was yelled at the screen by a guy sitting near us at the Grassroots festival. "THAT'S STUPID, WHY WAS THERE EVEN A BEAR IN IT!". He didn't have any problems that it has a hat and tie or that really doesn't even look like a bear (I should have at least used one reference photo).

Jim
Written and Directed by
Timothy Merks
Jim: Anthony Dunn
Macintosh: Jonathon Shearer
Doctor: Claire Housden Monet
Music by: Alison Derby
Sound by: Adrian Tolman/Perrina Bozanich
Edited by: Perrina Bozanich