The Seaside

I actually started this blog about the same time I started making this episode. The idea was to bring it up to date and then keep a work in progress diary on the making of The Seaside. But I have only just caught up and the episode is finished so I'll start the running commentary with the next one.

The format is the same as before, but this time the robots are by the seaside. They try to do the things that a lot of us will have done as children. The things that I am currently re-discovering with my son. In fact the things we did on the family day out at Hunstanton when the backgrounds were shot. But it's different for robots...

I think the general look of it is better than The Park. And I'm happier with the music too. I had planned to do a big stunt at the end (involving the dodgem cars) because I thought I should have something comparable to the end sequence of The Park. But I just happened to put a test sequence together with (what became) the final scene at the end. And I thought to myself "I just can't top that as an ending". So there it stayed.

As always please feel free to leave your comments.

The Park

I was still unsure who while idle do's audience would be. Or if it would even have one. I had a feeling I might end up making something that would only appeal to me and my brother Samuel. So I decided to double the appeal by working in themes which I knew would appeal to my son Jacob and nephew Thomas (then aged 2 and 3 respectively). So for my first episode I sent the robots to play in the park.

The animation was done in (mostly) 5 seconds in chunks. The plan was to cut quickly between a series of quick sight gags. I thought that by making all the clips a uniform length I could edit them together however I wanted at the end and still have some kind of rhythm. I'm not sure how sound that theory was, but I got pretty much the result I was after so I intend to stick with it until proved wrong.

The plot was simple. At the start I tried to play up the robots feeling of being lost without a purpose - my favorite example being them playing listlessly on the swings and roundabout. Then I let them ease into the situation a bit, maybe even enjoy themselves. But inevitably their games degenerate into a series of accidents with culminate in the set piece with the seesaw, the skateboard and the duck pond.

Finally I added the soundtrack. I kept the sound effects to a minimum - I think this gives them more impact. The music was something I had half written several years earlier but never done anything with. It's not the original "robots in summer meadows" piece, but something I felt was more in keeping with what the project had become.

People tend to describe the finished film as "sweet". I make no apologies for that, it comes from my having the younger viewers in mind. But I hope that the combination of the music, the unashamedly silly humor, plight of the poor robots, will appeal to a wider audience. It certainly works for me. If you haven't already done so, watch it here and please feel free to add your comments below.

while idle do

But what about the robots? Isn't this supposed to be the how and why of while idle do? Well towards the end of making Misunderstandings I started thinking about my robot fantasy film again. I started experimenting with robot designs again and finally came up with one I was happy with. The problem had always been how to make something mechanical expressive without making it too cartoony. The final design relies mostly on the eyes, but also has antennae and extra neck articulation (inspired by Pixar's lamps) to back up the expression and give my characters more ...er... character.

With a robot character I was basically happy with it was time to start thinking about a story. I'd had a couple of ideas which worked in the whole robot frolicking in a summer meadow thing as a fantasy or dream sequence and was tempted to go down that route until I stumbled upon Brian Taylor's excellent Rust Boy site. That changed my mind for two reasons. Firstly it appeared so close to what I was planning and I didn't want to look like a Rust Boy wannabe (my insecurities again). But secondly I could see just what a long term project Rust Boy was and didn't want to start something that big myself. Still being an animation newbie I felt that the learning process would be better served by completing short projects, learning from my mistakes and then taking that trough to the next one.

So I decided to make a series of short (less than 5 minutes) episodes based around two robots just messing about in their spare time. The joke being that robots aren't designed for leisure (the word robot comes from the Czech for drudgery) and it would always be destined for disaster.

After a bit experimentation, I hit on the idea of combining my animations with photos (supplied by my wife Vanessa - a keen amateur photographer) which allowed me to quickly create realistic(ish) outdoor scenes. The combination worked better than I had could have hoped and I began making some test scenes with the robots playing in a local park. Then the final piece fell into place...

For any non-geeks out there when a computer system has no immediate task to perform it is said to be idle and runs what often referred to as its idle loop. Being a geek myself I liked the parallel between us and machines finding ourselves with time on our hands. I started work under the title The Devil Makes Work for Idle Clock Cycles. But then I remembered a simple phrase that us geeks use from time to time. A phrase which (although I cant think of a programming language where you would use this exact syntax) comes from the way you might code an idle loop. And so I named my project while idle do...

The Peculiarity Lounge

Having finished my first film the next question was what to do with it? My brother Samuel (who rather helpfully has a film making background) was getting his Edinbourough Film Festival submissions ready round about the time I finished My Human Friends. He suggested I submit it to their animated shorts competition. I did, and it was duly rejected.

But I didn't let that put me off. I started work on a sequel. This time it would be longer, funnier and have more action sequences. The result was My Human Friends - Misunderstandings. It was certainly longer. And did indeed have more action sequences. And the funniest bits probably were funnier than those in Abductions. So I submitted it to the BBC's new talent animation competition who duly rejected it.

Now I really am not a sore looser. In fact I think to expect to go from nothing to award winning animator in 18 months would have been incredibly arrogant. But I was frustrated that my work wasn't getting seen and I wasn't getting any feedback on it. So I decided to take matters into my own hands and publish my work online.

Although I write software for a living, I'm not all that up on web development. So there was another round of trying stuff and figuring out what worked for me before I launched my site. During this time the scope of the site shifted to include some of Samuel's work which we both thought would be well suited to showing on the web. So rather than doing a My Human Fiends site as I had intended, I tried to come up with some kind of ludicrous back story to tie all our work together. I came up with the idea of a strange cocktail lounge, (which I envisaged as a cross between Milliways and the Black Lodge) where our films would be their quality variety entertainment. And so The Peculiarity Lounge was born.

My Human Friends (and other strangeness)

I began by evaluating as much of the available animation software as I could lay my hands on. I quickly decided to go down the 3D route on the basis that I would rather put the time into creating my models and avoid repetition later. Maxon's Cinema4D emerged as a clear favorite, because for me the modeling was just so much more natural than anything else I tried. But then the indecisiveness set in.

Realizing just how far things had come since I last dabbled, I gained confidence in what I might be able to achieve. The Cubist Noir idea got dropped and I began working on robot designs. But then I got hooked on the cutesy look of the vinyl toys I was seeing on Kid Robot (a favorite site of mine for inspiration) and began working on a space hero character designed in that mould. Then it was back to the robot idea for a bit until I discovered Tim Burton's The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and created my own spooky little boy character who I called Myden. But then I started on a Ray Harryhausen style cyclops as a test for a project my brother was working on. He evolved an extra eye (the cyclops that is not my brother) and became a robed alien character. This was when my plans took a bit of a twist.

All along I had been worried that no one get what I was doing. Who would be interested in watching my whimsical robot fantasy? Or my whimsical tale of an odd little boy in a spooky house come to that? My insecurities got the better of me and I tried to think of something that may have a wider appeal. I came up with the idea of using my alien charter to make broadcasts from the bridge of his spaceship. The alien would talk gibberish and a voice over would translate (thus avoiding lip syncing). The gag would be that the aliens body language would betray his obviously belligerent nature while the voice over (provided by I.D.I.O.T. scientists)would deliver a message of peace and reassurance.

I ran with this idea and early last year I finished my first animated film. The final alien character was a version of Myden painted green (the two eyed cyclops just didn't look sinister enough). The addition of cut away scenes demonstrating the aliens belligerent nature made it far more labor intensive that the quick gag format I had originally conceived. It was a very long way form my original robot fantasy. And it didn't tie in at all with the music which had inspired me to start animating in the first place. But despite my indecision, within a year of staring my animation project, I had completed something. Something I called My Human Friends - Abductions.

The Beginning

I think it all started about 4 years ago with a piece of music I had written. It was supposed to be a song, but to be honest I've never been very good with words (although it has taken me far to long to realize that) but as I played the piece I kept getting these surreal images in my head of a robot running through meadows, along cliff tops, river banks and as dusk fell sheltering in a broken down old church. I got to wondering, could I possibly make that? I had after all been a keen Amiga artist back in the day, and I was (and still am) working in computer graphics for a living (all be it in a technical role - writing the software that makes the graphics for TV), but it all seemed too much work for one man to achieve in his spare time.

The idea sloshed around my head for a long time. At first I tried to ignore it. After all, I wanted to be making cool music not whimsical films about robots that no one else would ever get. But then again Grandaddy and The Flaming Lips were cool weren't they? And they didn't seem to have a problem with robots. And they certainly had no problem with whimsy. And it had to be said my home recording project wasn't really going anywhere. I kept starting things, I had plenty of ideas, but I never actually finished anything. Perhaps I needed a change in direction? Maybe the structure of writing the music for a short film would help me to finally finish something.

But it wasn't until the first few sleep deprived months of fatherhood that I really made any kind of start on things. One sunny morning, I was pushing my son along the bank of the river Ouze in an attempt to calm him after a particularly bad nights sleep. I found myself sifting through the vivid dreams that my addled mind had conjured in its brief and precious moments of unconsciousness. And I saw something that I really thought I could make. It wasn't robots. The characters were made up of simple abstract shapes. And the scenes were defined by light and shadow rather than actual detail. It was to be a kind of cubist film noir (I was toying with the title Dicasso), and it was the first idea that really seemed achievable to me. That was the point (two years after the original idea) that I decided to start animating.