8 Minutes Idle gets greenlit

A little while ago I did some designs for some proposed animated sections for 8 Minutes Idle - a feature film Sarah Cox (of Arthur Cox Ltd) was hoping to produce as a feature film based on Matt Thornes novel. The project made it throught the pitch stage and it got green lit for production the other week so it will actually be getting made! Mark Simon Hewis is directing but in the meantime I've been doing some doodly illustrations for their (pre)production blog which you can see/read here! I'm really excited about this one.

Toronto Zoo Polar Bears - be sure to see them ads

Last month, maybe the one before, I spent a couple of days working on a commercial directed by Matthew Walker for Toronto Zoo. There were four spots in all but you can see the one I did below:



Was a lot of fun to do especially because it's a bit like Matt's short film John and Karen which I really like and which you can see a clip of here: http://vimeo.com/1922334

Directed by Matthew Walker, produced at Arthur Cox for Aardman animations for Lowe Roche for Toronto Zoo.

The TATE Movie Project!

For a few months this year I've been working away on the character design and animation for the TATE Movie Project website. Today is the launch day so you can go see it all and have a look around the virtual film studio at www.TATEmovie.co.uk!

To find out more about what it is all about there is a good article on Creative Review - will be interesting to see how it all turns out!

It's directed by Sarah Cox of Arthur Cox Ltd; Robin Davey did the backgrounds; and it was all put together by lots of clever people at Aardman Digital who are hopefully resting their brains for a little bit now.

Mother of Many by Emma Lazenby online for a little bit

Mother of Many, Emma Lazenby's BAFTA winning short film I worked on at Arthur Cox last year is online for a little bit for the NFBC Film Festival online competition.

Watch is quick before it's too late (and if you like it click the thumbs up button on the YouTube page here to vote for it to win!)...



Some more reviews ranging from:

Stunning. Beautiful. I love it.

Truly amazing!!

Slightly difficult to watch but so are many great things. Beautiful sound and animation.

to:

Disgusting.

:o

Why Music Matters - Sigur Rós

Before Christmas I made a short film at Arthur Cox Ltd, produced by Aardman, for the Why Music Matters campaign. The idea was to pick a musical artist from the big long list of EMI artists and say why music matters. I chose the band Sigur Rós because I had a friend in university who kissed a girl on an A-road over-pass in the rain one night, and he said it was so incredibly emotional he imagined a movie camera spinning around them both while the sparkling rain fell in slow motion and Sigur Rós played. I found that funny and wanted to show how people match their surroundings and experiences with music, and vice versa.

Here it is:

You can join the music matters Facebook page, follow them on Twitter or read more about it on the BBC, Telegraph, Guardian, MojoMusic and Rough Trade Records websites.

Keith Reynolds and Francis Cooper back in Lille.

Keith Reynolds and Francis Cooper headed back to Lille for the Lille Fete de l'animation last weekend. Sarah Cox was there as part of a retrospective/screening of Arthur Cox work which included my films and the IRN-BRU commercial I directed last year. Magnifique.